On complex problems – Wolfgang Streeck is Emeritus Director and Senior Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Köln, Germany in an interview in Die Zeit

‘Streeck: Oh God, I rarely feel pleased, but I view it with great sympathy. The crisis of the German political system is undeniable, and it’s not just a German phenomenon but can be observed in all Western capitalist societies: the collapse of the centre, the decline of social democracy, and the emergence of new parties that represent interests and values that previously had no place in the established party spectrum. This is usually described as a process of decay, at least from the perspective of the old parties, which might see it that way. But you could also describe it as a process of democratic renewal, if you understand democracy as an institution that gives space to the diverse experiences of citizens, allowing them to articulate and bring these experiences into politics. Many of these new parties are indeed very unsympathetic — Trump, for example, and similar ones in Holland, Italy, France. But if you understand democracy as the opportunity to vote out failed political elites, then you can still concede: yes, democracy exists for this kind of articulation of the will of the voters.
Zeit: But these right-wing populist parties pursue anti-democratic goals.
Streeck: Yes, if you define democracy as being nice to each other, maintaining a Habermasian discourse culture, or upholding certain values that others do not, then by that definition, these new parties are certainly not democrats. But one issue that has been under-discussed in the commentary on the elections is the fact that voter turnout in these two federal states increased by about ten percentage points. That’s sensational, as voter turnout had been steadily declining. The fact that people are now taking these elections seriously again is something I, as a supporter of democracy, don’t view as a bad thing. And specifically, Wagenknecht’s party has mobilised voters who were previously non-voters. What has also become clear is that all these centrist mobilisation efforts — these demonstrations of sensible people, the majority of whom took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands — had no visible impact on the AfD’s results. This shows an interesting resistance in parts of the population to what I would call centrist indoctrination. Indoctrination that tries to cover up the manifest problems of centrist politics by creating a front: “Us, the democrats, against authoritarianism!”. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed democratic forces are responsible for the decay of infrastructure, the misery of the education system, the schools, the lack of daycare centers, the railways, the crumbling physical and institutional infrastructure from the 1960s and 1970s; and then add immigration policy to that. The centre stands in the face of these problems and marvels at how nothing can be done about them. And then this inability to act is declared as a complex response to complex problems, in contrast to the supposedly simplistic answers given by the so-called populists.’

Read the article here.

Sure, democracy does not mean that we all should uphold the same values.

But is the center collapsing? And if so, is this the result of failures of the center? What kind of society should exist in order for the electorate to support the center as the electorate in the West used to in the last decades of the last century?

But more important, there is no proof that wherever the populists rose to power, the US (Trump), Italy, to give just two examples, they managed to solve the problems that the center could not or would not solve.

I would say: none.

But the important question is, Mr. Streeck is right, what kind of values should be outside the game, the theater that is called democracy?

We cannot agree on all values, but on what values should we be able to agree? Is scapegoating foreigners, asylum seekers, Muslims, acceptable or not? And if we say this is not acceptable, what are the consequences? Outlawing certain political parties? Outlawing certain values? Where to stop?

Or should we try to seduce the electorate in the hope that the voters will reject certain ideas that I’m willing to label dangerous. Scapegoating is always dangerous.