Saturday’s post on the authoritarian turn in German politics has become one of the most widely shared pieces I’ve ever written. I am truly grateful to all of my readers for helping me report on what is happening in my country. A great many have argued that my comparisons to the DDR are off-point. They suggest that National Socialism is a better historical analogy, and that we are seeing before us a re-manifestation of classic German fascist tendencies. I think this is a misreading, and at the risk of repeating myself to I’ll try to explain why. In a second piece later this week, I’ll write further about fascism and its nature, because I think this is a locus of particular confusion especially in the Anglosphere. (That will be a much more complicated essay, but I’ll try to get it finished by Wednesday; here, you need only know that I’m avoiding terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ very deliberately, for reasons I’ll soon clarify.)
“It is thus best to conceive of liberalism, socialism/communism and right-nationalism as overlapping electron clouds, which achieve mutual exclusivity only at the extremes.”
------------------------
This man in my view is the best political explainer on Substack and perhaps in the whole wide world, though of course I can’t prove it.
But I got great antennae so everyone ought to trust me here.
Call it anything you want or not, but in the end it is anti-human. The simple struggle between life and death where politics are meant to determine the outcome. The clowns and parasites who would rule over us are becoming more and more desperate as their computer algorithms and faulty game shows are not jiving with reality.
It is interesting how the spectres and shadows of the past influence today. Those long since vanished threats both take on mutated, sometimes even entirely new meanings with increasing time since the events they are based on, and also get revived just at the point when you thought they had become completely irrelevant.
Growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 80s, the Germans were very often the playground roleplay baddies. One group of kids would do the comedy accents, Hitler moustaches and salutes, and always lose. Of course we were too young to understand why, but having watched the entire covid mania (where I have my own theories about what we should have learned from the Holocaust, that for another time), I don't think most people ever did understand once they grew up.
The open and murderous racism of the national socialists ties in well with the mutation in "anti-nazism" because it comes from the same place as "anti-racism". Racism when I was growing up was already largely reduced to name-calling. Like Nazism it had been defeated, and it didn't take a war (at least, not in the UK). Today it is a problem that is almost totally nonexistent, and it is clear that all the wonderful new racism suppression ideas the left comes up with in the pursuit of equality of outcome, or the constant invention of new -isms that we apparently all need training out of, actually do more harm than good on their own terms. One man's privilege is another man's disadvantage - so creating new discriminatory privileges to "address" the past creates resentment that is equally as morally justified as past resentment against the discrimination of the past.
The idea that the institutionalised racism of, say, American slavery, could ever reemerge is insane, just as insane as the idea that some nonexistent German neo-nazi group would rebuild death camps, or that anyone really gave a monkey's about the strange man in a dress most would (and will) never encounter in a lifetime anyway. But the left sees racists and nazis everywhere.
The progressive left is fighting a dim and partially incorrect recollection of last century's wars against a comic-book straw man. By equating name calling with slavery, opposition to mass immigration (especially having to pay for it) with mass murder, and respect for property rights and minimalist government with fascism (god the irony), they can keep the whole schtick going forever. You will never completely eliminate "racism" or other "isms", you will never achieve absolute equality across all metrics between all groups however defined (even if you legislate for it), so there is always more progress to be made, and more authority to be exercised.
What are the AfD doing about this deliberate intimidation, surely there must be laws against the deliberate intimidation of electoral candidates.
Care to comment? The AfD should be raising merry hell about this intimidation campaign, they are entitled to stand and have the same protection as any other politicians standing in elections
Ideology of left or right isn't at the core of this globalist movement. Any ideas are thin veneers for a massive power/money grab. The reason why leftist ideas predominate as the veneer, is that they all require increased central power to enact. Global phenomena like climate and pandemics are useful in that they can create crisis narratives to fuel the grab for central power. Any time spent debating labels is wasted really. It all comes down to totalitarianism with poverty and dependency for the masses and riches and power for those ruling.
Can I take this to another level I have been contemplating Eugyppius?
A democracy is based on a constitution, however, there may come a time when the constitution no longer works, and working around it leads to more failure to deliver and political unrest.
In such a situation there has to be a democratic means of changing the constitution so that the constitution works again for democracy.
That is not possible unless a political party realises that, is able to build popular support, gain sufficient strength and therefore mass the democratic force to do so.
The AfD is likely that party.
In The UK we are in my opinion reaching the limits of a constitutional "norm" settlement, we are tied in by far to much international law, and the apparatus the left have developed by NGO's infiltrating the major institutions like the WEF, NGO's, the Judiciary, the Civil Service - in fact everything but government office and is deliberately trying to frustrate democratic change.
The "world order" is not working for the people any more, not in most of Europe or the UK and arguably the USA as well
If the AfD is banned, or as they now seem to be trying to do intimidate them out of office or putting them under a police state, merely for opposing the liberal lefty consensus and clearly represent a large section of the electorate, that is nothing short of totalitarianism identical in my opinion to Putin's intimidation of his political opponents.
What laws on political intimidation does Germany have? What legally can the AfD do in terms of the law to force fair elections and stop intimidation that looks to be to be state sponsored?
Because what you describe is the use of a police state for the purposes of political intimidation of opponents, that put bluntly is no different to Putin, Xi, Stalin or Hitler.
A simple concept of fascism is the partnership of the state and corporations versus the citizenry. This is somewhat concealed in the current construct by the smokescreen of foundations and NGO's, but remember the duck- if it quacks like a duck... The promotion of PPP's almost makes the point.
I have found Ayn Rand's formulation of statism useful in helping to see motives and structures.
Your description of invented "rights" is indeed a trap, as they are constructed with no apparent responsibilities for exercise by the citizenry or consequences for governments which override them. Our current experience in Canada is a fine example- most are aware of the imposition of the "Emergencies Act" two years ago, but far fewer are awake to the destructive adoption of the UNDRIP on a widespread basis. The destruction of property rights through"climate" rules is another example of the statist impulse.
Describing what we are witnessing in the west is extremely difficult. I believe it is because it does not fit nicely into any of the boxes that make up our prior experience. Wokism, or whatever name it is given in Europe shares a lot of elements with prior ideologies.
When it comes to classifying communism, socialism and fascism I like to use Hayek's formulation that they are all essentially collectivist ideologies. They only differ in their definition of the in-group involved in "the struggle" and the out-group against whom they are struggling. The same goes for all the other isms of the 20th century.
I think when people talk about the modern regime being fascist, what they are referring to is the seeming melding of public and private entities towards a common goal. In the United States big finance is used as an enforcer of the current woke ideology against corporate America. On an individual level, the corporate HR department is the enforcer against the employee. I've experienced this myself recently. Operationally, I think there are significant parallels to fascism.
What is truly different is the underlying ideology. Communism, socialism and fascism are not only collectivist, they are also identitarian. Although the definition of the in and out groups differ among them, the in-group is identified as a majority of the population in whatever subdivision the ideology chooses. In the nationalist sense it would be some historic or ethnically homogeneous group. In the internationalist sense it would mean the underclass or working class.
Wokism is collectivist in that it is a call to collective action on a number of issues, the alleged climate emergency being the most obvious. However, it is different in that in the identitarian sphere the in-group that is elevated is in all cases a distinct minority relative to the population, whether they be migrants or sexual minorities. In both cases, the wokist ideologue urges the majority of the population to work against its own interests to either achieve some nebulous collective goal, such as net zero, or to elevate minority rights over the rights of the majority. I think this relates back to a series of articles you did on Exogenous Moral Orientation (I think I got that right finally!).
It is my view that collectivist ideologies by their nature always turn repressive, because by their nature they require the entire population to get with the program. The only way to accomplish that is through coercion, particularly when the goal is contrary to the interests of the majority of the population.
An honest appraisal...Germany is well on the way to creating a State that is impervious to the wishes of actual Germans..The only way out will be nationwide strikes by workers who can't be replaced, like truckers and farmers...
N.B. Two common dictionary definitions of "fascism." (1) a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition; (2) a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control. (This 2nd definition being the sense most old-school leftists use the term in, as opposed to capital-F Fascism.) Two definitions of "totalitarianism." (1) centralized control by an autocratic authority; (2) the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute [state] authority. (The rather sloppy definition and resulting misunderstandings of these terms is such that their meanings cannot be taken for granted, and thus the terms need to be clearly defined by the author in any serious discussion involving their use.)
Authoritarian liberalism is real phenomenon. Now I am real "economic leftist", I support high taxes, Piketty style politics, and I tell you that from my point of view these EU regimes are nowhere left enough😀. So there is another left/right cleavage, on economic issues. And here leftism has suffered immensely and has been replaced with identity politics.
One of the great challenges is that when one is young, it's natural to want to travel to interesting places and meet lots and lots of people who one imagines are different from oneself, and the concepts of globalism and internationalism seem very right and the natural goal to fulfill the great dream of that Coca Cola commercial.
It's only after you've been beaten up a little along the road of life that you start to wisen up and by then you've voted foolishly for so long and supported initiatives that are now coming back to bite you quite viciously in your tender parts.
"That said, these lunatics are anything but toothless; they can do a lot of damage to ordinary people." And it is in damaging ordinary people that terrorism produces its greatest effect.
“It is thus best to conceive of liberalism, socialism/communism and right-nationalism as overlapping electron clouds, which achieve mutual exclusivity only at the extremes.”
------------------------
This man in my view is the best political explainer on Substack and perhaps in the whole wide world, though of course I can’t prove it.
But I got great antennae so everyone ought to trust me here.
Call it anything you want or not, but in the end it is anti-human. The simple struggle between life and death where politics are meant to determine the outcome. The clowns and parasites who would rule over us are becoming more and more desperate as their computer algorithms and faulty game shows are not jiving with reality.
It is interesting how the spectres and shadows of the past influence today. Those long since vanished threats both take on mutated, sometimes even entirely new meanings with increasing time since the events they are based on, and also get revived just at the point when you thought they had become completely irrelevant.
Growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 80s, the Germans were very often the playground roleplay baddies. One group of kids would do the comedy accents, Hitler moustaches and salutes, and always lose. Of course we were too young to understand why, but having watched the entire covid mania (where I have my own theories about what we should have learned from the Holocaust, that for another time), I don't think most people ever did understand once they grew up.
The open and murderous racism of the national socialists ties in well with the mutation in "anti-nazism" because it comes from the same place as "anti-racism". Racism when I was growing up was already largely reduced to name-calling. Like Nazism it had been defeated, and it didn't take a war (at least, not in the UK). Today it is a problem that is almost totally nonexistent, and it is clear that all the wonderful new racism suppression ideas the left comes up with in the pursuit of equality of outcome, or the constant invention of new -isms that we apparently all need training out of, actually do more harm than good on their own terms. One man's privilege is another man's disadvantage - so creating new discriminatory privileges to "address" the past creates resentment that is equally as morally justified as past resentment against the discrimination of the past.
The idea that the institutionalised racism of, say, American slavery, could ever reemerge is insane, just as insane as the idea that some nonexistent German neo-nazi group would rebuild death camps, or that anyone really gave a monkey's about the strange man in a dress most would (and will) never encounter in a lifetime anyway. But the left sees racists and nazis everywhere.
The progressive left is fighting a dim and partially incorrect recollection of last century's wars against a comic-book straw man. By equating name calling with slavery, opposition to mass immigration (especially having to pay for it) with mass murder, and respect for property rights and minimalist government with fascism (god the irony), they can keep the whole schtick going forever. You will never completely eliminate "racism" or other "isms", you will never achieve absolute equality across all metrics between all groups however defined (even if you legislate for it), so there is always more progress to be made, and more authority to be exercised.
Have you read about this?
https://rmx.news/germany/this-shouldnt-happen-in-a-democracy-afd-politician-withdraws-from-election-race-after-threats-to-his-family/
What are the AfD doing about this deliberate intimidation, surely there must be laws against the deliberate intimidation of electoral candidates.
Care to comment? The AfD should be raising merry hell about this intimidation campaign, they are entitled to stand and have the same protection as any other politicians standing in elections
Ideology of left or right isn't at the core of this globalist movement. Any ideas are thin veneers for a massive power/money grab. The reason why leftist ideas predominate as the veneer, is that they all require increased central power to enact. Global phenomena like climate and pandemics are useful in that they can create crisis narratives to fuel the grab for central power. Any time spent debating labels is wasted really. It all comes down to totalitarianism with poverty and dependency for the masses and riches and power for those ruling.
Can I take this to another level I have been contemplating Eugyppius?
A democracy is based on a constitution, however, there may come a time when the constitution no longer works, and working around it leads to more failure to deliver and political unrest.
In such a situation there has to be a democratic means of changing the constitution so that the constitution works again for democracy.
That is not possible unless a political party realises that, is able to build popular support, gain sufficient strength and therefore mass the democratic force to do so.
The AfD is likely that party.
In The UK we are in my opinion reaching the limits of a constitutional "norm" settlement, we are tied in by far to much international law, and the apparatus the left have developed by NGO's infiltrating the major institutions like the WEF, NGO's, the Judiciary, the Civil Service - in fact everything but government office and is deliberately trying to frustrate democratic change.
The "world order" is not working for the people any more, not in most of Europe or the UK and arguably the USA as well
If the AfD is banned, or as they now seem to be trying to do intimidate them out of office or putting them under a police state, merely for opposing the liberal lefty consensus and clearly represent a large section of the electorate, that is nothing short of totalitarianism identical in my opinion to Putin's intimidation of his political opponents.
What laws on political intimidation does Germany have? What legally can the AfD do in terms of the law to force fair elections and stop intimidation that looks to be to be state sponsored?
Because what you describe is the use of a police state for the purposes of political intimidation of opponents, that put bluntly is no different to Putin, Xi, Stalin or Hitler.
This will not end well.
A simple concept of fascism is the partnership of the state and corporations versus the citizenry. This is somewhat concealed in the current construct by the smokescreen of foundations and NGO's, but remember the duck- if it quacks like a duck... The promotion of PPP's almost makes the point.
I have found Ayn Rand's formulation of statism useful in helping to see motives and structures.
Your description of invented "rights" is indeed a trap, as they are constructed with no apparent responsibilities for exercise by the citizenry or consequences for governments which override them. Our current experience in Canada is a fine example- most are aware of the imposition of the "Emergencies Act" two years ago, but far fewer are awake to the destructive adoption of the UNDRIP on a widespread basis. The destruction of property rights through"climate" rules is another example of the statist impulse.
Describing what we are witnessing in the west is extremely difficult. I believe it is because it does not fit nicely into any of the boxes that make up our prior experience. Wokism, or whatever name it is given in Europe shares a lot of elements with prior ideologies.
When it comes to classifying communism, socialism and fascism I like to use Hayek's formulation that they are all essentially collectivist ideologies. They only differ in their definition of the in-group involved in "the struggle" and the out-group against whom they are struggling. The same goes for all the other isms of the 20th century.
I think when people talk about the modern regime being fascist, what they are referring to is the seeming melding of public and private entities towards a common goal. In the United States big finance is used as an enforcer of the current woke ideology against corporate America. On an individual level, the corporate HR department is the enforcer against the employee. I've experienced this myself recently. Operationally, I think there are significant parallels to fascism.
What is truly different is the underlying ideology. Communism, socialism and fascism are not only collectivist, they are also identitarian. Although the definition of the in and out groups differ among them, the in-group is identified as a majority of the population in whatever subdivision the ideology chooses. In the nationalist sense it would be some historic or ethnically homogeneous group. In the internationalist sense it would mean the underclass or working class.
Wokism is collectivist in that it is a call to collective action on a number of issues, the alleged climate emergency being the most obvious. However, it is different in that in the identitarian sphere the in-group that is elevated is in all cases a distinct minority relative to the population, whether they be migrants or sexual minorities. In both cases, the wokist ideologue urges the majority of the population to work against its own interests to either achieve some nebulous collective goal, such as net zero, or to elevate minority rights over the rights of the majority. I think this relates back to a series of articles you did on Exogenous Moral Orientation (I think I got that right finally!).
It is my view that collectivist ideologies by their nature always turn repressive, because by their nature they require the entire population to get with the program. The only way to accomplish that is through coercion, particularly when the goal is contrary to the interests of the majority of the population.
An honest appraisal...Germany is well on the way to creating a State that is impervious to the wishes of actual Germans..The only way out will be nationwide strikes by workers who can't be replaced, like truckers and farmers...
N.B. Two common dictionary definitions of "fascism." (1) a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition; (2) a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control. (This 2nd definition being the sense most old-school leftists use the term in, as opposed to capital-F Fascism.) Two definitions of "totalitarianism." (1) centralized control by an autocratic authority; (2) the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute [state] authority. (The rather sloppy definition and resulting misunderstandings of these terms is such that their meanings cannot be taken for granted, and thus the terms need to be clearly defined by the author in any serious discussion involving their use.)
So-called «liberalism» is just about as liberal as certain religions are tolerant – i.e. only until they acquire enough power to crush everyone else.
it does not really matter what you call it. the general meaning is clear. This is NOT good and going the wrong way by the day
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/the-age-of-authoritarian-liberalism/
I've linked to this article once more, as its conclusions are pertinent and convincing.
Authoritarian liberalism is real phenomenon. Now I am real "economic leftist", I support high taxes, Piketty style politics, and I tell you that from my point of view these EU regimes are nowhere left enough😀. So there is another left/right cleavage, on economic issues. And here leftism has suffered immensely and has been replaced with identity politics.
One of the great challenges is that when one is young, it's natural to want to travel to interesting places and meet lots and lots of people who one imagines are different from oneself, and the concepts of globalism and internationalism seem very right and the natural goal to fulfill the great dream of that Coca Cola commercial.
It's only after you've been beaten up a little along the road of life that you start to wisen up and by then you've voted foolishly for so long and supported initiatives that are now coming back to bite you quite viciously in your tender parts.
"That said, these lunatics are anything but toothless; they can do a lot of damage to ordinary people." And it is in damaging ordinary people that terrorism produces its greatest effect.