Non-fiction
Nils C. Kumkar
Polarisierung
[Polarisation]
Translation Grant Programme
For this title we provide support for translation into the Polish language (2025 - 2027).
The narrative of division: How a discourse changes democracy
A specter is haunting us, in Germany and elsewhere. It’s name is polarization. Society, we repeatedly hear from politicians and political commentators, is polarized to an unprecedented degree, indeed there’s a downright divide running through our midst. The antidote, routinely suggested by the political center, represented, for example, by the German Federal President, is “social cohesion.” The former Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz as well, with a similar purpose in mind, made frequent calls for us to “link arms.”
But the best example of social cohesion is the kind found in dictatorships. Wasn’t linking arms tantamount to the highest civic duty in the “national community” of the Nazis? And isn’t democracy, on the other hand, by definition a contentious and controversial form of government? Democracy is expected to withstand a lot, but polarization is apparently too much. Sociologist Nils C. Kumkar has now given this topic a smart and, as it were, counterintuitive analysis. Yes, there is indeed increasing polarization, Kumkar concludes from a systems-theory perspective. But not in the way a panicked political class and public sphere would suggest. Polarization, according to Kumkar, is not the reflection of a society torn asunder by irreconcilable convictions. Rather, it is the communicative effect of a breakdown of democratic consensus that no one has mastered as well as the extreme right has.
Polarization has become a business, the business of YouTubers, bloggers and trolls, of people Steffen Mau has aptly characterized as the “entrepreneurs of polarization.” Polarization is accordingly rather one-sided, and in truth not bipolar at all, thus rendering the term fairly meaningless. But since “polarization,” in Kumkar’s view, does not exist in actual social reality, being merely a mechanism of discourse, it can’t be refuted by reality either. Polarization exists because the entrepreneurs of polarization want it to, persuading their predominantly digital (and young) client base that freedom needs to be defended against the liberal mainstream or even created in the first place. “Polarization sells,” writes Kumkar, and it does so as the “strategy of the smallest divided denominator.” The main thing is that people are divided – that would be one way to describe this strategy; the political nitty-gritty can always be dealt with later. Communicative polarization of this sort thrives on the permanent reduction of complexity, to use a turn of phrase coined by Luhmann. The elites are always the others, while your own followers are kept on board with simple but predictably aggressive messages. Donald Trump, in this respect, is the world champion of communicative polarization.
Kumkar might be a systems theorist but he doesn’t limit himself to observing our present polarization crisis. Instead he looks for solutions, but only those that grasp polarization as a problem of or an opportunity for political communication. Kumkar asks, for example, if a counter-polarization might be desirable – to really get society polarized, with two or more competing polarization narratives. The simple slogans of the right require a simple response as well. Polarization sells: what we need, in Kumkar’s view, is not so much the self-critical pleading of liberal democracy but a left-wing liberal, media-savvy populism that dispenses with any “moral spectacle.” Rather than exhibiting an irrational fear polarization, he would gladly polarize the debate even more.
Translated by David Burnett
By Christoph Bartmann
Christoph Bartmann was director of the Goethe-Institute in Copenhagen, New York and Warsaw. Today he lives and works in Hamburg as a freelance author and critic.
