A backlash against liberalism?

Abstract

, when Donald Trump won the US Presidential Election, people have tried to make sense of this unexpected and-for many-shocking victory. One of the most popular explanations was that of a 'backlash' of disaffected voters-mostly from the white working class-against progressive 'identity politics' in support of the rights of disadvantaged groups and minorities. Mark Lilla, professor of Humanities at Columbia University, became an influential voice in the ensuing debate. His much-discussed article in the New York Times argued that the liberal 'obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored'. 1 The exclusive concern with civil rights of Black people, equality for women or separate toilets for people who identify as transgender, Lilla concluded, drove these voters into the arms of a candidate who seemed to take their concerns seriously and respect their values. Trump's election victory is one of several recent political phenomena that have been explained by the 'backlash' thesis-that disaffected white working-class voters are reacting against supposedly excessive liberalism. The 'Brexit' vote in the United Kingdom has also been interpreted as a rejection of a perceived out-of-touch liberal establishment and its project of building a European identity based on free movement and free trade. 2 The recent electoral successes of the far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, have widely been explained as a protest vote against Germany's liberal policies during the refugee crisis in 2015. 3 In effect, all of these explanations argue that the pursuit of liberal values such as the support for minorities' rights, while perhaps a noble Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2020 02:48:12AM via free access debates 2 HCM 2018 pursuit, has been so relentless that it lost the backing of the majority and is thus threatening the existence of the liberal world order itself. This is where the Weimar Republic comes in. The collapse of Germany's first liberal democracy and the establishing of the Nazi dictatorship are among the most intensely researched and debated topics in modern history. In their search to find an explanation for this catastrophic failure of democracy, historians have long argued that it was Germany's authoritarian traditions and lack of political modernization that doomed the young republic from the start. This Sonderweg (special path) thesis has attracted much criticism and recently the opposite argument has been made: to some extent at least, Weimar was too modern, too liberal, too progressive. Particularly with its famously permissive sexual politics, the republic pushed the envelope so far that an inevitable backlash followed that swept Hitler's anti-democratic movement into power. Based on cutting-edge research, three experts in the history of Weimar's sexual politics discuss the validity of this 'backlash thesis' for German history and today's politics in this forum debate. In her book Weimar Throu...