The litmus test of modern societies

Discrimination as a field of activity for fear mongers

Misperceptions and misunderstandings often shape the picture. This is due to the fact that the exclusion of religious and ethnic minorities often has more to do with the mood of the majority than with genuine social or cultural conflicts. Discrimination is the field of activity of fear mongers, because minorities can be dealt with in a reasonably safe manner. But when individual prejudices become widespread, society as a whole is in danger.

Once differences of skin color, religion and origin are accepted as generally binding markers of difference, an arbitrary system of equally unreasonable and simplistic explanatory patterns unfolds. The illusion arises that one can suddenly answer all central life questions of modernity through the prism of diversity: "Who are we?", "Where do we come from?". And the most important question of all: "Who is to blame?". Fueled by politics, it is often only a small step from prejudice to fisticuffs.

The USA and Western Europe are fundamentally different after all

There are clear differences between democratic societies in the way they deal with diversity, and this is particularly true of the transatlantic region. The United States and Western Europe look quite similar in political, economic and cultural terms - and yet they are fundamentally different. In America, a polity emerged from the end of the 19th century in which people from many regions of the world came into contact with each other and were exposed to the cultural industries of film and music and the unleashed productivity of a vital country in rapidly expanding cities. Finding one's way in a U.S. society that had no role models demanded of native-born and immigrant Americans alike. The ideal of the "one out of the many" perpetuated on every quarter is based on the ongoing containment and neutralization of destructive myths of origin.

Diversity as a strength

Conflict was constant, but so was the realization that ethnic and cultural difference were a potential source of strength. The activists of the Civil Rights era still drew decisively from these experiences. Despite (and because of) the struggles over civil rights for black Americans, an underlying emancipatory mood pervades 20th-century history in the United States.

Cosmopolitan community against its will

This socio-historical peculiarity is not only due to the American immigration tradition, as is often said. It is true that at the turn of the century before last, more than 24 million people came to the country within only four decades - about one third of the total population. The result was a cosmopolitan polity against its will.

The unagitated way of dealing with the foreign, however, is primarily due to the fact that this society has always had to come to an understanding about itself. America is open to interpretation, because the meaning of the phrase "we Americans" changes with each decade. (Since 1992, Mexican salsa has sold better than ketchup.) This experiential circle of cultural diversity has created a polity without equal - the U.S. can be described as a non-national nation. Pluralism has never been a political program, but a necessity.

Rhetorical Bermuda Triangle of Fear

A majority of Americans over the past fifty years have agreed to reject the notion that origins are destiny. But this Enlightenment legacy has been under intense pressure since 2016. With a rhetorical Bermuda Triangle of fear (immigration, terrorism, globalization), Donald Trump has succeeded in transforming white resentment that had been thought tamed into open hatred of American tradition.

Contrary to their own proclamations, large parts of the Republican core electorate are virtual emigrants: they have emigrated from the institutional traditions of modern America as well as the moral inventory - fed by the struggle for civil rights and U.S. participation in two European world wars. People are alienated from modern America and its precepts of pluralism, leaving democracy, the Enlightenment, and science behind. Many conservatives see themselves as victims of diffuse circumstances and find themselves on a path at the end of which lies no place of arrival, but only political homelessness in anger at their own society.

What should our societies look like in the future?

American history, which is not poor in discrimination, experienced an absolute novelty in 2018, when the White House and willing helpers in the Department of Homeland Security used the separation of underage children from their parents as a politically intended deterrent measure at the U.S.-Mexican border: cruelty as a re-election program. Neither from Republican middle classes nor Protestant mainline churches nor from conservative captains of industry came any significant resistance. On the contrary. A large proportion of enrolled Republicans have become delusional, with more than half declaring that the traditional American way of life is disappearing so rapidly that force may have to be used to protect it. As is so often the case, the U.S. is anticipating developments. The social crisis, constantly simplified under the rubric of polarization, outlines very fundamental questions: What should our societies look like in the future and how should they arrange themselves? What criteria will be used to decide on belonging, and how will demographic problems and increasing mobility be dealt with? In sum, this is nothing less than the litmus test of modern democracies.