Democracy on the rocks

We are at the culmination point of a top-down class war that has been waged since the beginning of the neoliberal era – in the form of a project that has explicitly declared an assault on democracy, the media, and the welfare state as its agenda. The purchasability of politics and the media hardly needs a fig leaf anymore.

Since this agenda, in its entirety, plays into racism, misogyny, and right-wing identity politics, it is insufficient to pit class against race and gender – even if this approach has gained momentum since Trump's election. The perception that the left is fixated on identity politics, which favors the successes of the right, is already poisoned.

In fact, Kamala Harris barely addressed these issues during the campaign – and was heavily criticized from the left for it. Instead, the continuation of neo-social democratic Bidenomics took center stage, which already addressed the disparities that are now sometimes cited as the cause of the Democratic election defeat. Joe Biden, as economic expert Robert Reich explains, stood for a paradigm shift in economic policy, a neo-Keynesianism with billions in investments in domestic infrastructure and industry and millions of new jobs – as one would have wished for the "traffic light coalition" here at home. However, right-wing identity politics had a hypnotic pull that reached deep into the mainstream.

It is often overlooked that it is the right wing itself that puts gender and migration issues on the agenda. Right-wing propaganda networks tirelessly rotate these issues in a politically sedating mix of facts and fiction to stoke political polarization and resentment - and to position „MAGA“ as a new right-wing collective identity against it. US Democratic election campaigns, on the other hand, have hardly taken up gender-related issues recently and have simultaneously adopted anti-migration positions that were previously considered radical even by Republicans. Something similar is happening in the EU.

Ironically, neo-social democracy, which rightly focuses entirely on distribution issues, often leads to the tacit acceptance of core right-wing theses. The rise of neo-fascism is thus rationalized as a logical reaction to „gender madness“ and the „migrant flood“ – narratives that poison political discourse. This dynamic is particularly evident in this country in the strategy of the BSW, which further shifts the political landscape to the right.

A decisive counter-momentum is missing. However, it will not arise from former leftists now polarizing against gender issues and migration to supposedly promote the class struggle. Politics must, of course, credibly address distributive justice and the corruption of parties, institutions, and media, but it cannot avoid advocating for truths that are inconvenient for the bourgeois mainstream, which is so fond of its role as a victim of censorship. At the same time, the limits of the current growth model – the foundation of Keynesian social democracy – make the development of alternative approaches more difficult. Money can be redistributed – limited resources cannot. There is no national solution for this – certainly not a nationalist one.

The far-right has long since co-opted the class struggle anyway. Right-wing extremists like Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, are deliberately pursuing a strategy of national socialism, as is also propagated by the Höcke faction of the AfD here in Germany. Bannon's criticism of international capital, of the globalists, which he recently articulated in view of Elon Musk's brazen influence on American politics, is hardly surpassable in its Marxist sharpness.

Of course, this critique of right-wing identity politics is distorted: a national working class, imagined as down-to-earth and righteous, is pitted against homeless, cosmopolitan bloodsuckers, Soros friends, trans activists, leftists, and immigrants. Thus, Bannon's thinking finds resonance with old anti-Semitic and anti-leftist stereotypes and is gratefully received in Nazi circles.

This is also a topic in the current factional dispute within MAGA-World – and it seems foreseeable that the anti-globalists will not be able to hold their own against the multinational hyper-capitalism that Trump's new chief strategist Elon Musk promotes. The two camps only agree that certain groups of people may be considered livestock at the end of chains of command – and intend to treat them as such from January 20, 2025.

The confrontation with the neo-fascist takeover is far more than a glance at the enormous influence and wealth that economic elites have amassed in recent decades through their immoderate, entitled audacity – at the expense of the environment and at the expense of the world's citizens. It is the question of how we can sustainably interact with nature and solidaristically with each other in the future – and how we can bring these issues back into the mainstream. It is a battle for the soul of humanity.

An end to hate, contempt, and retribution is nowhere in sight at the moment. There are hardly any political alternatives – and at the same time, no alternative to politics.