Berlin – Anyone who now, after the erosion of the long stable constellation of controversial people’s parties, wants to keep the upper hand politically, relies on the claim that they want to shape social change and that they can do so. The election winner Olaf Scholz immediately seized the opportunity to position his Social Democratic Party, assisted by the Greens and the FDP, as a guarantor of progress. Climate change, digitization, you already know.
The ambivalence of social change, which is now haunting political debates as a magic formula with a guaranteed solution, could be described solely on the basis of these two subject areas. Really now? The commitment to readiness for progress as a sufficient instrument to remedy all technological, social and ecological deficits?
It seems that even after the Bundestag election and during the efforts to form a coalition, increased awareness of the pitfalls of political terminology is required.
The enemy has long been identified in the field of digitization, it is a hesitant insistence that has slowed down crucial innovation processes in recent years, by whomever – the digitization failure as a kind of technological infectious disease.
After the devices have started up, things don’t go fast enough and not far enough, especially during the corona pandemic it became clear how absurdly handwriting e-mail addresses on sheets of paper for potential contact tracing are. In view of the strange paperwork before access to events and the catering trade, digital registration appeared to be an overdue solution, although the impression soon solidified that this control variant primarily fulfills an alibi function that is contemporary.
Forward thrust and risk assessment
So while one believes that, using the example of digitization, one can excellently demonstrate how adhering to analogue cultural techniques prevents or at least halts the necessary steps into the future, the climate crisis is primarily about countering impending change with all your might has raged in the form of unleashed forces of nature. Not only since the devastating weather catastrophes in regions that have long been described as moderate climatic zones has been one of the urgent imperatives not to allow the possibilities of industrial and technological progress to rule unchecked any longer. Even if the mistrust in politics recently ran along very different problem areas, when reorganizing the party system it will be important to be able to differentiate between accelerating and braking, i.e. between pushing forward and weighing up risks.
The creation of a balance between innovation dynamics and the diverse phenomena of threatened social change has always been the core task of conservative politics, which Theodor Fontane once summed up as saying that one should stick with the old as long as possible and with the new first, if you have to. Fontane in particular precisely registered the ambivalence of the approaching modernity and lived it through with ironic attention. Last but not least, his works testify to a great sympathy for traditional ways of life, while his novels are, above all, seismographically precise descriptions of social upheavals. And once you’ve read into your notebooks, they appear like the anticipation of digital writing systems.
However, it can be doubted that the CDU and CSU union was ultimately the force that provided society with the necessary ties in the Merkel era. At the end of Merkel’s chancellorship, it is a remarkable paradox that the party alliance loses its foothold at the moment of her departure, after she has initiated relentless fundamental liberalization over the course of 16 years in office. Merkel is not a conservative, but one who has amalgamated the illusion of preserving social values with political pragmatism.
Undoubtedly, however, the resources of a bourgeois conservatism will also be required in the future, which is able not only to counter the pseudo-bourgeois revolt on the right-wing fringes, but also to contain it. In view of the crumbling Union, it would therefore be important to outline a new conservatism that is at the height of social change.
Social mobility and excessive demands
This aims directly at people’s emotional household, and this can be found in concrete terms in their living conditions, beyond any formulas of pathos such as home and security. These have been the target of political debates for some time. While the advocates of ecological ideals have identified the home of home in the green as a lavish nest in the service of a false idyll, and the apologists for economic redistribution regard the housing market as the field of activity for their ideologically secured insights, a new conservatism would depend on the social quality of the To reevaluate living and make it fit for the future.
Instead of stubbornly pursuing a request for expropriation, it should be a political goal, especially in urban centers, to increase the quota of residential property that is also used by the owners and their relatives themselves. Social mobility has always been the epitome of social modernity, which is increasingly experienced as a burden and excessive demands. Despite the immense coupling of social performance with individual mobility, it should not have gone unnoticed that reliable living conditions, which have received a considerable boost from the effects of digitization, are a stabilizing factor for economic and social developments.
Furthermore, for the broad field of mobility transition, it would be necessary in urban planning and development no longer to be out for small triumphs in the traffic war against the car, but to offer a mobility mix that is able to do justice to an aging society in particular, for the bicycle highways and Cargo bikes in cities are more of a threat than a solution.
The greatest challenge for the preservation of democratic conditions, however, consists in an intelligent social transfer between town and country, in which economic success, ecological pragmatism and social relationships can be lived under the conditions of extensive individual freedom. Special attention is required to ensure that there is not only a gap between town and country. No less serious are the social tensions in rural regions, which differ mainly in whether they are attractive enough to meet the needs of urban middle class or not. The dynamics of gentrification have long since extended to the idyllic village, but also have an impact on those areas of land that are completely ignored and are at best affected by industrialized agriculture. A conservative policy worthy of this name would have to address the living conditions that have arisen and are possible between town and country and between country and country. It would be the comprehensive expansion of a concept of social mobility, for which Fontane would be a good key witness with his poetic cartography of Brandenburg.
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