On the Slow Demise of Migrationism

It is always dangerous to write optimistic posts. Even distantly optimistic posts, like yesterday’s on the changing political discourse surrounding migration in Germany, generate a lot of push-back.

For some of my pessimistic critics, almost everything that happens in politics is the work of a nebulous “they.” Press discussions, public discourse, the entirety of what you might call “metapolitics” – none of this matters, because “they” will continue to flood our countries with infinity third-world boat people for all time. Elections also do not matter, because “they” will just keep issuing their orders to whomever we elect and in this way secure the same catastrophic policies as before. There is nothing anybody can do and all change is inconceivable for hardcore subscribers to theories of “they.”

Others don’t go quite that far. For them, it is enough to point out that centre-right posturing on migration restriction is a cynical political ploy. The CDU don’t really care about closing the borders, they just want to win elections, and they’ll say anything necessary to lure more voters to their side. If they have to pantomime as Alternative für Deutschland for an election cycle, that’s fine. They can get back to cavorting with the Greens, outlawing internal combustion engines, opening new refugee centres and forcing every last German retiree to spend the last of his savings on heat pumps soon enough.

I don’t entirely disagree with either of these views. I’ve repeatedly said that liberal democracies function like convoluted oligarchies, so there is most definitely a “they.” This “they,” however, is not a hidden cabal. “They” operate entirely in the open, as a cadre of social and political elites. You know all of their names. Their problem, is that they must by and large work within a system of constitutional constraints. Among other things, they actually have to win votes to maintain control of the state apparatus. If they lose elections, they will not necessarily be cast out of power, because they also govern from a variety of non-state institutions. Losing control of the state apparatus, however, is very inconvenient for the oligarchs, and so they must spend enormous resources on the project of managing public opinion. Like everyone else, “they” must manoeuvre within real limits.

Otherwise, as I said already in my last post, the CDU are obviously not acting out of moral conviction. Nobody in Germany’s political elite genuinely cares about stopping mass migration. My crazy thesis is simply that they don’t have to be serious for their posturing to have consequences extending well beyond their concrete intentions. Probably all processes of political change begin with cynical attempts to rob opposition parties of talking points in order to achieve short-term electoral advantage. Their actions, however tactical and contingent, nevertheless changes the parameters of acceptable public opinion. To employ a term I generally try to avoid, it shifts the “Overton window,” and this has political consequences for all the reasons I mentioned in the paragraph before this one.

Migrationism is both a political programme and an incipient ideology, not unlike pandemicism. It depends, for its long-term viability, on a series of seven or eight intertwined myths, which the present German political establishment, in their myopic desperation, are eagerly undermining.

In what follows, I will list these myths, explain how German political elites are presently destroying them, and finally provide some brief evidence that the migrationist ideological system, in Germany at least, is facing collapse.