Kantel makes a point I’ve tried to make before about Green politics. He’s having a go about the German Green party leader, Renate Künast, who’s decided it would be cool to order all public service canteens to observe a vegetarian day every week. He remarks that the party is a mixture of “neoliberalism dyed green, and the desire to force everyone to be happy”. I couldn’t agree more.
This is something that I notice whenever I’m in Germany. The content of Green politics is served by the SPD or even, now, the CDU. You can argue about how well the grid transition is getting on, but it’s getting on, and the argument is basically technocratic.
That leaves the style, and as a result, style hegemony is now a major aim. Lifestyles are generally on sale, and as a result, the people who whine about consumerism and gentrification the loudest seem also to be the best equipped and most expert in these disciplines.
I am genuinely fascinated by the role of the Greens in Germany and the sharp contrast with the Greens in British politics.
Why has Germany do you think embraced Green politics more than the British? And why in the UK is the movement much more left leaning than our own Labour party (not that that would be difficult) which makes them seem unvotable in many parts of the country.
Any Green councils or constituencies in the UK are a mess and generally the electorate just are wary of them.
Would love you to elucidate.
TBH, I think people don’t realise how much the style-and-tone of German Green politics has roots in bildungsbürgerlich culture – the Rudolf Steiner cultism, the reform-of-self stuff, even the vegetarianism. I think the dislike of consumerism actually codes it more as being vulgar and prole-y than plutocratic. There was also a radical-leftist strand which lost out in internal party politics, plus the peacenik/hippy/feminist tendency that some people would argue was imported from the wider West (roughly, theory from France and practice from the US).
Also, there was a big north-south split in the 80s that mapped onto the right-left scale more than the realo-fundi thing. They always strike me as coming over as part of Protestant Germany, but perhaps that’s just my own prejudices now that their biggest powerbase has moved from Berlin to the South West.
In the UK, well, hating the division of Europe equally between both sides was never popular beyond tiny groupuscules, and bildungsbürgerlichkeit isn’t a thing, and if you were a 70s leftie you didn’t spend the 80s lamenting the embourgeoisement of the workers into Golf-driving happy slaves and the general well-off complacency of society, but rather raging against Thatcher. I think you have to have the social market economy to hate consumerism properly.
Also, it can’t have escaped anyone that the lifestyle of nonconsumerism (whether in Crouch End or Kreuzberg) is actually rather expensive, a sort of meta-consumer good, and defended by heavy investments in cultural capital.