Culture Club

heute: Untertanen-Ideologien

...Und selbstverständlich spielten bei der Ausbildung der konformistischen Rebellion in der Bundesrepublik nicht nur die oben dargelegten, spezifisch deutschen Faktoren eine Rolle. Der Europa- und deutschlandweit um sich greifende Rechtspopulismus und Rechtsextremismus kann auf den Begriff des Extremismus der Mitte gebracht werden. Und dies ist ja ein gesamteuropäisches Krisenphänomen. Zum einen ist es gerade nicht nur der soziale "Rand" der Gesellschaft, der zur extremen Rechten überläuft, sondern in weiten Teilen gerade deren "Mitte".

Der Rechtsextremismus war schon immer ein Bündnis zwischen Mob und Elite, zwischen den vielen gesichtslosen Hetzern auf Facebook, den Brandstiftern in der Provinz und den Stichwortgebern und Wegbereitern der Barbarei, die für gewöhnlich Schlips und Kragen tragen: einem Thilo Sarrazin, dem Wegbereiter des neuen deutschen Rechtsextremismus, einem Hans-Olaf Henkel, der Beatrix Storch, geborene Herzogin von Oldenburg, oder dem Wirtschaftspopulisten Hans Werner Sinn, der rechte Ressentiments in Wirtschaftsideologie umformuliert.

Ab einem gewissen Schwellwert gesellschaftlicher Durchdringung geht dieser Rechtsextremismus in eine neue extremistische "Normalität" über, da das gesamte Spektrum - inklusive einer Fraktionsvorsitzenden Wagenknecht - weiter nach rechts rückt. In diesem Fall ist es schlicht der Wahlerfolg der AfD, der all die Rassisten und rückratlosen Untertanen, die diese Partei gewählt haben, von jedem Verdacht des Rechtsextremismus frei spricht. Kein Politiker, der noch gewählt werden will, kann es sich leisten, knapp 25 Prozent der Wählerschaft als Rassisten zu bezeichnen...

komplett http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/47/47766/1.html

wo er leider selber in Hetze übergeht und sich zu persönlichen Diffamierungen hinreißen lässt, die im scharfen Kontrast zu den Biographien und Lebensverdiensten der dort genannten stehen.

Dieses Vorgehen zeichnet für gewöhnlich den ideologisch verbohrten Demagogen aus, nicht jedoch den nüchternen und vor allem redlichen Analytiker.

Im Bereich Von Extremismus- und Totalitarismusforschung finden sich m.E. durchaus erhellendere Schriften, auch hinsichtlich der keineswegs völlig unproblematischen Denkfigur eines Extremismus der Mitte. Dort kommt es sehr auf das richtige Augenmaß und ein feines Differenzierungsvermögen an. Die Übergänge zu einer dümmlichen Antifapolemik werden ansonsten leider sehr schnell fließend.  

zur Romantik...  

auch zu nennen

 

der Gründgens' Faust-Inszenierung ist bis heute legendär.
Die in der Zeit erwähnte Verfilmung mit der Originalbesetzung und dem Nachbau der Schauspielhaus-Bühne ist bei youtube abzurufen.  

Danke und
erholsame Feiertage allerseits
wünscht

Pimpernelle  

 

By Richard Hofstader, American Scholar (von 1954 und passt)

komplett: https://theamericanscholar.org/...o-conservative-revolt/#.VvQxQifKAdU

....There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America today. Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life and to establish throughout the country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is certainly not radical — there are hardly any radicals of any sort left — nor is it precisely conservative.

Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative, ....because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions.

They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence...

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years.

He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one. While he naturally does not like Soviet communism, what distinguishes him from the rest of us who also dislike it is that he shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly hostile to such realistic measures as might actually strengthen the United States vis-à-vis Russia.

He would much rather concern himself with the domestic scene, where communism is weak, than with those areas of the world where it is really strong and threatening. He wants to have nothing to do with the democratic nations of Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire than the Soviet Communists, and he is opposed to all “give-away programs” designed to aid and strengthen these nations.

Indeed, he is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except Congressional investigations, and to almost all of its expenditures. Not always, however, does he go so far as the speaker at the Freedom Congress who attributed the greater part of our national difficulties to “this nasty, stinking 16th [income tax] Amendment.”

A great deal of pseudo-conservative thinking takes the form of trying to devise means of absolute protection against that betrayal by our own officialdom which the pseudo-conservative feels is always imminent. The Bricker Amendment, indeed, might be taken as one of the primary symptoms of pseudo-conservatism. Every dissenting movement brings its demand for Constitutional changes; and the pseudo-conservative revolt, far from being an exception to this principle, seems to specialize in Constitutional revision, at least as a speculative enterprise.

The widespread latent hostility toward American institutions takes the form, among other things, of a flood of proposals to write drastic changes into the body of our fundamental law. Last summer, in a characteristically astute piece, Richard Rovere pointed out that Constitution-amending had become almost a major diversion in the Eighty-third Congress.4 About a hundred amendments were introduced and referred to committee.

Several of these called for the repeal of the income tax. Several embodied formulas of various kinds to limit non-military expenditures to some fixed portion of the national income. One proposed to bar all federal expenditures on “the general welfare”; another, to prohibit American troops from serving in any foreign country except on the soil of the potential enemy; another, to redefine treason to embrace not only persons trying to overthrow the government but also those trying to “weaken” it, even by peaceful means. The last proposal might bring the pseudo-conservative rebels themselves under the ban of treason: for the sum total of these amendments might easily serve to bring the whole structure of American society crashing to the ground....

was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier approach to history from the far left, in the 1950s he embraced consensus history, becoming the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus", largely because of his emphasis on ideas and political culture rather than the day-to-day doings of politicians. His influence is ongoing, as modern critics profess admiration for the grace of his writing, and the depth of his insight.[1]

His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter

Hofstadter, influenced by his wife, was a member of the Young Communist League in college, and in April 1938 he joined the Communist Party of the USA; he quit in 1939.[26] Hofstadter had been reluctant to join, knowing the orthodoxy it imposed on intellectuals, and disillusioned by the spectacle of the Moscow Show Trials, but wrote: "I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation... my fundamental reason for joining is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it."[27] He remained anti-capitalist, writing: "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it", but was similarly disillusioned with Stalinism, finding the Soviet Union "essentially undemocratic" and the Communist Party rigid and doctrinaire. In the 1940s Hofstadter abandoned political causes, feeling that intellectuals were no more likely to "find a comfortable home" under socialism than they were under capitalism.[27][28]

Biographer Susan Baker writes that Hofstadter, "was profoundly influenced by the political Left of the 1930s... The philosophical impact of Marxism was so intense and direct during Hofstadter's formative years that it formed a major part of his identity crisis... The impact of these years created his orientation to the American past, accompanied as it was by marriage, establishment of life-style, and choice of profession."[29]

Geary (2007) concludes that, "To Hofstadter, radicalism always offered more of a critical intellectual stance than a commitment to political activism. Although Hofstadter quickly became disillusioned with the Communist Party, he retained an independent left-wing standpoint well into the 1940s. Both his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), and The American Political Tradition (1948) were written from a radical point of view."[30]

In the 1940s, Hofstadter cited Charles A. Beard as "the exciting influence on me".[31] Hofstadter specifically responded to Beard's social-conflict model of U.S. history, which emphasized the struggle among competing economic groups (primarily farmers, Southern slavers, Northern industrialists, and workers) and discounted abstract political rhetoric which rarely translated into action. Beard encouraged historians to search for the hidden self-interest and financial goals of the economic belligerents.

By the 1950s and 1960s Hofstadter had a strong reputation in liberal circles. Lawrence Cremin noted that "Hofstadter's central purpose in writing history . . . was to reformulate American liberalism so that it might stand more honestly and effectively against attacks from both left and right in a world which had accepted the essential insights of Darwin, Marx, and Freud."[32] Alfred Kazin identified his use of parody:

   He was a derisive critic and parodist of every American Utopia and its wild prophets, a natural oppositionist to fashion and its satirist, a creature suspended between gloom and fun, between disdain for the expected and mad parody.[33]

Conservative commentator George Will in 2008 called Hofstadter "the iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension", who "dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders—a 'paranoid style' of politics rooted in 'status anxiety', etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension."[34]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter

 

heute: Qu'es mi vida, preguntais