Torben Lütjen Thu, 5th May 2022, 8:00 pm America in the Cold Civil War The USA after (before?) Trump Lecture For a long time, the USA has been considered a deeply divided country – with or without Donald Trump in the White House. In his lecture, Torben Lütjen explains how a once very consensus-driven society could become a nation of deep contrasts: between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, urban and rural, white majority society and ethnic minorities. Lütjen discusses at what point polarization, which must exist in any democracy, becomes a problem that attacks the very foundations of institutions, and discusses with the audience whether Europe’s democracies may soon face similar challenges. Torben Lütjen is a German author and political scientist. Since 2020, he has held the substitute professorship for comparative politics at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel.