55 Voices for Democracy: Claus Leggewie on New Political Alliances

“55 Voices for Democracy” is inspired by the 55 BBC radio addresses Thomas Mann delivered from his home in California to thousands of listeners in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the occupied Netherlands and Czechoslovakia between October 1940 and November 1945. In his monthly addresses Mann spoke out strongly against fascism, becoming the most significant German defender of democracy in exile. Building on that legacy, “55 Voices” brings together internationally esteemed intellectuals, scientists, and artists to present ideas for the renewal of democracy in our own troubled times. The series is presented by the Thomas Mann House in partnership with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Deutschlandfunk.

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Crises have always led to unlikely alliances. Now is again the time to forge alliances against right-wing populism and the climate catastrophe, demands political scientist and publicist Claus Leggewie. Leggewie holds the Ludwig Börne Professorship at the University of Giessen and is head of the local “Panel on Planetary Thinking.” In 2021, he was an Honorary Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. His most recent publications include No Representation Without Consulation (2021) and Climate Change and Cultural Transition in Europe (2018).

The video of Claus Leggewie’s talk can be viewed below.

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https://youtu.be/TgCkDOkIPEo

Thomas Mann in exile was an active member of the worldwide anti-Hitler coalition uniting conservatives and communists, clerics and atheists, liberals and authoritarians, colonialists and anticolonialists against this enemy of mankind who had ignited a global conflagration and who could be stopped only through decisive use of force. “Hitler had the great advantage of producing a simplification of emotions, the No that never for a moment was in doubt, a clear and lethal hatred,” Mann wrote in 1946. Also in less existential times of crisis, political forces that previously were like fire and water were forming alliances, thus testing their tolerance to the limit. We see this also happening today: In Hungary and Poland, both democracies on the brink, the toppling of a government suspected of corruption and susceptible to fascism will only be possible if all forces support the most promising opposition leader against the governing autocrats in the next parliamentary elections.

Even where the choices seem less dramatic, cross-party action is called for: the U.S. president as well as the European Commission will only be able to push through a climate-friendly recovery budget with the votes of its opponents, and in Germany a so-called “traffic-light coalition” forced former antagonists to forge a compromise. This is because of the urgency of agendas such as climate and species protection, where it is no exaggeration to say that it is a matter of humanity’s survival. History knows such closing of ranks primarily in the context of the outbreak of wars, which forced “impossible” coalitions such as that formed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin against Nazi Germany. If the climate crisis were given the same status as military aggression genocide, or pandemics, the impossible would also become possible here. The fact that it already reaches murderous proportions is owed to the very fact that it has so far been impossible to achieve unity. The current decade will show whether the increasingly frequent symptoms (with emissions continuing to rise) will finally result in real consequences. Traditional forms of governance are no longer up to the task.

The imperative to unite and the need to collaborate are apparent in both domestic and foreign policy. Globally, it will be necessary to find common ground especially with China, one of the main carbon dioxide emitters whose party dictatorship, alas, tramples human and civil rights. Domestically, we are dealing with an obstructive opposition such as the U.S. Republican Party, which still is home to stubborn climate change deniers and supporters of Donald Trump, putchist manqué. Imitators of his paranoid hatefulness can be found around the globe. One will have to reckon with them — and talk with them.

This is not a free ticket for a “government of technicians”, and certainly not a “climate dictatorship”, nor a plea for blue-eyed centrism. In light of the upcoming great transformation, the biggest turning point since the industrial revolution, liberal democracies will have to develop modalities and processes that set aside ideological and power-strategic differences. This presupposes a different notion of power than that which we know from a long line of sources, from Thomas Hobbes to Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. The German Green politician and new vice-chancellor Robert Habeck recognized this when he said, taking his cue from Hannah Arendt: “In keeping with the times, power is dialogic, not monologic, it is informal and subtle, not rigid and authoritarian. In keeping with the times, power is not evidenced by demanding obedience and subservience, by people in power behaving like potentates, but by people forming groups and agreeing to do things, to act.” This was Hannah Arendt’s whole idea of politics in general.

While Germany is struggling to form an effective government coalition, in the United States, the main per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, a mildly Green infrastructure plan is facing strong opposition, including from the Democratic left wing, while the country periodically risks default and stalemate as the Republicans want to force the next government shutdown. To whatever extent these power plays may be understandable from a realpolitik perspective, this obstructive behavior bespeaks murderous irresponsibility. For the sake of short-term political gains, enormous property losses, unprecedented waves of refugees, and deaths at a mass scale are tolerated, destroying the opportunities of Generation Greta, to whom all like to pay rhetorical homage.

Democracy needs to be repaired as comprehensively as the old-industrial infrastructure. In Germany, there has emerged the rhetorical figure of the “progressive center,” meaning an alliance between environmentalists and liberals that first-time voters and young voters prefer for very different reasons. Narratives of the insurmountable gap between economy and ecology or of the stingy “Swabian housewife” are becoming moot; an agreement to protect the climate and biodiversity produces a new political color scheme that obviously also includes “black” members of parliament (for example, from the CDU “Klima-Union,” a group of Christian Democrats that seeks to advance climate issues). In the Bundestag, too, there is a broad majority of deputies who are willing to act more decisively.

Germany, with its suffrage system aiming at consensus and proportional representation, is better prepared for that than the United States – where a winner-takes-it-all system exacerbates polarization. Two years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences launched a nonpartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, which recently issued a report entitled “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century.” The project is led by Harvard political scientist Danielle Allen, Stephen B. He(a)intz, the president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Eric P. L(i)u, author and former speechwriter of Bill Clinton, and its members include, to name just a few, Sayu Bhojwani, founder of New American Leaders, Judy Woodruff from PBS, and New York Times columnist David Brooks.Something similar could emerge in Germany — to begin with a nonpartisan “climate caucus” in the Bundestag and Bundesrat that closely cooperates with non-parliamentary groups, foundations, think tanks, and NGOs that put the climate on the top of the agenda. The majority of the population in both countries, as we know from surveys, is demanding conclusive transformative policies and willing to change their own lifestyles.

Even more than “reinventing democracy,” it is a matter of “repairing democracy,” of repairing a democratic infrastructure that in many places is worn and fraying at the edges, that suffers from an obvious lack of legitimacy and that guarantees only imperfect representativity. In the United States, this goes so far as to explicitly deny suffrage to minority voters, but in Europe, too, the principles of the separation of powers and the rule of law have taken some heavy knocks. Protecting democracy is no longer limited to building dikes “against the right,” as much as we need to do that. People on the coast know that it is necessary not only to protect against storm surge, but also to fight its causes. These causes include the alienation of large parts of the citizenry from the everyday practices of democracy. Activists of “Our Common Purpose” therefore travelled up and down the country, collecting complaints and suggestions from a wide variety of people and translating them into recommendations that ultimately call for more government responsiveness and citizen participation.

The German coalition agreement confirmed the appointment of consultative and deliberative citizens’ assemblies at the local, regional, and national levels, which are designed not to bypass but to support the parliamentary system, as well as the government and judiciary. Members of parliament are to have regular substantive conversations about upcoming projects with a random selection of voters. This can be supported by foundations, on the model of the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States, which ambitiously aims to recruit a million democratic leaders from across the country. For this, it takes a re-orientation of the social media, which, to put it in European terms, need to be subjected to public law to remove their destructive and paranoid sting; only if the platform providers facilitate the interoperability and transparency of the data traffic, can the unfulfilled promise of a digital democracy still become a reality. The American recommendations, by the way, also include a year of national service for all age groups with the goal of strengthening the culture of commitment to democracy.

Although citizens’ assemblies do not receive an enthusiastic welcome from professional politicians, the idea is gaining ground, from the local to the European level. This is Joe Biden's Global summit for democracy from below. What is still missing is the bridge linking deliberation to decision-making, which can be left neither to the taste of the executive nor can it be a direct democratic mandate bypassing the representatives. Governance has to take leave of the Ressortprinzip(the outdated specialization of isolated bureaucracies), which has sorted political tasks according to narrow subject areas and which is no longer able to deal with cross-sector problems such as change of mobility patterns, sustainable agriculture, socially just urban design, etc. Such overarching tasks need to be combined into missions and transcend national borders.

Today, to paraphrase the insights of Thomas Mann, it is less about the simplification of emotions towards hatred but towards a Yes to saving the planet that never for a moment is in doubt.