Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage
On the fear of the future
Everywhere you look, fear is rampant. Fear of war and climate catastrophe, fear of reptilians and migrants, fear of job loss, rent increases, and all-powerful billionaires (sic!). The rich are building bunkers, the European Union is adopting asylum procedures where no one in Europe actually has to see the asylum seekers, global military spending is reaching new record highs, and politicians are driven by the fear of the coming fossil fuel revolt, which is as inevitable after the Iran war and the global energy crisis as the sausage porn photo on Markus Söder’s Instagram account.
But can this really be true: that fear is something that “we all”, or at least many of us, “share”? The statement doesn’t seem entirely coherent, even counterintuitive, when we look at the political discourses of our time. With the exception of the political discourse of the AfD and other right-wing extremist forces (more on that later), we find very few stories about fear. Even in the 2025 federal election campaign, the Greens plastered their posters with the slogan “Confidence!”, and while the narratives told by the current federal government do contain some references to complex crises, major dangers, and difficult challenges, (as I write this, a massive “reform package” is being negotiated within the coalition) nothing about it should cause fear; it’s all solvable, they claim, if only the right reforms, tax cuts, and gifts to capital were implemented. Sure, it’s a crisis, but crises have been ongoing ever since the global financial crisis of 2007, then the Euro crisis, then the “migration crisis,” then the Corona crisis, then the first energy crisis (2022) and the second… So, crises are constant anyway, and so far, we’ve always managed to get through them somehow. Why, then, be afraid, or at least, why admit to it?
The middle class’s fear of division
The search for “fear” in political discourse must therefore necessarily be indirect, because fear of collapse is rarely articulated; it is repressed, hidden behind other issues, anxieties, and accusations. It is a bit like a solar eclipse, an event that produces so many extreme effects that looking at it directly would be too dangerous, too confusing, too destabilizing. Or like dark matter in space, which we cannot see directly because it does not interact with light (in our analogy: rational reflection), but which has all sorts of gravitational effects in the real world from which we can draw conclusions about its existence.
One example of this is the discussion about a possible “division” or “polarization” of German society, and how this could be prevented or, if it truly existed, reversed. For example, the well-known sociologist Steffen Mau, the author of *Trigger Points of Time* says that “division (is) a fear scenario,” then explains to the German upper middle class in its courtly Pravda that the deep fear of society falling apart is unfounded, that “most people” still “group themselves in the broad middle.” What appears to be a narrative about sociological facts is actually, on the far more powerful level of emotional communication, a kind of paternal “no, dear child, you don’t need to worry, things are still as you know them, as you like them to be.” This is at least as much therapy as sociology, because when we feel fear, we seek out discourses, choosing from the various political discourse products offered to us in the highly mediated world we live in precisely those that make us feel the least bad.
When “the center” discusses polarization or division, it is expressing its deep, fundamental fear of losing control over society, of heading towards a future with likely far fewer, or at least far more contested, privileges. The narrative of the center, that one must combat “societal division,” is primarily the fear that there is no longer enough “common ground” to hold society together and maintain the center in its rather comfortable position of power. And since, from the perspective of bourgeois society, “division” can best be combated with “reason” and “communication,” which are then contrasted with the perpetual “culture war” from the right and “identity politics” from the left—communication that thus distinguishes the center from “the extremes”—we ultimately arrive at a discourse that simply says: no matter what the problem is, we just need to do more of what we already considered right, and then we’ll solve it. Yes, we are afraid that the world is changing, but if we simply don’t change anything and just remain as we are now, then we no longer need to be afraid.
My favorite and cautionary example of such discourse comes from the intellectual doyen of the black-green wing of the taz newspaper, Peter Unfried: the asserted. Not too long ago, he claimed that “without a functioning democracy, a market economy, and a strong center… there can be no climate policy,” that global warming doesn’t fit into the concept of “either the far right or the far left,” and from this he concluded that it was finally time for some reasonable (i.e., centrist) adults to sit down and find a rational compromise: “’compromise is the new progressive.’” This is quite clever: the potential division of society is identified as a problem—the fear of it is real and cannot simply be ignored by producers of political discourse—but then it’s immediately rolled back into the paternalistic reassurance that the adults will now sit down together again and solve things the way they’ve always been solved up there: through the ideology-free, reasonable, universally Habermasian discourse of societal elites. Here, too, the mode of dealing with fear in the democratic political discourse of our time becomes apparent: the problems are briefly acknowledged, there is a brief nod towards acceptance, only to then return to a narrative in which things do not have to change fundamentally, will not change fundamentally, in which, as is usual in fairy tales, everything turns out all right in the end.
The affective surplus
The problem with these pragmatic, fatherly political discourses, in which every problem can be solved by a little more of what we’ve always considered right anyway—leftists, for example, believe that a little redistribution would solve the climate problem, pragmatic Greens believe that building, buying, and driving a few more electric cars would solve the climate problem, precisely what has been demanded for decades—is that they fundamentally go against the emotional impulse of those they are meant to convince. Yes, we seek discourses that alleviate our fears, but when these discourses almost obsessively assume that problems can be solved, they easily give listeners the impression that it’s not about their feelings at all, not about them, but rather about communicating to them that their feelings are unnecessary, exaggerated, or even part of the problem itself. This leads to people turning away from these narratives because those experiencing strong emotions usually don’t want their feelings (fear) to be reversed (reassured) in communication – they want their feelings reflected and validated; they aren’t initially looking for a solution. When a good friend constantly told me about her boy troubles , she didn’t want to hear how she could overcome them; she simply wanted to be heard and seen, and not put under pressure to find a solution.
The collective emotional states—or affects — that underlie politics produce an “affective surplus” in relation to the political discourses that articulate them; they cannot be fully captured by these discourses, especially not by those whose stated goal is to deprive people of precisely the feeling that currently shapes their perception. If the everyday perception of many people is increasingly dominated by fear—I mean, why are more and more people, even full-time political professionals I know, increasingly engaging in news avoidance ? Because the world is increasingly filled with fear and negativity – and because the political narratives of our time only superficially acknowledge, reflect, and validate this feeling – the sense remains that the unreflected feeling is somehow shameful: that having “fear” is a sign of one’s own “defeatism”, that “fear” is an emotion that is primarily exploited “by the right”, and which we therefore shouldn’t feel all the time, that fear is, in a certain sense, an infantile turning away from the world, while the enlightened person (preferably a man for the sake of simplicity) faces the certainly solvable problems of our time without fear and with a great deal of rationality.
And as every good sex worker knows: the simplest way to manipulate people, to build a relationship with them in which they feel accepted and comfortable—more comfortable than in other contexts—is to acknowledge and validate their real but hidden feelings and desires. Someone who constantly has to suppress a strong feeling and then finds a place where that feeling is “accepted” will always gladly return to that place. At that point, it doesn’t really matter whether a remotely realistic solution is proposed for the problem that triggers the feeling, because, as already mentioned, for people, their feelings aren’t primarily about resolution, but rather about their acknowledgment. And since global ecological collapse triggers strong negative feelings, political discourses that cannot truly acknowledge the collapse, its insolubility, or the resulting fear leave behind an easily manipulated affective surplus that can now be articulated by political entrepreneurs and steered in a desired political direction…
Donald Trump, or: how does political communication work?
…from political entrepreneurs, such as… Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is without question the greatest political communication genius of the postmodern era. Seriously , the fact that this repulsive orange-skinned baby man was elected twice to the most powerful political office in the world—the second time as a convicted coup plotter with significant health problems, and after announcing his intention to rule as a dictator right at the start of his term (but “only for a day”), and still with a respectable majority—has by no means been sufficiently reflected upon in terms of what it means for our understanding of effective (and affective) political communication.
Of course, one could simply say that politicians always lie, people fall for these lies, and Trump’s lies cater to the reactionary views of his supporters. That may be true for part of his base, but it certainly doesn’t apply to all Trump voters. And it ignores a fact already described in 2016, during his first presidential run : “Many of his supporters don’t believe Trump’s wild claims—but they don’t care,” as the Washington Post wrote. They support him not because of, but in spite of, his positions. They aren’t concerned with ‘substance,’ which in turn explains why it never hurts Trump to be “exposed” in a lie (although, frankly, the very category of “lie” seems somewhat anachronistic when discussing and trying to understand Trump).
This is about much more than a lying politician. Trump’s political discourse is a prime example of what is called post-factual politics in Germany. The English term ” post-truth politics” goes further, however, because truths are more than just facts. While the German term gives the impression that only certain facts are being questioned, and the bourgeois-Enlightenment context in which they exist remains intact, the English term indicates that the entire conceptual framework within which facts make sense is being shaken. Trump’s political statements no longer articulate classical claims to truth. Therefore, they cannot be combated with the traditional weapons of ideological critique. For a situation in which Trump can say whatever he wants, only to claim the opposite in the next breath—and in which this doesn’t harm him— the comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “Trumpiness” on his satirical show “The Late Show.”
Trump’s supporters don’t follow a candidate who rationally justifies his political program, who appeals to their economic interests. They follow someone who feels what they feel: the anger and the disappointment, but above all, and more importantly, the yearning for recognition, for belonging again, for being someone—for having agency. “Make America(ns) feel great again.” For Colbert, Donald Trump is therefore the politician of our time: “an emotional megaphone for voters full of anger.” His actions create affective resonance. His supporters don’t cheer the content of his words, but the fact that there is someone standing there who gives them a sense of strength and relevance they haven’t felt for decades.
This means that political communication, contrary to what hegemonic West German Habermasianism suggests, does not function through substantive agreement, or even as a Popperian process of constantly falsifying hypotheses. Instead, it functions through the construction of emotional resonances, sympathetic vibrations between subjects. Of course, this analysis is not particularly new; Spinoza already argued in his Tractatus Politicus that people are “led more by passion than by reason,” and the most effective form of communication of our time, capitalist advertising, has long since internalized it. But we still seem to have largely failed to understand this fundamental fact of political communication, to have not yet integrated it into our strategies. For the only political actor with mass appeal who seems to take seriously how much fear people in this country have of an increasingly bleak future is, unfortunately, the AfD.
Centre of the Web 