How do politicians weaponise Christianity? In conversation with Tobias Cremer

Thank you for having me, Nick.

Your book covers France and Germany and America in depth, and I want to focus primarily on France and Germany before we compare them to America at the end.

Let's talk about how European politics as a rule has changed over the last 15, 20 years or so, and I'm particularly interested in what you call the emergence of a new social cleavage.

What do you mean by that?

Yes, so I think this is a really good way to start because, I mean, it's one of the phenomena we, we really are seeing in so many Western societies is the rise of the populist right, and, uh, the right really is not a fringe party anymore.

In some cases, even forms governments.

When I started this research, I really tried to understand what is going on, and I was really looking whether it was demand side or supply side, so whether something happening in the electorate, um, or on the, on the political offer.

Uh, and I actually came down to thinking there is something in the political electorate happening.

Uh, and the, uh, findings that I had basically in my book was when I was looking at the social origins of right-wing populism, that it's very much the consequence of a new cleavage, a new social cleavage, a new divide in our societies.

And, uh, basically social cleavage theory for everybody who hasn't spent most of their 20s writing a social science PhD-

[laughs]

... uh, is basically the big divides in our societies according to which our political system's oriented.

Usually we say it started getting fixed in the 1920s, where we had two dominant social cleavages.

The one is the economic cleavage between state interventionism on the one hand and free trade on the other hand.

So like if you, if you want to think it in Marxist terms, it's the, it's the class struggle between the working class and, um, the, the capital owning class.

And then on the other hand, you had the more moral or historically religious cleavage.

That was really between social conservatism and social liberalism.

What is interesting now is when you look at the far right or the populist right that has been really taking off since the 2010s, is that they are not as easily met in their two-by-two metrics.

So when you look at, uh, the, the economic, uh, cleavage for instance, you'll have some populist right-wing parties, like the early AfD in Germany was very much an [laughs] liberal economic party similar to the Tea Party movement in the US.

But at the same time, you have in the same political family, uh, a lot of parties now that actually take much more of a state interventionist position.

I mean, we can think about the tariff policy of Donald Trump, and he's not alone with that.

Many far right politicians are really pushing for that protectionism.

Um, but also some parties are strong on social welfare.

Yes.

And, uh, the same is actually true when we come to the moral or religious cleavage.