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Plain to see, in fact, is the structural role of the populist Right in the legitimation of current liberal-democratic hegemony. For what this Right - Buchanan, Le Pen, Haider - supplies is the negative common denominator of the entire established political spectrum. These are the excluded ones who, by this very exclusion (their 'unacceptability' for governmental office), furnish the proof of the benevolence of the official system. Their existence displaces the focus of political struggle - whose true object is the stifling of any radical alternative from the Left - to the 'solidarity' of the entire 'democratic' bloc against the Rightist danger. The <i>Neue Mitte</i> manipulates the Rightist scare the better to hegemonize the 'democratic' field, i.e. to define the terrain and discipline its real adversary, the radical Left. Therein resides the ultimate rationale of the Third Way: that is, a social democracy purged of its minimal subversive sting, extinguishing even the faintest memory of anti-capitalism and class struggle.<br><br>

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http://www.lacan.com/zizek-heider.htm