(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . 'Trumpian unity is inherently dependent on constructing a substantialized enemy' [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-08-04 Trump supporters enjoy Joe Biden. He is the perfect obstacle for the drive, an entity that can be blamed for all psychic malaise while a fantasy of his annihilation is easily conceptualized. Sadly, to maintain the base(d) loyalty of evangelicals, the step-parent, like the blended family is the enemy, made real by the Second Family. Their status as hate objects is made even more palpable by its status of being biracial and Jewish. The loss of Biden as a target made the doubled-down choice of JD Vance a fatal choice for the Trump campaign. Timing is not everything, it’s now the only thing that has turned the election. x J.D. Vance is far from alone in pushing this line of attack—Trump allies are devoting millions of dollars to getting this fearmongering message in front of voters.https://t.co/mhULV4jjXP — The New Republic (@newrepublic) August 4, 2024 If the object is never attained, what permits subjects to find satisfaction in repeated failure is notably the fetishism of the obstacle to their satisfaction. In the case of the psychic apparatus of MAGA supporters, the unattainable fantasized object is the “Great America” evoked by their slogan. To fight their socio-psychic malaise that the restoration of a Great America would eliminate, Trumpists substantialize a series of particular enemies that block access to non-alienating libidinal existence (immigrants, leftists, political elites, etc…). These enemies are discursively constructed to fulfill death-driven aims, i.e, to enjoy the impossibility of a libidinally satisfied subjective condition. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in Against the Populist Temptation: …populist discourse displaces antagonism and constructs the enemy. In populism, the enemy is externalized or reified into a positive ontological entity (even if this entity is spectral) whose annihilation would restore balance and justice… [...] Therefore, collective enjoyment of the MAGA identity is dependent upon the semiotic construction of the fetishized enemy. The state of panic that the Republican Party seems to be in since Biden’s dropping out of the presidential race is symptomatic of the loss of a clear discursively constructed fetishized enemy. [...] To cope with the crumbling down of their libidinal strategy, Trump supporters have developed two responses: Reframe the obstacle to the object of their drive as the fact that Biden will be in the White House for the next 6 months. Transfer the fetish of the enemy towards the de facto Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. sublationmedia.com/… July 30, 2024 A Castrating Moment for Trump’s Death-Driven Campaign Mathieu Claude-Giroux Trump’s brand of kamikaze misogyny was to combine it with his now more blatant racism: x JD Vance thinks it's just unmarried cat ladies? I'm a typical boring married mom of 4. I'm the white woman who never voted for Trump & I have thousands of sisters across the country who are getting angrier every day as they belittle us. It's not just a "honeymoon." #YesWeKam pic.twitter.com/t8D932AraD — Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) July 24, 2024 [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/4/2260558/-Trumpian-unity-is-inherently-dependent-on-constructing-a-substantialized-enemy?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/