There are two different modes of ideological mystification which should in no way be confused: the liberal-democratic one and the Fascist one. The first one concerns false universality: the subject advocates freedom/equality, not being aware of implicit qualifications which, in their very form, constrain its scope (privileging certain social strata: rich, male, belonging to a certain race or culture). The second one concerns the false identification of the antagonism and the enemy: class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews, so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the “Jewish plot.” So, to put it in naively-hermeneutic terms, in the first case, “when the subject says ‘freedom and equality,’ he really means ‘freedom of trade, equality in front of the law’ etc.,” and, in the second case, “when the subject says ‘Jews are the cause of our misery,’ he really means ‘big capital is the cause of our misery’.” The asymmetry is clear – to put it again in naïve terms, in the first case, the “good” explicit content (freedom/equality) covers up the “bad” implicit content (class and other privileges and exclusions), while in the second case, the “bad” explicit content (anti-Semitism) covers the “good” implicit content (class struggle, hatred of exploitation).
Slavoj Žižek,
“The Palestinian Question”
Liberalism and Fascism
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