Welcome to our special events this evening.
Very different to the special events on the other side of the Atlantic, which is taking place exactly the same time.
I hope that the director of the European Studies Centre and a member of the
History Department and on behalf of the European Studies Centre and his college,
it is my great pleasure to introduce this year's race up invites fellow in.
As most of you know, the fellowship is named in honour of the former German president,
who sadly passed away in February last year when right sector was a towering figure in German political life.
Having been a central and highly influential politician for nearly five decades,
and by second was mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984 and then served as the federal public school president from
1984 to 1994 and was universally commended for overseeing reunification with characteristic grace and sensitivity.
As the first president of a unified Germany since 1945, White Secker also had connections to Oxford,
having studied a Balliol College when he was 17 years old and was an honorary fellow of St Anthony's.
No figure, more fittingly, embodies the ideals of strong German British relations and European solidarity.
Now, as many of you also know, the German visiting fellowship here in Athens has been running for some 45 years and has brought
pre-eminent German scholars in the fields of history and social science to Oxford for two generations.
A distinguished array of academics, including Professor Tony Nicholls,
the founder of the European Studies Centre and long time professor of German History here at Oxford.
Hello, Professors Jürgen Coker, Timothy Garton Ash and Jean Kaplan have skilfully shepherded the fellowship over the
years and we are all grateful to them for the outstanding effort and continue to support.
Three prominent German foundations. Bosch Trust and Volkswagen have been extremely generous over the years in underwriting
this important initiative of intercultural understanding and bridge building.
And Dr. William Cole Volkswagen has been especially supportive of the programme over the years,
plus, like they said Maran for organising this event tonight.
Now let me turn to our featured speaker tonight, Professor Paul Norton,
who is professor of modern and contemporary history at the university in Berlin, as well as the director of the Darwin Humanities Centre.
There, Paul studied history and sociology at the University of Dusseldorf and at Johns
Hopkins and wrote his dphil in the legendary history department at Bielefeld,
under the supervision of the eminent historian Jürgen Cocker, whom we all pleased to have in attendance tonight.
Paul wrote his ability to be the first in 1999 and has held fellowships at Harvard,
Chapel Hill and Munich before securing his permanent post about in 2005.
He's also editor 2000 Berlin Oh, sorry.
Yes, of course. He is also edited a highly high profile social history journal, persisting as does art history and society.
Paul is the author, eight books and numerous publications, and I hope that he will forgive me for not mentioning all of them.
He has been long interested in various issues of contemporary history and politics
in Germany and the US with particular focus on democracy and Republicanism.
Paul's approach can be seen in several of his recent books, including Influential Voices Democracy or What Is Democracy published in 2012,
as well as the Ordinal endorsing his own off the order ordering of German society published in 2000.
I've long admired this last one in particular,
which addresses the changing historical understanding of society in Germany since the late 19th century,
not least because it is a rich study of the interrelationship between sociology and history as prominent narrative
modes for analysing the shifting social pressures and identities associated with the making of modern Germany.
In some ways, this book seems inspired by the work of Ralph Dando, who of course was a long time warden of this college.
In in this study, Paul elegantly traces the history of how society, as opposed to the state,
was conceptualised by various German regimes and thinkers as the very foundation of the political community.
Anyone reading the papers these days about problems confronting Germany, especially concerning the refugee crisis,
cannot help but notice how liberal ideas of German society,
including discussions of who's in and who's out, are being severely challenged in various quarters.
In his talk tonight, imaginary invalids, your Euro-American Populism and the Crisis of democracy.
Paul's research moves in a new direction towards thinking about the historic significance of one of the real buzzwords of our time.
Brexit and the victory of President elect and the so-called president elect does change the next few minutes.
Donald Trump have popularised the term in recent months and it's hard to imagine a more topical theme, especially given the poll's lecture.
Time happens to precisely coincide with Trump's inauguration in Washington, D.C.
So please join me in welcoming Professor Knowlton as this year's ritual invites visitors.
Yeah, Paul, thanks very much for the generous introduction and for the generous reception here at the centre in the past months.
Dear colleagues, your students, your friends of St Anthony's College and the European Studies Centre.
It is a great pleasure and even greater honour for me to be able to speak to you today and presenting the annual reception invited to lecture.
I'll be proud and humbled by having received this fellowship for the academic year 2000 1617.
And I'm well aware that this although the visitor nameplate is a relatively new stance in a long and impressive tradition
that you just sketched of modern historians and social scientists coming to the downtown college with support,
in particular from the Fox Foundation, which over more than four decades has invested so much not just money,
but intellectual energy and curiosity in this place and its people, and especially in fostering exchange between British and German scholars.
In a truly European context, I'd be honoured that the Secretary General of the Volkswagen Dongle and Call has come over from Hanover,
British place of sorts, to attend this lecture. In all modesty,
I can assure him that there is no better place to realise the goals of our very
precious investments than St Anthony's College and the European Studies Centre.
And this moment I should also like to express my deep debt of gratitude to Jurgen Cocker,
who first created a seminal paper of mine more than 30 years ago and is here today.
And to my great academic mentor, the late translator.
While this may be a pleasurable occasion, or at least I hope you will agree when I'm done with my talk,
but it was this is also an ambiguous moment in a very specific as well as in the larger sense,
as Paul Betts already mentioned,
the very hour my talk of this talk at 5 p.m. Greenwich Time is the moment when the 45th president of the United States, Donald J.
Trump, takes his oath of office on the steps of the Capitol at noon Eastern Time.
And although it follows is, of course,
an attempt at making sense of this event in a larger transatlantic framework from an analytical and scholarly point of view,
there may be more pleasant topics around, but this is, well, the topic of the day.
When I came here in the first days of October to the centre at the beginning of Michaelmas term,
everyone was returning from their summer breaks and I could immediately sense the intensity with which ongoing political events,
and especially the repercussions of the British referendum of June 23rd impacted
not just on the academic agenda and calendars of events in this building,
but had hit everyone here in their very identity as citizens of Europe.
This is what scholarship in our disciplines is all about a complex hybrid of restraint and
engagement with the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency on November 8th last year,
the distance between Europe and North America seems to have shrunk and grown.
At the same time, politicians, media and civil society in Western Europe have reacted on a scale between unpleasant surprise and outright shock.
And there is much speculation about a major shift in transatlantic relations,
about the loosening of the classical post-war relationship by the incoming administration.
That is certainly warranted by Trump's rhetorical signals during the campaign as well as during the transition period.
Just think of his Times and Bildt interview earlier this week and possibly by his
actions starting now from the point of view of the liberal public in Germany,
the UK and elsewhere in Europe,
their own countries and governments are now called upon to defend democratic regimes and lifestyles against not just a bull in a china shop,
but against the temptation of authoritarian right wing rule that is looming in Washington when a ruthless populists takes the reins of power.
And yet,
the success of populist politics in the United States in many respects only reflects and repeats what has been going on across large parts of Europe,
including the presumably so enlightened western half. Across the continent for many decades.
Less than two years ago, it looked as though populism was the European pattern of political discontent in the beginning of the 21st century.
While the problem of American political culture, both in its self-diagnosis and in the view from outside,
was much rather the ever widening gap between the two major political parties and their constituencies.
The loss of common ground, and, at least from a Liberal perspective,
the radicalisation of the Conservative right epitomised in the rise of the Tea Party movement towards the end of the last decade.
The rise and success of Trumpism has therefore, ironically,
brought profound commonalities between American and European politics to the core
and indeed commonalities between the social and cultural underpinnings of politics.
Democracy, as we knew it, in a state of crisis on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
And populism is the ghost that haunts Americans and Europeans alike.
In my talk this evening, I should like to address the situation with an attempt at understanding populism,
both in a broader historical perspective and with the categories mostly of a historian,
not a political scientist, and as a Western phenomenon, in other words,
as an expression of fundamental changes in advanced Western democracies over the past decades,
reaching back into the 1960s and 1970s,
we look at patterns of political culture relevant to the crisis of democracy and the rise of populism, for example,
in the emergence of anti-elite prism and the transformation of party systems,
which revealed both differences and similarities between the American and the European trajectory.
Needless to say, the populist landscape in Europe is wide and rugged in itself,
as are economic conditions and cultural foundations, out of which the populist challenge has grown.
My prime European case is Germany, and I will mostly leave aside post-communist countries such as Poland and Hungary, and certainly Russia,
in which righteous authoritarian governments with different kinds of populist appeal are testing the limits of democracy and the rule of law.
And yet there is a case to be made in comparison with the United States for a Western at least Western
European brand of populism stretching from Britain and France to the Netherlands and Germany,
from Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south.
Obviously, this is a huge topic, and what I'm not going to discuss, among many other relevant facets, is the impact of media and technology,
especially the Internet and social media, on the production of illiberal mindsets,
the vulgar ization of political discourse, and hence the proliferation of populist politics.
Instead, I'm going to focus in the major parts of my talk on the much debated issue of the social origins of populism.
Although, and because one of the now most widely read interpretations of populism anomalous almost entirely leaves that dimension.
Least you may have wondered about the imaginary invalid in the title.
Beyond a literary reference to Moliere, the race seeks to capture an essential enigma and the quest for an explanation of populism.
Who are its followers? Who are its voters? It is often assumed that populist attitudes such as anti-elite schisms,
xenophobia and nationalism are an expression of marginalised groups in the age of globalised capitalism,
an understandable and perhaps even legitimate act of protest against exclusion, disempowerment and injustice.
Far from rejecting economic factors, indeed an important part of my consideration as will be devoted to them.
My main argument, nevertheless, is about cultural mechanisms rather than economic inequality.
The sickness often is, to put it provocatively, an imagined one.
Both the alleged sickness of liberal democratic societies and the suffering of the populist electorate.
While I'm trying to advance the complex multi causal model, as historians of course do for historical explanation of populism,
I mostly see it as a reaction to the cultural dynamics in a new stage of the modernisation of Western societies as a cultural backlash
against processes of liberalisation rooted in the 1960s and as an attempt at coping with an age of uncertainty and ambiguity.
So the reaffirmation of traditional values. First.
That would be called the critique of elites, especially economic and political elites,
has not been invented by populism, only exploited and exacerbated.
And it is, in fact, a major asset of democratic societies, of course.
Therefore, it is not surprising that its traditions are historically stronger in the United States than in Europe.
European political culture.
In the transition from the early modern era to the modern age, from monarchical and aristocratic to more egalitarian conceptions of society,
you have it has retained its hierarchical and deferential elements not only into the into the industrial period,
but arguably into the post-war era of the 1950s and 1960s.
Germany is a special case in point with its authoritarian habits that it supported fascism
and all the more profoundly came to be challenged in the radicalism of the student movement.
American politics have been characterised by anti-elitist traits since the
Jeffersonian revolt against federalism and even more since the age of Jackson.
Resentment against big cities, big business and big politics has run deep all over the late 19th and 20th centuries,
and in fact constituted a major element in the appeal of the original populism of
the farmers and small businessmen protest movements that culminated in the 1890s.
What then has changed recently? While the anti-elite schism of the classical democratic age have mostly been advanced by the political left,
whereas the right stuck with elite, abiding,
patriarchal notions of social order, anti-establishment politics has transitioned to the right and construct new arguments about democratic liberal.
Indeed, leftist elites who, in their progressive agenda setting, allegedly have lost contact with the aspirations of ordinary people.
Kind of a political switch.
At the same time, however, leftist anti-Semitism has been fuelled by growing social inequalities and the transformation of capitalism since the 1980s,
with the emergence of a new class of superrich and the post production Financialized Market Economy.
The story is complicated, and it's important to see both the overlap of right and left populism and the critique of elites and establishments,
as well as markets differences. While leftist populism mostly projects the critique of elites at the 1% as the Occupy movement so suggestively put it,
the elite threshold for right wing populism, sociologically speaking, is much lower as it often begins with the academic upper middle classes,
with professors or journalists as major agents of political and public discourse.
It works with us. Whether the gap between elites and ordinary people has indeed grown in the past three or four decades
is hard to tell and subject to definition for the research and type of elites under scrutiny.
The very rich have become even richer from the perspective of the lower middle,
as from the perspective of the lower as well as the middle classes, and even more so in the United States than in Europe.
The divide between the working class and the middle class already is much more difficult to assess.
Political elites have probably become more plutocratic and in that sense,
more estranged from the chances of common people in America, but not quite so in many European countries.
Recruiting patterns of the political and administrative class in France for the system of the Grand
Ecole have remained stubbornly resistant vis a vis both capitalist and egalitarian transformation.
In Germany, meanwhile, access to the political class has long been relatively open and might have become less elitist,
less elitist in recent decades for several reasons.
With the entry of the amateur politician into the political arena in East Germany in the wake of reunification,
think Angela merkel and so many East German minister presidents and one in West Germany.
The Green Party has opened alternative paths for political careers from the marches with regard to political and some other functional,
however not economic elites.
It is quite safe to say that indeed populists are imaginary invalids, or at least the estrangement is on their part and not with the politicians.
Certainly demands from civil society have raised expectations about transparency and responsiveness
in representative democracy that politicians are now often unsuccessfully trying to catch up with.
Again, the dynamics of the less left and of the right may be understood as communicating vessels.
The crisis in representation, or rather in understanding representation is much more a question.
Understanding representation has been nourished by older traditions of Marx's critique of liberal democracy, representative democracy,
as well as by the more recent quest of progressive movements for the introduction of more elements
of direct democracy in which we are seeing and welcoming in many Western European countries.
The idea of the idea of a homogeneous interest of the people hindered in its fulfilment
by the egotism of elites is a common denominator of left and right populism.
A new Rousseau ism against which pluralist notions of interest and representation have been increasingly difficult to advance.
This element of anti pluralism is one of the or perhaps the major argument in Bernard Muller's assessment of populism,
I call it until you saw it and you it's only a new Rousseau ism because its importance the volunteers are now still there,
the very real element and the overwhelming feeling of non-Arabic presentation.
Its roots are in the rapid dissolution of the corporatist and associational society that had characterised
social order in the age of classical modernity from the times of Alexis de Tocqueville into the 1970s.
In this system, everyone, or rather every male citizen, white male citizen,
came to be represented in a variety of social roles as a Catholic or as a member of a Protestant denomination,
as a farm worker, as a member of a trade union in sports or in leisure clubs,
or some voluntary association through closely knit communities and a high degree of identification with the leaders.
The elites of those values and associations secured a feeling of individual empowerment
to the rank and file that has been lost in an era of radical individualisation.
Most of all, for the working and lower middle classes, the bonds that connected them to their local and intermediate powerbrokers have been destroyed.
With the results were the result of a sense of loss of control and a massive wave of distrust in those when.
Now operate without their consent. Step two before we further pursue this argument at the crossroads of manifest
reorganisations and patterns of social order and their cultural repercussions,
I would like to take a brief look at another aspect of the political embedding of populism,
namely its organisational side and its locus in party systems in particular.
If populism can be understood most fundamentally as an attitude towards society and politics,
it may pursue its goals in various organisations, of course, but still the rise of populism,
especially in Western and Central Europe since the 1980s,
is inextricably linked with the erosion and sometimes even the collapse of traditional party systems that has lent stability to the post-war periods.
And in many ways this can many ways can be traced back to the late 19th and
early 20th centuries when social democratic as well as conservative Catholic.
For many countries, parties emerged. The stability of these constellations, be it to party or multiparty systems, has been shattered as a consequence,
among others, of the evaporation of social milieus and the just discussed retreat of a corporatist and associational society.
The close link between the end of a polarisation of society,
the breakdown of party systems and the rise of populist movement parties in their wake is most and most obvious in countries such as the Netherlands,
with its long standing pattern of presiding, or Italy, where confessional,
ideological and cultural camps that shaped the post-war party system in a similar way.
In Italy, populism came to power with Berlusconi and his Italia Movement Party in the 1990s.
And although Italian democracy has survived Berlusconi's long reign and moved back to
more classical trajectories in many ways so across the fingers towards Washington,
the organisation of interest and the party system has never recovered from its collapse and will,
for the foreseeable future remain in the populist mode of post ideology and ad hoc mobilisation in many other European countries.
However, party system step rather undergone a process of gradual erosion and transformation, as it is true for Germany since the 1980s.
In such constellations, populism has organised in right wing parties that sometimes were formed on the basis of smaller parties that already existed,
as was the case with Europe. Hiatus remaking of the Austrian Liberal Party appeared.
Mostly, though, populist movements created new parties that were positioned on the extreme
right of the political spectrum and with independence on national interests.
France, or much more recently with the German ascendancy,
the predominant German political culture since the 2000 has not been characterised by the high degree of polarisation of the United States,
where the populist appeal is the hybrid really of right wing ideologies and a more centrist promise to bridge the cleavages in culture and society.
On the contrary, in Germany, Germany stands out for its consensual and centrist political culture with a post ideological overlap of the form of both
Christian Democrats and social Democrats embodied in a series of grand coalitions different from the United States.
Populism in Europe has often occupied a space on the political right that have been vacated by the liberalisation of conservative parties.
The AfD, therefore, is both a rather traditional conservative party with a bourgeois and sometimes even elitist,
certainly elitist outlook and a modern populist party with a broader appeal to the discontented and petty bourgeois.
In structural terms, the American case of Trumpism is rather singular in the Western world,
and yet it exemplifies similar issues and the transformation of conservative politics at the beginning of the 21st century.
Its singularity is in the hijacking of a major existing party and not a minor party such as the FBI.
But one of the major players in an otherwise extremely stable two party system,
Donald Trump has been the parasite surviving through and from his host the Republican Party.
This pattern is remarkable since there is a well-established pattern of third party
challenges in the United States that Trump may instead have chosen to follow.
Indeed, the original populism of the late 19th century organised as a third party, the People's or Populist Party.
Trump may have to get his credit for realising that these efforts have never carried
someone to the presidency and that the internal crisis of the GOP more important,
its own rift between moderate establishment and conservative zealots on the grassroots level had made it ripe for his own assault.
Populism, hence, may flourish in a variety of organisational ways and with quite different positions in a country's party system.
However, two features runs through those varieties.
Number one, a previous damage to the party system by the realignment of voters beyond their traditional cohesion and milieus.
And second, a crisis of conservatism as a political ideology and cultural worldview that has
come under pressure with the attacks of both economic and cultural liberalisation.
At the end of the 20th century, third set patterns of socio economic change.
Now, why do people vote populist or even anti-democratic?
Why do growing shares of the population countries that we used to think of as the most educated and most enlightened in the world,
all for a political program and propaganda that is phobic, racist, misogynist, and nationalistic.
The core question of the popular attraction of the populist appeal probably is I'm sorry, impossible to answer in any satisfactory way.
Obviously, it is more than an empirical riddle that would only need more data to be solved.
All of that is certainly true. Answers will be dependent on fundamental persuasion, on political ideologies and deep seated worldviews.
Liberal optimists will assume that everyone will be following a path of enlightenment
and rationality once impeding factors have been remedied a lack of education,
growth, social inequalities,
or a distortion of rational discourse in the Habermas model by the intrusion of power into the Lifeworld sceptics won't be so sure about this.
They would argue that people do think and behave in irrational manners and that we shouldn't assume,
as the history of the 20th century has demonstrated in ample ways,
the weakest, outward bound to the universalism of liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism, trans nationalism.
Now, where I stand, I don't know. Perhaps someone will. I have to look for some middle ground.
I think perhaps we need both, like in the figure of Richard Rodgers liberal ironies, which might be of business consolation.
Perhaps the most widespread explanation for people going populist is the leftist and progressive narrative of economic marginalisation.
It appears in American as well as in European political thought, and points to major socio economic transformations during the past few decades,
far beyond the economic and financial crises that have shaken the Western world from 2017.
Although in that view, the last ten years, that certainly aggravated existing issues of social inequality.
The roots, however, often in these narratives about the turnaround of the mid 1970s to early 1980s.
That is in the end of the post-war era of prosperity, in the end of the now,
especially by historians and very especially very particularly in Germany,
so much discussed on global use with the retreat of Keynesian economics and the rise of neo liberalism in the immediate run up to the US election,
the editorial of The New Yorker and a powerful endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president,
I'm sure many of you read it succinctly, summarised this narrative anger and resentment in this reading, a vibrant within quote,
a white working class that has been losing ground and for which a disconnected political class,
particularly within the Democratic Party, has failed to convey any sense of empathy.
And, of course, The New Yorker, even contrary, the original populism of the late 19th century by boldly claiming, quote, We are in the mess.
We are we are in the midst of a people's revolt.
The great debate concerning inequality. The Hollowing of the middle.
Globalisation's winners and losers. We cannot dismiss the message because we deplore the messenger.
While the moderate left or the moderate left in Europe would probably overall know, I'm sure,
which overall be much more reluctant with adopting this American progressive narrative,
certainly insofar as it lends legitimacy to the populist revolt.
Public intellectuals on the radical European left echo and reinforce that.
Sometimes. For example, I argued in such a way, taught by Slavoj Zizek three months ago at Berlin's Humboldt University has been announced as rage,
rebellion and power in the face of populism.
She doesn't come to the defence of liberal democracy. And why should he, as one of the last remaining Orthodox Marxists?
But more is the fact that the very legitimate anger by the people as it is
channelled into populism does not lead into a real rebellion and revolution.
Hence, she would have to disagree with outgoing German President Jonathan Gauss well-received
plea earlier this week that all of us should do more to defend liberal democracy.
Now, this raises problems of political theory and political philosophy that are not going to further follow tonight.
Suffice it to say that the question of the legitimacy of populism is a delicate one between the Scylla
of giving some credit to racism and xenophobia in the name of larger power structures and inequalities.
The neoliberal syndrome, so to speak, and the correctness of what Germans called Bella is shameful.
The environment of voters who ought to be held accountable or to be held accountable for the illiberal views, balance and balance.
But the danger with the danger of overlooking the origins of anger and hatred.
Here we are again in this dilemma with the title of My Talk.
Imaginary invokes in an empirical and historical perspective,
it is very plausible that the economic dynamics of the past half century have
contributed to the susceptibility of certain groups to the populist message.
But the connection is more complicated and less obvious than the standard account of the neoliberal assault assumes.
The age of the total of years in the 1970s has ushered in a period of relative stagnation in wages and living standards,
while income from capital and financial transactions has dramatically grown and sometimes skyrocketed.
For the most part, however, this is a relative experience,
and living standards in 2015 are much higher for the lower and middle classes when compared to the still relatively post-war scarcity of 1975.
Perhaps more so in Europe than in the United States. And the story is different is a different one for Southern and Eastern Europe,
two regions that only began their trajectory of growth and prosperity in their new democracies and within the European Union.
And, of course, with support of the European Union for all their current economic calamities,
Greece and Spain today are worlds apart from their state of mostly rural poverty in the mid 1970s.
A similar case could be argued for Poland and Hungary and certainly for East Germany,
the former GDR, while the post-communist configuration in many ways has its own variables.
Spain and Greece are politically deprived as they have witnessed major populist
movements on the left rather than on the light on the right with Syriza,
and put it in the older industrial countries that are more susceptible to right wing populism.
Deindustrialisation has indeed hit the working class hard, and the link to the success of populist politics is obvious in the American Rust Belt,
with blue states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that Donald Trump captured on November 8th,
as well as in old industrial German regions in the northern part, for example, of Britain,
back where the AfD scored major victories in the state elections of March 2016,
such as in Manhattan Pforzheim, where they captured the air to the act mandated.
However, if white males in those regions are most vocal in today's populism,
it doesn't mean that they were that they were the sole or prime victims of deindustrialisation,
the quintessential white male working class that appears in The New Yorker and has become almost topical or even a cliché in American discourse.
When factories shut down in the American Great Lakes industrial zone,
as well as in the German role could be migrants and minorities were equally hit hard.
Little talk about them gets about from Italy or Turkey in Germany and African-Americans
would come to the north with the Great Migration just one or two generations earlier.
In the US it was predominantly men who lost their jobs in coal mines, steelworks and auto plants certainly.
But rationalisation and the export of production to the southern periphery of the respective continents Southern Europe, Africa or Mexico,
in the case of the US and Asia in particular, has probably even more engulfed industries,
industries that had relied on female wage labour, such as upper.
Six electrical appliances and most of all, textiles.
Not all losers of globalisation have become permanently marginalised.
And not all of the marginalised are turning their frustration into hatred and xenophobia.
Women in particular, have probably been more successful in securing the new chances of post-industrial
service society than men and the poorest and most economically marginalised have,
according to preliminary data, rather than not voted for Trump on November eight.
Trump voters are much more typically to be found in the lower middle classes, and besides,
as is the case with populists elsewhere across the complete range of income and education.
Indeed, this is what we would expect from historical evidence of voter support for right wing movements and the crisis of the Weimar Republic.
Unskilled and unemployed workers gave strength to the KPD, while the NSDAP overwhelmingly benefited from middle class votes.
Hence, it is important. It is important to ask questions for economic change when looking at political attitudes.
But the answers may well go beyond economics or look in different directions,
which may await children as the concept of deindustrialisation and globalisation are not sufficient in explaining the new populism.
The larger notion of the emergence of a post-war society,
of a post-war society may be helpful as a direct attention to other factors such as gender and organisation and the IS paradigm.
The male breadwinner took centre stage. A skilled worker with his wage could support his whole family, wife and children.
The inability to do so in a postcode economy has done more than material harm.
It has come as a cultural shock to a deeply patriarchal worldview.
Meanwhile, the destruction of this work environment, such as assembly line production,
has served as a catalyst for the decline of trade union strength in Western democracies since the 1980s.
But the flight from organisation is a much larger trend,
also beyond the sphere of work and labour and rooted at least as much in a massive reorientation of
cultural preferences from the collective cultural preferences from the collective to the individual,
a reorientation that's across social classes.
And we cannot emphasise this strongly enough,
a reorientation of cultural preference to the individual that has widely and happily been embraced by people again across all classes.
At the same time, a gap has opened in educational attainment and its consequences for economic achievement and social prestige.
Increasingly, the pitting the academic upper middle classes against us, against the non-academic, lower middle and working classes,
and producing resentments against the elitism and the increasingly liberal worldviews of the educated classes.
This is why we finally have to turn to patterns of cultural conflict and understanding populism.
Without losing sight of economic change, social inequality and their repercussions.
Populism may be defined as a pattern of cultural resistance, namely as resistance against liberalisation of society.
The cultural liberalisation of Western societies and in extension across the globe to which populists oppose,
or at least which they do not instinctively grasp or rationally understand in relation to their own lives,
is in a complicated relationship with the dynamics of economic liberalisation.
Of course, summarised with the concept of neo liberalism.
But it would be a mistake, both conceptually and historically, to conflate those two liberal forces of the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
or to reduce the cultural liberalisation to a functional by-product of the larger neoliberal power strategy as Marxists tend to do.
Like neo liberal, neo liberalism has freed women in order to better exploit themselves.
Historically, the origins of cultural liberalisation, as we understand it today, brought forward by the protest movements of the 1960s,
the student movement and new feminism in particular have preceded the global economic
crisis of the 1970s and the paradigm shift in political economy from Keynes to Friedman.
From demand to supply.
The pursuit of individual liberties and personal autonomy and cultural liberalism sometimes, of course, dovetails nicely with the neo liberal ideas.
Economic individuals who are completely set free from social bonds and obligations, free to move for your workplace regardless of family or whatever.
At the same time, both set in stark opposition against each other with the new neo liberal quest for order and regulation.
Think European Union. I think the German pattern of states order is very much not so much market,
but the German pattern is very much one of state order neo liberalism running directly
counter to the idea of grassroots organisations and creative self-realisation of individuals.
In any case, culture wars have emerged as a salient feature of a new populism in the United States as well as in Europe.
Culture wars that promote a politics of cultural and social nostalgia, or even reveals an aggressive gesture against modern society.
Populism in this regard has become the heir to conservatism,
and the populist tide might may indeed be understood historically as a second wave of protest,
second wave of protest or backlash against the cultural liberalisation and value of change that had
started in the 1960s and half a century ago prompted the rise of then new conservatism rather early,
starting in the 1960s in America and 1964 was often mentioned as a kind of key year.
And about a decade later, only after the turmoil of 1968,
or even after the economic watershed of 1973 in Western Europe, the West German tendency and Thatcherism,
the cultural agenda of current populism has certainly been influenced by more recent events and processes such as the mass migration of
Middle Eastern and African refugees by the challenge of radical Islamic terrorism in the wake of 911 and the Western war against terror,
and by new stages, in the new stages and the cultural dynamics of Western societies, especially with regard to minority rights and sexual politics.
We should do this in a minute,
but the core catalogue of grievances refers back to the 1960s and seventies with three larger issues of particular prominence symbolic significance.
It's a rampant and it's really first point for me.
First, a rampant anti-Semitism that comes in variations in degrees from the more traditional conservative
housewife ideal promoted by the German team to the aggressive me largely of Donald Trump.
But all almost always constitutes a core element, not just some obscure irritation in the populist agenda.
Second, a vibrant nationalism that is not only and in many cases not even primarily directed
against political transgressions of the nation state like the European Union,
but is anchored in the cultural ideal of ethnic homogeneity and hence articulates its reservations against immigration and the ideal of ethnic,
cultural and religious pluralism in modern societies.
Third, if perhaps somewhat less important populism or currently still less important, yet less important.
Populism also converges in its rejection of the ecological paradigm change that has transformed Western culture since the 1970s.
The denial of climate change, or at least the refusal to act politically on it, currently looms large on the populist agenda.
More so in the US than in Europe. But it reflects a deeper resentment against the redefinition of values along ecological or sustainability lines.
In the eyes of a historian. Therefore, there is something like a cultural lack in the populous mindset.
Almost a century ago, American sociologist William Faulkner, 1922,
has introduced the notion of cultural lack in an attempt to explain the belated reaction of societies to processes of material and manifest change.
This pattern of late reaction applies to both economic and cultural changes that go back several decades.
By now, manufacturing plants have been closed.
In think of tactile text on objects, industries have been closing assembly line.
Jobs have been lost to other parts of the world since the 1970s and eighties,
and it was often the fathers or the mothers, for that matter, of those angry today who lost their jobs and the economy.
Women have attacked patriarchy and claimed their autonomy as individuals, their equal share of standing since more than a generation.
And yet, the pursuit of female equality still doesn't seem to be culturally digested in a significant share of male society.
However, one should be careful not to overemphasise the image,
this image of continuity and cultural liberalisation since the 1960s, the beginning of the 21st century,
not only witnessed as a second wave and cultural backlash, but also a genuine second wave in the dynamics of cultural liberalisation itself.
What, half a century ago, equality and autonomy for marginalised groups, for women and minorities had been the rallying cry.
The pursuit of equality and autonomy has now been extended to minorities who are largely out of sight.
Two decades ago, at least in mainstream public discourse, people with handicaps, for example, or LGBT people, or as another example, take religion.
In the early 1970s, German elementary schools were still struggling with becoming the main shots,
going to school and rather than being confessional Protestant or Catholic.
Only a generation later, the debate is about Muslim prayer and Islamic religious education.
The new politics of sexuality, in particular,
has challenged the notion of normality in different ways compared to earlier emancipation movements in the 20th or even the 19th centuries.
Liberals and progressives sometimes too easily take this cultural redefinition for granted.
We should pass a moment in order to understand the enormous historical significance of the barriers we are breaking today.
For example, with the conception of marriage beyond heterosexuality,
if liberals demonstrate understanding vis a vis economic disruptions and people's lives.
They should also take cultural disruptions into account and without compromising on their principles,
give others who are less privileged time to accommodate.
Conclusion Populism. In an age of ambiguity.
Populism flourishes in an age of ambiguity above all other variables in a complex configuration, economic changes and new inequalities.
The dissolution of social milieus and the erosion of public systems.
The distrust of elites and the crisis of representative government.
It should be understood as a search for order. The search for order in an apparently orderly world,
as an attempt at securing boundaries in a historical situation when boundaries disappear quite literally,
but also in a larger figurative sense, how can we control our lives and maintain security with open borders?
How can we care for ourselves and our local microcosms in the shadow of global elites to prosper in their unbounded existence?
And be careful? We are part of these global elites. We are part of those form the next flights from Heathrow just a few steps away,
not from any other people, but the irritations which translate into populism reached still deeper ours.
This nature of the paradox of fuzzy realities.
How can there be nation states and a European Union if the latter does not seem to
transform itself into a sovereign federal state yet is more than a federation of nations.
So as the Brexit make it clear to draw boundaries, women should be equal to men.
But shouldn't we stop thinking in those bounded categories of gender at all?
Whether with new designations of bathrooms or beyond trans categories all around us in times of liquid modernity.
The latest thinking in Parliament has just passed away. Call it the West may be under attack from outside, but the real threat comes from the inside,
with the tension between a hugely dynamic reinterpretation of Western ideals and the difficulties of many not outside the West,
many in the West, whatever their economic situation may be in keeping pace with this ongoing revolution.
Ironically, populism has brought the West closer together again on both sides of the Atlantic.
America and Europe are in the very same predicament.
They cannot stop this revolution in the name of freedom and rights, participation and inclusion.
And yet they have to listen to the voices of those struggling to keep pace.
Thank you for listening.