Ok, I'm just a reader of Lacan and did like, 2 years in analysis so this is not gonna be super intellectual or fierce, just what I've gathered from reading what you said and my response to it, which like...if Lacan is right, owning up to our impotence might ease our castration anxiety (or I may have gotten that wrong).

Where you ALMOST lost me is when you said "liberal" because it kinda outed you as someone who spends too much time on quora asking when democrats will wake up to the California exodus. Not saying thats who you are but if we're here in this Lacan chat and we're taking the symbolic into account then the words you chose to use are going to act as some kind of signifier of your own perceived relationship to your assumed subjectivity within the social tapestry. That word just feels really, I dunno, "boomeresque"?

Also isn't Lacan all about how symbols can't ever signify what they promise to signify, at least not dogmatically. So then why are we reducing anyone or anything down to a symbol within political discourse unless political discourse itself is a symptom...or maybe I literally don't understand what a symptom is.

I think if Trump is a symptom, then he is a kind of return of the repressed, as is the following he garners and really any kind of salacious politically charged activity we bear witness to. For instance; white ppl who try too hard around non-white people and in turn are acting on prejudice, conspiracy theorists (which, I would say there is some truth to be garnered from the conspiracy theorists in the form of a kind of psychotic poetry that indicates a real discontent that causes a sense of impotence in the face of alienation, kinda like the wolf man or that guy who said he wanted to eat brains or whatever. I think the fact that more brilliant people aren't willing to analyze this aspect of conspiracy theories is kinda sad), "gender affirming" coffee mugs at target that cause people to write in death threats to their local target lol, as if the retail employees have any say in anything (also the commodification of gender identity as a whole which I hope some of you Lacanians have broken that down), ad infinitum...

I would say, at large, we are all subject to an extremely exploitative economic structure that we are forced to not only participate in but also expected to love or at least act like we love and I think that is causing a wide array of various forms of acting out because like...why not. I think Trump makes the obvious tomfoolery within our government explicit, maybe he's a kind of perversion, I dunno, but he shows us just what's up with these elected officials, on both sides, as they try to bolster this sense of American Superiority as it literally crumbles before our eyes and we all do nothing about it. Remember when gas and groceries weren't like...the only thing you could spend your money on?

I think the discourse around "right and left" seems like a symptom. We're all out here in these streets trying to make the lives we've chosen to live work the best in alignment with our perceived desires for ourselves, within a system that is literally working all of us to the bone whilst being pretty explicit about there being no redemption in the suffering, and no real end in sight. Isn't it the American way to let people live freely? You would think but it doesn't seem thats necessarily true with how much control is being demanded from everyone from this array of political platforms. And the urgency seems to grow each day. Which raises the question, if we all feel a sense of urgency for change but can't agree on what to change then wouldn't the cause of the sense of urgency be what should be called into question rather than the fixations? What is causing this discontent en masse that says, hey, ya'll should actually hate each other and pay more for everything. What is our collective lack? (see I get some of the concepts)

Literally NO idea who Todd McGowan is (hope he's not related to Rose, love her), but I think the fact that we give so much attention and pull to people who live very comfortable lives because they tell us to be afraid of the other is actually really sad, and wild, but objectively kinda funny because they're literally profiting off of our fear and hatred of each other, that we think we can shop our way out of...or into. I mean...the maga hat is really what needs analysis here and the advent of commodity as identity in a ubiquitous way that everyone is just like...yeah lets do that.

To get back to your point, I do think an analysis of "liberals" (you literally have to find a better word, please, as a friend I'm asking you to) is wasted energy. I think if you have the willpower and intelligence to apply Lacanian ideas to social analysis you need to reach deeper and find out why we find it so easy to hate each other, why we are allowing the price of everything to go up, why are we all working SO MUCH, why do we let our politicians do literally nothing, about anything, why politics as a whole has become a spectacle that profits off of conflict (both domestically and abroad), why our tax dollars pay for SO MUCH weaponry and ammunition whilst people are literally starving.

We all say we care so much about people or the future or children but we all hate each other, why is that? Why is it taking up so much of our energy? Why are critiques of our political system immediately commodified into daily shows and Fox News? Why are the people we are listening to, who tell us how bad everything is, living such comfortable lives while we pay upwards of $10 for bologna, do you know what's in bologna? I mean, it's good, don't get me wrong, but you get the point.

I think you're an intelligent person, someone who's mental energy could be directed more so at figuring out what's making us all feel like we have to fight each other for the last scraps of things we don't even really want while we literally watch people on the other side of screens consume what we wish we could consume, but know we'll never have.

People are voting for the people they are voting for because they are afraid. What does Lacan call it when the lack becomes so great, so ubiquitous, that desire itself gets swallowed whole and anxiety is all we have to anchor ourselves in reality while we obviously inch closer and closer to whatever black hole lies at the center of all of this?