Identity Politics versus Solidarity: Comments on Thierse

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Former President of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse mounts a powerful argument against identity politics in Germany and their political consequences. His comments here and originally here have elicited a robust discussion in Germany, especially because the current leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), of which Thierse is a long-term member, reportedly responded that they felt ashamed at his “regressive” views. While the leadership represents the current left wing of the party, other voices from the center rallied to Thierse’s defense. At stake is the gap between alternative aspirations within this venerable party, once the foundational political organization of the German left with roots in the workers’ movement of the nineteenth century.

On the one hand, Thierse is heir to the understanding of the SPD as the party of the working class but also coupled to the expectation within West German democracy that the SPD would play the role of a Volkspartei, a party that could reach beyond narrow categories and garner extensive electoral support. On the other, opponents within the party, symptomatic of the current self-understanding of the “left,” argue for the SPD to be the party of identity politics, a party that appeals to groups based on the familiar terms of gender and minority ethnicity.^[1] The debate therefore involves the gap between proponents of redistributionist programs, the traditional Social Democratic core, and their competitors pursuing “post-material” values, including the sense of belonging associated with identity. In any case, the Thierse controversy is playing out at a time when SPD polls are at historic lows. From a post–World War II high of 46.3% of the vote in 1972, it has fallen consistently, earning only 20.5% in 2017, and currently polling in the mid-teens, in advance of the national elections on September 26. This decline should be seen in the context of the weakness of socialist parties elsewhere in Europe; the collapse of Labour in the UK under Jeremy Corbyn is just the most extreme example, but one could point as well to the disappearance of a political left with electoral credibility in France as well. The role of identity politics in the Democratic Party in the United States is another example, although one that led to an electoral victory in the exceptional circumstances of 2020. Thierse’s short essay can serve as a microcosm of the pressures on German Social Democracy as well as on the traditional left elsewhere.

First, the easy part. Thierse is unambiguous in his critique of right-wing identity politics, the positing of national identities as homogeneous and uncompromisingly hostile to other identities: hence their politics of exclusion. So far, so uncontroversial. However Thierse ventures into more dangerous territory with his subsequent claim that concepts such as homeland, patriotism, and national culture should not be abandoned as reactionary but on the contrary embraced by a democratic left. This is largely no longer the case in most Western countries, where national pasts have been redefined exclusively as sites of crime and violence, slavery, colonialism, and genocide, rather than as progressive constructions of communities of democratic solidarity. The particular texture of the rejection of national pasts differs from country to country, contingent on local cultural discourses, but the common denominator is the treatment of history as guilt and the predisposition to reject symbols of national belonging. Examples in the United States: hostile interpretations of the flag, the national anthem, historical names (Washington, Lincoln, Grant), and associated monuments.

Yet Thierse’s primary affront is his critique of left-wing identity politics, which—unlike its right-wing cousin—is premised on a vision of a fragmented population, multiple communities, each with its unique identity, defined in terms of suffering, and each with its own claims of grievance. Thierse in fact refrains from calling these particular identities into question; he acknowledges the suffering, but he nonetheless wants to engage in what might be called cross-community discussions. However such communication requires a language that is accessible and not subject to policing by a “cancel culture.” Furthermore this discussion has to involve rational argumentation rather than exclusively the subjective experience of victims. “Biographical formations, no matter how bitter, must not be used to discredit unsympathetic oppositional positions and to exclude them from the discourse.” Would that it were so. Victims do not have a monopoly on the truth—such is Thierse’s challenge to the character of debate in the media and the universities in Germany, but certainly familiar in the United States as well.

It is tempting to speculate on Thierse’s motivations. Primary among them is surely the political importance of responding to the implosion of the SPD. While identity politics and post-material values may appeal to the party leadership and the “new class” of the media and white-collar professionals, they leave the traditional working class behind, which then faces difficult alternative electoral choices: the far right Alternative for Germany or the legacy Communist party of “the Left.” When the SPD fails, these are the options that remain, along with the further path of alienation from electoral participation altogether. In any case, the SPD is not going into the upcoming elections with a strong wind behind its back. One of Thierse’s defenders, Horst Bredekamp, has made clear the connection between these political-theoretical issues and the future of the party: “Overcoming the identity-political attack on reason may turn out to be more difficult because it has barricaded itself in behind the ethos of a left-wing emancipation rhetoric. Wolfgang Thierse recently had the courage to make clear that political correctness means the end of the Social Democratic Party. It ought to build him a monument.”

Thierse’s stance likely also reflects his own personal sensibility and sense of fairness. He famously defended the lived experience of the general population of East Germany, those who were neither collaborators nor resistance heroes, with an inverted modification of a phrase from Theodor Adorno: “There was a right way to live under bad conditions.” Similarly in his current comments, he rejects the notion that individuals who are not members of an oppressed group should therefore be counted as oppressors. “But the criticism of the ideology of white supremacy should not turn into a myth of the original sin of the white man. Talk of a structural, ubiquitous racism in our society turns it into something ineluctable, in the sense of the claim: whoever is white is a priori guilty.” For Thierse, this is wrong.

In addition, Thierse has elsewhere explained how his political perspectives interlock with his Catholicism. An exploration of his particular balancing act of religion and politics, especially within the SPD, would go too far in this context, but it is worth noting how he has underscored how religion should not be treated merely as a private matter, eine Privatsache. That suggests not only a rejection of the notion that religion should remain outside the public sphere (compare French laicité and the ban on religious symbols); it also points to a critique of an individualization of religion, a splintering of religion into multiple denominations as opposed to participation in an aspirationally universal project. From that perspective, it follows that individuation and fragmentation, i.e., the loss of a catholic universality, derive from a specifically Protestant political theology acting as a driver of identity politics. In contrast to the individuation of identity politics, Thierse calls for an encompassing, non-exclusionary solidarity in a universal project. None of this theological background is made explicit in the current article, although even here Thierse refers repeatedly to “religious-worldview” diversity as part of the landscape in an increasingly pluralistic Germany. The religious-theoretical question is operating here, even if subtly. Thierse might not endorse the comparison, but his appeal for solidarity and against the fracturing of society into segregated identity-political categories resonates with aspects of the cultural criticism articulated by another German Catholic thinker, Pope Benedict in his 2006 Regensburg Address.

Thierse’s text is directed at the democratic left. He issues the warning that its prioritization of identities will undermine the solidarity that was, historically, at the core of the agenda of emancipation and Social Democracy. Two of his defenders, the historian Peter Brandt (son of the former chancellor) and the publisher Detlef Prinz, get this narrowing of perspective exactly right: “Perhaps the core of this conflict involves a changed self-understanding of the SPD, which achieved, from today’s point of view, a luxurious 25.7% in the 2013 elections with the slogan ‘The “We” decides.’ The 2021 election slogan is ‘Social Policy for you’ [‘für Dich,’ i.e., a singular ‘you’—trans.]. This very shift from ‘we’ to ‘you’ shows that the party has traded in its profile as a broad party [Volkspartei] and turned itself into a promise of services. People like Wolfgang Thierse who remind us of ‘the basic commonalities of democratic coexistence’ should not be on the margins of the SPD. They should be in the middle with most of the party members: where trust and elections can be won.”^[2]

Yet the issues raised by Thierse have sociological pertinence beyond the politics of center-left parties. At stake is the challenge of fragmentation facing contemporary societies, whether one understands the moment in terms of late capitalism, postmodernity, globalization, or even post-globalization. Tensions are playing out between appeals to commonality and the centrifugal forces of differentiation. It was exactly this challenge that French President Macron addressed in his Pantheon speech of September 4 and his efforts to legislate against “separatism.”^[3] He has argued for the importance of preserving the cohesion of the Republic against “parallel societies.” From another point on the political spectrum than Macron, President Trump attempted in his Mt. Rushmore speech to defend the viability of the national narrative in the context of urban violence and toppled monuments in cities across the country. And now the threat of hyperfragmentation is being played out currently in California, with the imposition of an “ethnic studies” curriculum in schools that will divide rather than unify.^[4] Thierse’s argument is therefore relevant not only in Germany. He should be understood as taking a stand against imposed fragmentation and mandatory identity ghettoes everywhere, as he calls instead for the pursuit of common social goods, especially through the nation as a vehicle for social solidarity.

Notes

1. With regard to gender, cf. Stefan Russ-Mohl, “Ein Aufsatz zum Genderstern—und was er auslöste,” Der Tagesspiegel, February 17, 2021. See also Rudolf Stöber, “Genderstern und Binnen-I: Zu falscher Symbopolitik in Zeiten eines Zunehmenden Illiberalismus,” Publizistik 66 (2021): 11–20.

2. Peter Brandt and Detlef Prinz, “Wie ‘verqueer’ ist die SPD?,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 8, 2021

3. Russell A. Berman, “Macron on French Nationality: The Pantheon Speech,” TelosScope, November 11, 2020.

4. Bret Stephens, “California’s Ethnic Studies Follies,” New York Times, March 9, 2021.