The wager of Leftist political terrorism (the RAF in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, Action Directe in France) was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological sleep, so that the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence — ‚l’action directe‚ — can awaken the masses. While one should reject without ambiguity the murderous way this insight was acted upon, one should not be afraid to endorse the insight itself. Today’s post-political ’silent majority‘ is not stupid, but it is cynically resigned. The limitation of post-politics is best exemplified not only by the success of Rightist populism, but by the UK elections of 2005. In spite of the growing unpopularity of Tony Blair (he was regularly voted the most unpopular person in the UK), there was no way for this discontent to find a politically effective expression, and so Labour was re-elected with Blair at the helm. Something is obviously very wrong here — it is not that people ‚do not know what they want‘, but, rather, that cynical resignation prevents them acting upon it, so the result is the weird gap between what people think and how they act (vote).
—Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness, (London: Penguin, 2018), 162.
