It is time to stop worrying about allegedly right-wing "political extremism" and to start worrying about our overtly extremist and truly crazy political establishment

A response to Jeremy Stern's Tablet Magazine article, "Can Germany's Far Right be Stopped?"

German politics is like being trapped in a truck that some time ago jumped a red light and ran over a bunch of pedestrians. “That was terrible!” the driver exclaims. “Indeed, we shouldn’t have done that!” his passengers agree. “We must make sure we never do that again!” the driver intones. “And to be sure we never do that again, we need to put as much distance between ourselves and that intersection as possible!” The driver begins to accelerate, eyes glued to the rear window. “It’s working!” his passengers report. “Yes, we’re now much further from that dangerous intersection!” the driver cries. And as we all shoot down the highway at ever greater speed, it never occurs to anybody to ask where we’re going and what still greater hazards might lie ahead of us.

“Can Germany’s Far Right Be Stopped?” – a long, ambivalent and occasionally infuriating piece published this week by Jeremy Stern in Tablet Magazine – is an almost archetypal example of this plague of rear-window analysis. In its many paragraphs, Stern provides a Jewish-American commentary on many of the same post-Merkel developments in German politics that I’ve covered here at the plague chronicle. His thesis is that an “incoherent yet firmly anti-Trumpian political consensus,” involving such things as “open borders,” the “Green New Deal” and a “China-dependent mélange of politically correct ideas” has provoked a scary and ominous “resurgence of populism, extremism, and even political violence in Germany.” In this way Stern blends the standard, shallow media critique of Alternative für Deustchland with a rather more sophisticated centrist scepticism of the progressive attack on Trumpism in the United States. In 2019, the neoconservative Robert Kagan argued that Trump risked reigniting destructive midcentury German nationalism by withdrawing support for the “multilateral institutions” that have suppressed it all this time. Stern turns this doubtful thesis around; it is not Trump, but rather the “anti-Trumpian policy consensus” that bears the real responsibility for the resurrection of political extremism in Germany.

Viewing a rear-facing video feed from our truck of state, in other words, Stern has begun to worry that we’re only apparently departing the carnage. It’s hard to know, because nobody will look out the windshield, but we may have taken an exit that will by some magic redirect us to that fateful intersection. The main thing is that we continue to put space between us and that past catastrophe, and that we navigate by taking our bearing from landmarks that we’ve already passed. We must not return to where we’ve been; where we’re going is secondary.