Schoolmarmocracy

Thoughts on the hall monitors and the discourse police who make progressive Western politics such an unbearable lobotomised shitshow

Germany is becoming a weird place – not just politically, but culturally and discursively too. Every day it more closely resembles a massive open-air kindergarten.

Consider what is happening to the Bundestag: This has always been a highly ponderous parliamentary body, basically the Ambien of Western liberal democracy. As our economic situation and our political system have deteriorated, however, Bundestag discourse has only become more farcical. Under Bundestag President Julia Klöckner, it is increasingly forbidden to say anything interesting at all. Alice Weidel in a recent speech was admonished for observing that Chancellor Friedrich Merz has become the “lying chancellor” in the eyes of the people. Also forbidden in Klöckner’s Bundestag: using the English word “bullshit” (which is not really a profanity in German), referring to the statements of other politicians as “untruths” and calling the self-proclaimed “democratic parties” a “political cartel.” Even the basic act of levelling accusations against one’s political opponents is now out of bounds. All of this is uncivil, beyond the pale, unbecoming of parliamentary discourse – and should you overstep, you are likely to get a lecture and maybe even a call to order from nightmare-haunting personages like Bundestag Vice President Josephine Ortleb:

Or consider what has happened since the election of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf to the Federal Constitutional Court blew up in Merz’s face last week. The immensely grating Britta Haßelmann, whose voice sounds like what would happen if you crossed a frog with a D-list soprano and who for some reason co-chairs the Green Bundestag faction, stood at the podium on the day of the failed vote and shrieked in a quite unhinged and extended manner about the evils of misogyny, which is naturally the only conceivable reason CDU representatives might not want a lunatic leftoid on the nation’s highest court.

Haßelmann yelling, shouting and throwing up inadvertent white power gang signs in the Bundestag last week.

Since Haßelmann gave vent to her pathological fury, the left together with their allies in the press have been losing their minds over this simple, singular failed vote. It is nuts and also extremely obnoxious. As in Klöckner’s Bundestag, it is the discourse police in particular who are out in force. They tell us that rude alternative right-wing media bears moral responsibility for destroying Brosius-Gersdorf’s candidacy and that critiques of this sacred woman are totally out of bounds and that rumours of her plagiarism are especially deplorable. Everywhere you turn there are shrill screaming harpies shouting not so much that you are wrong, as that what you are saying is unjust, inappropriate and perhaps even sinful.

This is schoolmarmocracy. It’s what happens when people like the women pictured above over-accumulate in your governing institutions. It is everywhere in the West, but Germany has a particularly noxious case of it. The plague has been getting worse for years, arguably since the beginning of our present political moment in the years after 1945. It has never been worse than now.

Schoolmarms are a specific genre of human, especially common among European-descended females of a certain age, though men can be schoolmarms too. Schoolmarms have some utility as social enforcers among the young or the mentally deficient, but when too many of them end up in positions of prominence and authority you have serious problems. Everywhere schoolmarms gain the upper hand, we see the same symptoms – an obsession with vocabulary over ideas, a pervasive insistence that everybody be nice, constant catastrophising and a tendency to divide every concept and ultimately every person into opposing camps of good and evil. In their small-minded obsession with shallow propriety, schoolmarms impose a cultural rigidity and a profoundly formulaic and unreflective discourse that induces a kind of political arthritis. They make your nation stiff, senile and dumb.