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»So, you want to know how to fight against an idea? You do it with a different idea.« The Roman Tribune Messala offers that piece of advice to the Roman Consul Sixtus in the classic film, Ben Hur. The two have been discussing the rise of Christianity and looking for strategies to oppose the changes that have accompanied it. That old movie scene makes clear what has been lacking in the debate about the threat to our liberal democratic society: a different idea. True, everybody is dissatisfied with the status quo in one way or another. And although many are anxious about the future, only a minority thinks that something can be done about it. And only those who would like to go back to the Fifties or the Thirties have proposed any alternatives. The defenders of democracy haven’t offered a different idea that might stimulate people to desire a better future. They are simply standing on the sidelines saying »no.«

The right’s attacks on democracy are cultural

When people stop talking about progress, retrogression begins. When so many citizens perceive the contradictions and ambiguities of the modern age as intolerable, far-right forces see an opportunity to exploit those feelings. They defame the democratic culture of consensus-building, categorize world views in light of the friend/foe dichotomy, and redefine our images of reality on the basis of »truths« that are both simplistic and false.

Even though such attacks are aimed at the values and meaning of our common life, democratic parties no longer display much awareness of the cultural dimension of our political system. In the best case they do react to the temper of the times, but their responses fall short of what is needed. In seeking solutions to urgent problems like the culture wars and unanswered questions of meaning, they think it sufficient to spend more on the military, invest in infrastructure, and promise more social programs. Treating citizens as little more than »walking checking accounts« (Nils Minkmar) means dodging the biggest political task of our era: how to preserve the liberal and democratic political culture.

Progressives are abandoning the public arena almost without a fight to right-wing culture warriors and their quest for hegemony. They look on helplessly as freedom and democracy are reinterpreted and ground to dust. That clears space for conservatives who, fearing the growing dominance of right-wing culture wars narratives, shift the political spectrum toward a point where what’s at stake is no longer merely gradual change but a complete makeover.

The demand for moderation is false

To cite just one example, it has become oddly fashionable these days to cry »freedom« loudly and then offer proposals that would actually curtail freedom. While this may seem like a contradiction when taken at face value, there really is a right-wing conservative narrative that blames progressives for the rise of the far right. Wolfram Weimer, the federal government’s representative for culture and the media, is a perfect case study of such fault-finding, since he sings the refrain at every opportunity.

»The rise of the right cannot be prevented by shifting to the right.«

Rather than opposing the right’s attacks on the arts, Weimer compares the latter to »cancel culture« and positions attributed to identity politics. On talk shows he criticizes cultural institutions as »NGO's with an orchestra.« In an article he wrote for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he finds problems above all in those cases in which conventions have been called into question and must be revived on a new basis. Ultimately, Weimer judges right-wing excesses as reactions to the alleged dominance of a »radical feminist, postcolonial, eco-socialist culture of outrage.« He further observes that »left-wing alarmism« domonates the rhythm of the social environment. Thus, he concludes, it is important that everything – including the arts –should cater to the outlook of society’s bourgeois center again.

This is either a remarkably timid defensive argument or else one which falsely claims that the rise of the right can be prevented by a shift toward the right. Instead of sticking up for the enactment of liberal, democratic, Enlightenment-derived principles, he acts as if commitment to esteem and respect, inclusion and diversity, and genuine rights to liberty and participation were to blame for the fact that the right has become radicalized.

We need to disagree

Of course, progressive positions do sometimes miss their mark and produce a backlash. We should debate those points of view, trusting to the power of the better argument. But in fact, the request that we should please be less progressive and political only strengthens the reactionaries. The latter are not interested in making some minor course corrections; they would rather bring about a fundamental redefinition of freedom and democracy. They do not regard freedom as a social arrangement; instead, they vulgarize it as the entitlement of the stronger. In their ideology, calls for freedom degenerate into the insistence that one should be able to air any cliché or prejudice, however offensive or far-fetched. Meanwhile, progressive calls for esteem and respect are dismissed as ideological. Democracies, the rightists contend, should no longer concern themselves with the protection of minorities; instead, they should directly enact the will of the majority, now stylized as »healthy popular sentiment.«

»The reactionaries would like to bring about a fundamental redefinition of freedom and democracy.«

If we don’t respond with toughness to this rightward cultural drift, there is a risk that society will reach a tipping point. Hence, progressives cannot allow themselves to get stuck punching a right-wing tarbaby. One cannot secure spaces of freedom and communication by whittling them down to a supposedly normative centrism. That center is said to manifest a conservative consensus that alone deserves to be represented. Centrists, it is said, shouldn’t be disturbed by the »fringes.« Anyone who desires to forestall retrogression in social and cultural enlightenment must defend freedom and democracy far more unconditionally and courageously.

A personal vision in aesthetic matters is relevant to democracy

Taken as a criterion of cultural policymaking, this fixation upon the static center goes completely astray. Because of their aesthetic commitment to portray a personal vision, the arts possess an absolute freedom unrestricted by fear and anxiety. Such freedom is not given to them; it is at their very heart. Because the arts achieve their effects in the public realm, they become prominent targets in the culture wars. Many artists who inscribe − and sharpen public awareness of − democratic issues in the personal vision of their works, are all too conscious of being targeted.

In mid-May, Bruce Springsteen went onstage in Manchester and opened his European tour with a philippic against the Trump administration. This was noteworthy not only because an artist was capitalizing on his fame to stand up for democracy, but also because his criticisms were inspired by their inherent connection to his own activity as an artist. He asserted that the America he had been singing about for five decades is real, and contrasted this aesthetic vision of his country to the machinations of the Trump administration. The power of the fictitious world of art, he claimed, was more efficacious and closer to reality than the claims of political propaganda.

And in fact, the arts do disclose sensuous and creative worlds of experience. By working in the mode of the »as if,« they enable their public directly to experience creative speculations, while playfully revealing the mutability of the world. Thus, the arts are political in the sense intended by Hannah Arendt: loci of communication and understanding rather than displays of power. They make the public realize that something else can be imagined, played, and thus created besides our allegedly alternative-free reality. Right now, this capability may be the scarcest resource in political life.

The arts are free absolutely

From the standpoint of democratic politics, it is crucial that the arts should seize hold of their freedom to work autonomously. They really are not required to stay within the narrow boundaries of what is considered to be the bourgeois center. Instead, they operate at the margins, in zones of uncertainty and danger. These risks are not merely the price of freedom, but rather the main chance of modernity, because it is in these borderline areas that new things come to be. Artistic positions are often explicitly equivocal and forge links among different strategies and positions. They make diversity visible while encouraging encounters and exchanges regardless of whether participants share an opinion or perception. Often it is just this provocation that sparks discourse. Understood in this way, art is something that arises within society, develops along with it, and then recoils upon it. Art takes up human needs and offers new perspectives in and through its positions and narratives. It conquers spaces into which our society can grow.

The process-character of works of art has an inner affinity with the idea of democracy. No matter what arguments it may deploy, a state is never justified in interfering with the autonomous personal vision implicit in art. Thus, the state does not support the arts as a patron. Rather, acting as society’s proxy, it secures the foundations of creative engagement with the world we live in. A cultural policy that understands this also preserves art from being instrumentalized politically as a savior of democracy.

Through their stories and images and their unique duplication of and estrangement from the world, the arts show us what we can create in common if we want to. It is high time that democratic policymaking should again begin to evince serious interest in political culture and the personal aesthetic vision implicit in the arts. In doing so it might learn a few things. It might develop a different idea.
  andere Idee entwickeln.