Social Democrats Cannot Sit Out the Culture War Any Longer

This autumn the political left is once again approaching some important forks in the road. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) is heading into ever more troubled waters. After a historically bad election result in 2025, the party entered — not without pain — a coalition government with the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and promised an agenda of modernisation and public investment: a last-ditch effort to turn the tide of public frustration and halt the continued political rise of the far right. Yet the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has continued to gain ground in state elections and nationwide polls, to the point where it currently appears to be the strongest political force in the country. The party also seems to have a serious chance of winning an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt in September and, for the first time, taking control of a state government. That would mark another symbolic milestone in the rise of the far right in Europe — and create a testing ground for the party to roll out anti-liberal policies in Germany.

The most anticipated political date of the year, however, falls on 3 November, when, on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Democrats attempt to take back control of Congress in the midterm elections while Donald Trump’s approval ratings keep hitting lows. And even though the Democratic brand remains damaged — especially among working-class voters who see Democrats as “woke, weak and out-of-touch” — a number of progressive candidates have seen remarkable success in the primaries. Many are running on a populist platform against billionaires and, quite notably, against the “political class”, including the Democratic Party’s own establishment, while positioning themselves as champions of the American working class, universal health care, and affordability. Increasingly, they also follow the example of Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York and a rising political star of the left, in taking a critical stance on US foreign policy towards Israel. After appearing all but politically dead following the devastating loss that produced Trump’s second presidential term, the Democrats are showing new signs of life.

And while the US Democrats and the German Social Democrats operate from very different strategic positions — quite apart from the differences between the two political systems and party structures — their disparate approaches to pushing back against the far right are striking.

The exhaustion of technocratic politics

Recently, the political commentator Ezra Klein argued that some of the latest successes of Democratic anti-establishment candidates are connected to structural changes in the political game, in which authenticity and charisma matter ever more and attention is “the most important political resource right now”. Even though the campaign of Graham Platner — on which Klein mainly based his argument — collapsed after an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies, the case of the big-bearded, slightly scruffy-looking oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran from Maine remains remarkable. Platner was recruited by a group of independent progressive activists, who chose to back him largely on the strength of his authenticity and charisma. This represents a clear break with the classic Democratic approach of selecting prospects on the basis of successful institutional track records and, even more importantly, the ability to raise donor money.

The upcoming progressives are deploying new political strategies that can be read as a move away from the US Democratic establishment’s technocratic approach to politics — the same technocratic approach that arguably brought down Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom and has been at the heart of the coalition the SPD is part of in Germany. While some of these parties govern or sit in governing coalitions, progressive US Democrats mostly operate from the position of the political challenger. Yet there seems to be more at work here.

In the recent past, progressives in Europe and the United States have followed a political logic that places considerable faith in good policymaking. The idea is that electoral success hinges on developing and implementing policy solutions that accommodate a wide range of perspectives and vested interests. It is a strategy sometimes linked to the term “deliverism”: the belief that voters will reward politicians for delivering tangible improvements. Deliverism can, in principle, take the form of a transformative political project, as laid out for instance in the Abundance Agenda. In practice, however, it tends rather to resemble a “bullet-point”, transactional approach to politics, driven by polling and focused on piecing together a coalition by piling up offerings to key interest groups rather than genuinely building one. Often it connects closely with the third-way idea that elections are won at the centre. This approach perhaps always carried an inherent limitation — its precondition of at least solid economic growth and contained distributional conflict — and has also already been declared dead during the presidency of Joe Biden. Moreover, it tends to hollow out parties ideologically, with clear consequences for their ability to mobilise supporters. However, what is happening in the United States and elsewhere, above all on the far right, may well indicate that the heyday of this technocratic approach to politics is finally over.

The historian of political thought Anton Jäger describes the underlying structural change as the dawn of the era of hyperpolitics: the intense politicisation that follows the depoliticisation of the “post-politics” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its technocratic political culture. Politics is now everywhere; it is emotional and fast-paced. Yet while political energy is rising, little political consequence flows from it, owing to a lack of institutionalisation. The political uproars in the corners of the social internet, swelling and fading in rapid cycles, leave little mark on our political institutions. And considering how difficult it has become to bring about real policy change, it is clear that all this feeds a gathering storm of frustration.

Above all, changes in the media structure and the public sphere prepared the ground for the era of hyperpolitics, which today is fundamentally different from the controlled, institutionalised environment of the past, with its powerful gatekeepers. With that shift, the costs of political communication have fallen dramatically. Politicians such as Donald Trump and tech entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk have mastered these new powers, communicating directly with their millions of followers without mediation and commanding the attention economy at will. Where in the “good old days” it might have sufficed to keep a clean sheet, steer clear of scandal, and offer political opponents as little room for attack as possible, that approach today will likely fail. The contest is now about staying visible in an ocean of content flowing through the feeds of political consumers — and here, of course, authenticity and charisma come in very handy.

This has also given rise to the culture wars that have become such an important feature of contemporary politics, with Donald Trump as the dominant warlord, turning everything into a culture war. It is no longer just about the traditional us-versus-them topics — abortion, guns, feminism, and affirmative action or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) — nor even immigration and trade, on which he campaigned so successfully last time. Everything from climate change to virtually any other domestic issue is being “repackaged into cultural-resentment fodder”. Issues are thereby emotionalised and tied to core questions of personal or shared values, beliefs, and practices — or, to use a different word, identity, which is after all the foundation of all politics. It is also designed to seize our attention. The “flooding the zone” approach popularised by Steve Bannon is essentially a strategy for dominating the attention economy — and only those who hold our attention have a chance of actually influencing our political views and ideas.

These far-right tactics are evidently connected to a completely different understanding of politics, one far removed from the technocratic approach described above: politics as the struggle over cultural hegemony and identity, sometimes captured in the phrase “politics is downstream from culture”, coined by the conservative activist Andrew Breitbart. The idea of politics as a struggle over hegemony goes back to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and is thus of genuinely leftist origin; it has been translated into strategy and practice in arguments for populism and in social movements on the left. Gramsci developed his ideas in his prison notebooks after his arrest by Mussolini’s fascist regime, his thinking centred on the quest for a strategy to confront dominant bourgeois power. In his understanding, the political “hegemony” of the dominant group in society rests not only on the use of force and political power but also on consent among the population. Institutions such as the church, the media, schools, universities, and museums play a major role in reproducing cultural values and practices — and it is no coincidence that the far right is increasingly focusing its attacks on precisely these institutions.

For decades, far-right intellectuals have spread their own reading of Gramsci through international far-right networks. One of the most prominent cases is the French New Right intellectual Alain de Benoist and his use of the term “metapolitics”. Politicians such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary have likewise adapted Gramsci’s ideas. And even though Orbán also sought control by capturing the more traditional media and state institutions — an approach that has inspired others to follow — the right has arguably been most successful online. Its strategies are put fully into action on social media platforms such as Twitter (now X), Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, through networks of far-right party accounts, front-line influencers, bot armies, and other means. Together with more loosely connected actors — the podcaster Joe Rogan, for example, or Tucker Carlson in his Fox News years — acting as transmission belts into the centre and amplifying the message, mainstream culture has been successfully shifted towards the right, working towards the much-cited “vibe shift”. This has ultimately helped prepare the ground for the electoral successes of far-right parties such as the AfD in Germany and movements such as MAGA, which has captured the Republican Party in the United States.

And while the right dominates the culture wars by skilfully playing the scales of fear, and can count on the support of the algorithms that govern the digital public sphere, it would be a grave misconception, as is often argued, to understand it as thriving purely on negativity. The right is increasingly pursuing an anti-liberal “global political revolution” — and it does have an idea of the future to sell. I have argued elsewhere that even on the question of democracy, progressives tend to adopt a somewhat defensive stance, leaving the future-oriented position open to far-right actors who promise “real change”. No doubt progressives find it hard to explain why people should vote to defend democracy as it is when the prevailing feeling is one of losing control and living in a dysfunctional system. Treating that feeling with minor “reform pills” here and there is not a promising strategy. Yet it is important to remember that rage and anger — but also hope, love, and solidarity — are powerful emotions that can be activated in support of progressive politics as well. To that end, however, progressives need to engage more directly with these feelings, and that may mean getting involved in the culture wars.

Where the left can fight back

Choosing the right terrain on which to push back from the left is a question open to debate, and I can address it here only to a limited extent. The most obvious field for reclaiming hegemony is, of course, rising economic and social inequality in western societies. This partly entails the old leftist idea of talking about the economy rather than cultural issues; to succeed, however, the left will need to address the economy in cultural terms as well. It must formulate a compelling vision of the future and give people a reason to rally behind it. One way of doing so is to take on the “billionaires” who have become outrageously rich over recent decades and who, especially in the United States, increasingly exert direct influence over the political direction of entire countries. And with artificial intelligence (AI) as their newest toy — and the promise of massive job losses for the many — a new and potentially lasting social conflict of massive scale is brewing. We already see a growing number of local clashes over data centres in the United States. It is not unlikely that AI will be used — like many technologies before it — to gather power further into the hands of only a few individuals. This does not mean the left should take an anti-tech stance, but it does require answers for reclaiming power and driving development in the public interest.

This may also connect to another area in which the left will need to take back the progressive position: the narrative about the future of democracy. Polarisation over democracy is driven mainly by the right, through an anti-elite narrative that falls on fertile ground in institutional settings that have seen increasing professionalisation and are therefore perceived as distant from everyday life. Here, too, the left can push back — by focusing on the capture of the system by economic elites, often closely connected to far-right actors. Reclaiming democratic control over technologies such as AI, again, feels like a natural progressive response. Another starting point could be to engage more seriously with ideas about democratic innovation: citizens’ assemblies, for example, can be a tool for reviving democracy, especially in local contexts. Interestingly, Andy Burnham, the new British prime minister, appears to be building his political project “to beat the new right” on the centre-periphery or urban-countryside divide, focusing on the interests of the marginalised northern parts of the United Kingdom when he promises to “take back power from Westminster and Whitehall and give it back to the place where you live”. The far right, arguably, has built its political project from the periphery; mirroring that strategy on the left might prove a promising approach. Revisiting questions of representation within party structures and finding new ways to reconnect with elements of civil society, so as to anchor parties more meaningfully in the social fabric again, are also worthwhile endeavours in this area.

The third and final area I would like to address is masculinity — an issue on which the left has been losing badly in recent years and where it can no longer afford to leave the minds of young men and boys to the influential voices of the far-right-leaning “manosphere”. And this one should be easy. The far right’s ideas about men fundamentally cast them as isolated, hyper-neoliberal individuals. It is a very tempting offer for young men looking for orientation, since many of the past certainties about what men were expected to do as valued members of society no longer hold up. The answer of the manosphere ideologists is conspiracy theories that create a sense of belonging and of control — over yourself, your body, and the bodies of women — through strength, money, and manipulation. It offers ways to take back control of everyday life in a chaotic world through workout routines, supplements, and life-coaching programmes focused on financial, health, and relationship advice: the manosphere has long since become big business. Ultimately, it seems obvious that these prescriptions lead towards a rather lonely life, one without meaningful social relations. There is no room for men as fathers, or for men taking responsibility in society as volunteers or through other forms of social engagement. Men have always been valuable parts of society and social beings in their own right — a perfect starting point for a more solidarity- and love-based story about masculinity. Meanwhile, in the United States, an opportunity seems to be opening up to take back the “bro vote”, and Democrats are also experimenting with new approaches to masculinity — even though Graham Platner’s story will go down as a spectacular failure in this regard.

We do not have to consider all of this a good development. As Anton Jäger argues, it is well worth thinking about new ways of re-institutionalising — and thereby stabilising — the political energies. The race to find new answers here is still on. And no, culture war is certainly not the answer to everything; at the same time, the structural shifts in our societies are unlikely to fall back into place any time soon. Yet it also seems that progressives and Social Democrats are increasingly crafting strategies more adequate to this day and age by giving cultural questions greater weight in their politics. So even if Social Democrats should not go all-in on the culture wars, they need to rebalance and update their strategic repertoire — and learn how to fight back. There might, after all, be no alternative.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.