Wortwörtlich (135): Kulturkritik

Wie konnte es soweit kommen? Liegt das Desaster vom 9. November 2016 vielleicht auch daran, dass von den zwei Strängen der Kapitalismuskritik, die Luc Boltanski und Ève Chiapello identifiziert haben, in den USA nur eine Erfolg hatte: die kulturelle, während die soziale mehr und mehr vernachlässigt wurde? Mehr noch: dass diejenigen, die sich bereits sozial abgehängt sahen von den Etablierten zusätzlich die Herablassung der kulturellen Kritik zu spüren bekamen? Andrew Sullivan im Mai 2016:

„This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that latestage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain – and has actually helped exacerbate. For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. (…) Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the nearbottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. (…) They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them – all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities (…) And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out.“

Quelle: Andrew Sullivan: America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny. In: New York Magazine vom 2. Mai 2016.