Weltanschauung und Politik in den heutigen USA. Barack Obama und der „neue Kulturkampf“ um die Führung der anglo-amerikanischen Weltmacht

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the current relationship between Politics, Culture and Worldviews in the USA under Barack Obama. The present "great Obama divide" of US domestic politics consists in the division between institutional and contextual (cultural and worldview) politics. Obama has induced their current opposition when he ran for the US Presidency by profiling himself as a "cultural" candidate "against the system". One result is that by becoming part of the system after being elected, Obama has lost some of his initial "revolutionary" appeal; a second effect is that the opposition is now trying to turn the tables by mobilizing the contextual political sphere against Obama’s control of the institutional power. In fact, the Republicans, rather than concentrating on traditional ways of regaining power focus on launching a new "worldview" battle against Obama in the hope to use the pre-political sphere to eventually regain the institutional political majority. The overall result is a general climate of "worldview mobilization" in the USA, and an increased influence of cultural and worldview philosophies onto the institutionalized mechanisms of politics. Pre-political movements like the conservative "inverting the myth - inverting the paradigm" movement or the "tea party" movement are the expression of attempts towards a new "cultural battle" for "the soul of the USA," which has to be understood in its basic mechanisms, if the "Obama constellation" shall be understood. This article sketches some core elements of Obama’s worldview that are in play in this game, and it argues that many actions of Obama on the field of foreign politics are (and will be) to a noticeable extent co-oriented toward influencing the domestic "worldview battle."