Historian Andreas Rödder has announced the “end of green hegemony.” Unlike the intellectual leader of the CDU, progressives should not draw up ideological packages.
“And soon he will explain to me that everything is connected to everything…” Luisa Neubauer, here on February 3 in Berlin Photo: Liesa Johannssen/Reuters
The person I recently went with to demonstrate against the right was in a very critical state of mind. On the demonstration poster there were two comma errors “in a single slogan!”; In his opinion, unacceptable parallels were drawn with 1933. And of course: “I am not demonstrating against the right, but against right-wing extremism. There has to be so much precision!”
When Luisa Neubauer from Fridays for Future spoke, she sighed: “And in a moment she will explain that everything is related to everything else, that she is against right-wing extremism and climate protection.” She was right, that's exactly how it happened. He wasn't sure he wanted to follow Neubauer's desire to think everything together, not because she wanted to deny the connections, but for public relations reasons. I would have thought it would have been cooler if Fridays had simply shown the connection through her role in the event instead of talking about it. Because it was they who contributed so significantly to the mobilization against the AfD and the far right.
Or had I already believed the new story about the “end of green hegemony” with this rather tasteless judgment? Hey, be careful. Andreas Rödder, professor of history at the University of Mainz and a key conservative, recently expressed this motto through FACE put in the world.
Consequently, everything that has been thought and demanded in an emancipatory and climate-protective way since the 2008 financial crisis belongs to the “green hegemony”, which has already ended. Rödder cites as a “turning point” the shameful event last June in Erding, Bavaria, where the leader of the Free Voters, Hubert Aiwanger, wanted to “regain” democracy for himself or for the “silent majority.”
There are many errors in Rödder's thesis, however acceptable it may seem, starting with the fact that the issue of green hegemony since 2008 should have been reflected somewhere in economic and consumer behavior. To compare this with reality, I recommend taking a look at car registration statistics. Sociologist Armin Nassehi currently offers Time some more objections.
But Rödder is not at all worried about reality. Him but rather about the pretension of power, that is, the demand, not only of the Greens, to change reality: towards a greater probability of survival on this planet. And this demand, of course you are right, has been publicly and casually neglected since the disaster of the heating law. And with increasingly simpler arguments: something with “paternalism” always works; compare with the CSU general secretary's statement in this week's exchange about whether black-green is possible after the next federal election (we are talking about 2025), unless Christian Lindner will soon be offered the job he really wants) . The others use the circulating variants “Unfortunately overwhelming”, “Not like that, not at all”, “Nuclear energy”.
Rödder's “End of Green Hegemony” should be read as an offer to the Union camp, as a brief guide on how to repudiate climate protection with culture war slogans (“Against gender madness” and the like) – and at the same time eliminate with the progressive ideas of the last 30 years. As unpleasant as I find this package of ideological solutions, I think it makes more sense to approach each work individually: talk about climate when it comes to climate, talk about democracy and against the extreme right, when it comes to democracy and against the right goes outside.
Let's show that somehow you can still do it all together.