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SIMULACRUM OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS Socialist Party) failed to attract young female members because the difference discourse cannot be successful mobilization frame in a universalist frame especially when other alternatives emerged. The revival of the conservative and extreme right wing mobilised women in the framework of politics of motherhood.” In that framework the politics of motherhood women could find structural support for securing the family and a rhetoric which offers symbolic recognition of unpaid care work with the concept of women’s dignity. The rhetorical frame of maternalism by the victorious conservatism is not questioned neither by the neoliberal “new feminism” of the young generation who believe that they alone are the source of their own success and they refuse to pay for the failures of others or acknowledge that these are structures factors causing discrimination nor by the ideologically uncertain MSZP which in principle staged itself as the successor of the social democratic values. The categorization for “men” and “women” as political agents worked in the early 1900, but it remained unresponsive to the political and intellectual shift towards developments of identity politics from the 1960s. The simulacrum of social democracy attracts the elderly voters with nostalgia, but it does not work for the younger voters who are moving towards other alternatives. As a consequence, in the social democratic movement women necessarily are ghettoized into the women’s section where they are also fighting for the same agenda of women’s difference but in a framework which does not offer them visibility publicly or the acknowledgement of gender difference. The members, middle aged and older, white women are as unfit for coalitional politics as were their fore-mother, the social democratic women in between 1945 and 1948 without the threat of dissolving themselves in the political agenda defined by others. And today these “others” are numerous. Therefore, coming up with a feasible strategy for the future is not easy. The social democrats are advocating socialist internationalism in an era where the alternatives are polarized around the axis of cosmopolitanism. They are advocating “women’s politics” when the identity politics of the 1980s is already a part of history textbooks and without coalitional politics the chances of success is limited. In Europe women’s demands has changed during the past century: emphasis moved from needs to rights, not independently from the success of the social democratic movements earlier and within this, from the restricted right to parity in selected areas to the larger right of self-determination. This crucial shift was 5 Pető, Andrea, Die Marien in der Sonne (Die Apokalyptischen Madonnen), in Johanna Laakso (ed./Hg.), Frau & Nation / Woman & Nation, Finno-Ugrian Studies in Austria 5, Wien, LIT-Verlag, 2008, 137-174. and Petö, Andrea, Anti-Modernist Political Thoughts on Motherhood in Europe in a Historical Perspective, in Heike Kahlert - Ernst Waltraud (eds.), Reframing Demographic Change in Europe. Perspectives on Gender and Welfare State Transformations (Focus Gender), Band 11. Berlin, Lit Verlag, 2010, 189-201. + 417 +
