Lauren Hurley/PA Archive/PA Images. All rights reserved.When I reached over to switch off my alarm on the morning of 9 November, I wished I had stayed asleep. In the few seconds that I searched for the snooze button, my phone’s notifications had revealed that Trump would almost certainly be the president-elect of the US. I was paralysed.
Today, I still feel helpless and unable to respond to this threat to the values I believe in. I should have known better, I shouldn’t be depressed, but agitated, ready to protest and mobilize. But I am not. I am still trying to hope that Žižek and other pundits turn out to be right and that this is a deeply disruptive moment that shakes the grounds of representative democracy and helps change it for the better. Trump's victory feels like a threat to the idea of democracy, but we need to realize that, as Gary Younge has put it, Trump is but one “product of democracy already in crisis”.
Earlier, Brexit had similarly exposed a deep political crisis in Europe that made the frictions within the Union visible. On an ideological level, it exposed the increasing fear of ‘the other’ and the erection of identificational fences between classes, races and political camps. At the same time, hundreds of thousands are still envisioning Europe as their destination to flee war, poverty and devastation, but are faced with a social crisis that is not just the preserve of the southern European countries. Austerity measures in many European member states, particularly in Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Italy are a manifestation of the continued economic crisis of the Eurozone.
