Who needs direct repression when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?

From Slavoj Zizek's latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:

"In the middle of April 2009, I was sitting in a hotel room in Syracuse, hopping between two TV programs: a documentary on Pete Seeger, the great American folk singer of the Left, and a Fox News report on the anti-tax 'tea-party' in Austin, Texas, with a country singer performing an anti-Obama song full of complaints about how Washington is taxing hard-working ordinary people in order to finance the rich Wall Street financiers. The short-circuit between the two programs had an electrifying effect on me, with two especially noticeable features. First, there was the weird similarity between the two musicians, both formulating a populist anti-establishment critique of the exploitative rich and their state, and both calling for radical measures, up to and including civil disobedience - another painful reminder that, with regard to forms of organization, the contemporary radical-populist Right strangely reminds us of the old radical-populist Left. Second, one cannot but notice the fundamental irrationality of the 'tea party' protests: Obama effectively plans to lower taxes for over 95 percent of hard-working ordinary people, proposing to raise them for only the upper couple of percentiles - that is, for the 'exploitative rich.' So how is it that people are literally acting counter to their own interests?

"Thomas Frank aptly described this paradox of contemporary populist conservatism in the US: the economic class opposition (poor farmers and blue-collar workers versus lawyers, bankers, and large companies) is transposed or re-coded onto the opposition of honest, hard-working Christian Americans versus the decadent liberals who drink lattes and drive foreign cars, advocate abortion and homosexuality, and mock patriotic sacrifice and simple 'provincial' ways of life, and so forth. The enemy is thus perceived as the 'liberal' elite who, through federal state intervention - from school-busing to legislating that Darwinian theory and perverted sexual practice be taught in class - want to undermine the authentic American way. The conservatives' main economic demand is therefore to get rid of the strong state which taxes the population to finance its regulatory interventions; their minimal economic program is thus: 'fewer taxes, fewer regulations.' From the standard perspective of the enlightened and rational pursuit of self-interest, the inconsistency of this ideological stance is obvious: the populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and deregulation means more freedom for the big companies who are driving impoverished farmers out of business; less state intervention means less federal help for small businessmen and entrepreneurs.

"Although the 'ruling class' disagrees with the populists' moral agenda, it tolerates the 'moral war' as a means of keeping the lower classes in check, that is, it enables the latter to articulate their fury without disturbing the economic status quo. What this means is that the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode - pace those who claim that we live in a post-class society ... "