"Should the voters go rogue and install any such party at the state level, a prominent police union functionary openly hopes for insurrection and federal intervention."
I don't know how that is *anything* other than a precursor to civil insurrection. Everyone talks about the UK being a tinderbox, but this is bad. *Really* banana-republic-level bad. And do they not know their own history? Weimar Germany was a seething mess of competing police and paramilitary organizations tied to specific parties and all armed to the hilt. If anything it was the NAZI party that cleaned that up and introduced a level of uniformity to the uniforms.
Just how stupid are office-holders in Germany? Their voters? Every day my old impression of German intelligence and industry seeps away ever further.
Apparently, the German constitution allows civil insurrection in a case like that. In another comment eugyppius replied: 'Article 91 permits the federal government to intervene in state affairs in the case of "an imminent danger to the existence or free democratic basic order" – either by commanding state police directly or sending in the federal border police.'
Oh I'm sure that will end *really* well. Imagine being in Eastern Germany long enough to have seen statist authoritarianism make a comeback where you hoped it had been done away with forever. At that point the east may as well break back off again entirely.
Should such an insurrection occur, this "prominent police union functionary" may be in some distress to learn that s/he will be on the receiving end of it.
'"…state riot police should work together with the Federal Police on the strength of article Article 91 of the German Basic Law to intervene against the government of this East German state…"'
'…a prominent police union functionary openly hopes for insurrection and federal intervention.'
So the Constitution mandates insurrection against the democratically elected government in order to protect the Constitution? I haven't finished drawing my chart yet, but this feels very circular.
Article 91 permits the federal government to intervene in state affairs in the case of "an imminent danger to the existence or free democratic basic order" – either by commanding state police directly or sending in the federal border police.
Absolutely fascinating what is happening in the old West Germany.
Remember it was East Germany that used to live in a totaliterian state.
Will the penny ever drop that the East Germans might actually know a totaliterian State when they see one?
But- no - East Germans are the new Nazi Hitler loving people who are siding with Nazi Russia. Lol.
I just love History inversion but it is so sad that so many swallow it. One only has to look at Covid Clown World to see the perfect divide between East and West Germany.
The difference is the wording: Does Article 91 "permit" the federal government to intervene in a case of imminent danger, or does it "mandate" such federal intervention?
One feature I kept coming back to many times, and always rejected, was having a Royal Naysayer whose sole power was to disband the legislature and simultaneously abdicate. (Crown princes were elected, so the Royal Naysayer had no say in his successor.) The problem was the eternal one of Who Decides? As soon as someone is given that power, it will be abused. Imagine a Royal Naysayer who threatens to disband the legislature if they don't pass a law he wants. The minute they even introduce a bill to rein him in, he disbands them. Get enough Crown Princes with the same attitude, and who knows what would happen.
In the end, the only way I could see to solve the problem was to invert the legal hierarchy: any district can override its parent districts' laws within that district, and the district voters themselves can hold an election independent of government control to override their district laws.
I simply don't see any way to use government to prevent government from going rogue. There has to be some way for the people themselves to override government, short of revolution.
In a sense, that is exactly what the US Constitution attempted to do, but in a static, pro facto sense, rather than via the means of overriding legislation at the local level. As originally conceived, and as clarified in Amendment 10, the federal government had supreme authority but only in specifically acknowledged arenas. In everything else, the several states were intended to retain their own individual sovereignty.
That understanding is pretty much gone now, but that is what the founders and ratifiers thought they were doing.
I got my idea from the original Federalism, but went full retard: states can nullify federal laws within the state, cities can override state laws within the city, and voters can override city laws.
The real problem I see is not the partial federalism of the Constitution, but that federal politicians, judges, and bureaucrats have the final say on when the federal government has gone too far. In effect, my lower districts, and voters, have an ironclad a veto over higher district overreach. No level of government has any final say in defining itself.
It's fun to imagine theoretical forms of government.
Tending to think of things anthropologically, and taking into account the proportion of born sociopaths/psychopaths in Homo sapiens, I think Dunbar's Number is the most important factor.
However, wishing us back to Paleolithic hunter-gatherer status isn't much of a solution. Sorry.
Wasn't the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia almost exactly what you first suggested? A group of delegates free to imagine and debate theoretical forms of government? What a time to be alive.
"your loss of constitutional rights protects me, my loss of constitutional rights protects you. Now go get your experimental gene therapy to protect me."
Deployment of the BGS in Sachsen-Anhalt would be a pure through the looking glass moment. They would cross from west to east the border that they were formed to protect from westward incursions from the soviet empire.
If the broomsticks with which they are armed in a good day when sick notes don’t keep them home presumably German police can be reinforced by EuroGenFor.
I so appreciate that you're a rigorous chronicler and not an opinion writer.
And we should all be honest about politics. If you have a "side" it's because you dislike the policies or philosophies of the other side, and therefore you would never want them to win, right? Otherwise it's just a board game. But policies affect our real lives.
The concept of bipartisanship is a lie against human nature, isn't it? We've seen in the US from the postwar era that the guys who go into politics see it as a fun club where they can trade small favors to achieve their overall common goals--to run everything forever and get rich.
And because of this I don't mind in the least Trump and his family finding all sorts of new fun ways to get rich as long as the Trump era destroys both parties as they've been constituted, forever.
I am not aware the Trump family is profiting from office. Not like the Trump clan.
It is important to analyse what went wrong g with the parties and the political class. We know what went wrong with the institutions the left took them over from within as per the decades old plan.
But why did non or marginal socialists get so disfigured.
The consequences of a non-elite majority will not be as your police commentator suggested. When their bluff is called they will be grovelling g cords ours of the sort the old elites gave.
They're making tons of money from all sorts of jolly schemes and I don't give the least damn about it.
Socialism is a religion like any other and its adherents are as little tethered to reality as any cult members are. People find it desperately hard to give up the foolish aspects of the beliefs of their parents/ancestors and they try to fill the hollow place with what they imagine to be a modern rational way of dealing with the world. It never turns out to be modern and rational.
'They're making tons of money from all sorts of jolly schemes and I don't give the least damn about it.'
I find myself feeling the same way, especially when I point out to my progressive friends complaining about Trump enriching himself that Biden, and before him Obama and the Clintons, did exactly the same thing—as has almost every other high-level politician in modern history, if not all history.
My progressive friends express horrified disbelief, at least about the Democrats on the list. Secondarily, they consider it a defense of Trump, which it absolutely isn't.
(I know some would call this what-aboutism. Like the label "conspiracy theorist", that's just dismissing by smear something uncomfortable to contemplate.)
Nothing like the Biden racketeering family. Minimally the Trump family dabbles in private enterprise while the Biden racketeering family either shook down other countries, sold access or used their position to legislate for their families advantage.
The problem is that the Trump administration is actively promoting AI, which will, indeed, eventually neuter (but probably not destroy) the political parties, but will also eliminate privacy and freedom in the process. And they and their buddies are finding ways to get rich also, while the national debt continues its rapid climb. It will not end well.
It is an interesting theory (the “shared party state”). I wonder if it can really stand up with rigour against the more common-sense explanation that this is multi party democracy in action, with what in other countries is called “the establishment”. I suppose a forensic question would be, has any other party ever been treated the same as the AfD (there was a party banned as being continuation NSDAP I believe?) or conversely if any insurgent party has been treated differently than the AfD? You mention the Greens. I think a stronger explanation would be needed of how the Greens became an exception, beyond “because Reunification”?
The Greens were excluded and demonised for years, through the early 1990s - at which point they were allowed into the fold after purging their own ranks of anti-Atlanticist elements. This really was related to a general party-political shakeup after 1990, and probably a belief on the part of the SPD that the Greens were not a serious threat.
The other major post-reunification party to enter BRD politics was the ex-SED (later Die Linke), which got the full defensive democracy treatment from the constitutional protectors and everything for years.
Then there are of course a multitude of small parties that got the rough treatment after they started to win regional elections, like NPD.
Of course there are also the two parties banned under Adenauer to mention - the post-Nazi SRP and the KPD. These also important for understanding the political system, although the bans themselves didn’t matter that much as both parties were already in decline.
It’s not ordinary party politics when state organs actively intervene in the political landscape via intelligence agencies, judicial interventions and the like on behalf of ruling parties.
Of course I’m totally in agreement about the police letter. That’s extraordinary. Thank you for explaining the background on the Greens and the SED/Linke. It certainly supports your thesis. Very interesting!
No other party has ever been treated this way because no other party has been gifted every rational policy position by such an irrational government. AfD is a danger to the cartel parties because the AfD is right.
>>It is an interesting theory (the “shared party state”). I wonder if it can really stand up with rigour against the more common-sense explanation that this is multi party democracy in action, with what in other countries is called “the establishment”.<<
Yes, it sounds a lot like what some people in the USA call "the uniparty."
Mass immigration might eventually replace the people, at least in "white" nations. The purpose behind Artificial Intelligence is to eliminate voting itself, which is more effective in the long run. It may also eliminate most of the people.
Voting every 2, 3, 4, or 5 years for some asshole to make decisions on one's behalf is the pinnacle of human achievement. The Greeks got it wrong with their notion that democracy is direct and participatory. To allow plebs to vote online on matters that affect them would be anarchism. The American system is best. The US has twice the number of people that China has who have an IQ in the "mentally retarded" range and only 1/10 the number of people with an IQ in the "superior" or "very superior" ranges. 2/3 of Americans have an IQ below Chinese mean IQ. Allowing their votes to dominate the outcome in terms of which assholes are elected to make decisions is the best of all possible worlds.
My neighbor is a dual citizen German, a lovely man, and his frumpy over-educated American wife. He was up on his backyard shed trimming one of his big trees that came into our yard. I grabbed a ladder to help work with him to shape the thing, so it wasn't taking over the neighborhood. We talked.
I have known both of them to be quite liberal. I can hear some of his wife's phone conversations in the back yard. She is loud. She is a died-in-the-wool hard-core liberal. In one conversation with a friend, they were planning a trip to a "No Kings" march. I generally steered clear talking politics with them... although one of their sons is a hard-core Republican and I have chatted with him.
I asked the tree-trimming father how his job was going and when he would retire. He is younger than me. He is a chemical engineer for a company that makes synthetic fertilizer. Well in the next hour I learned that he had been red-pilled, liked most of Trump's policies and ideas if not his character, and had to keep it quite around his wife. He supported AfD and wanted the liberal German UE government removed. He said that his German family, mostly liberal, had turned the corner in accepting that Germany's mass immigration support had been a terrible mistake.
He was quote despondent though about his homeland. His opinion was that the liberal EU power was never going to allow AfD to take power, and the German people would remain too soft from their still-remaining guilt over starting two world wars, and also they had their weapons confiscated, and AfD and any attempt to pull the country back to the center again would fail. He said there are too many Germans like his wife that had their heads so clouded with propaganda from their education and from the regime-controlled media that they would continue to push for more and more collectivist authoritarianism until it becomes yet another German attempt at totalitarianism.
My friend thinks Germany is lost yet again.
He blames the German people as they are doing again what they did twice during the 20th century.
He thinks the US will recover from the same sickness and again will eventually end up having to bail out much of Europe for its collectivist drift idiocy.
One thing to take into account: the US population is quickly entering the "bailout fatigue" zone. "Would you send a gun to save a British home?" has become a literal punchline to the hardcore political wonks over here.
Meanwhile, over here in Canada, our own Nero, Mark Carney, runs off to Italy while Rome... er, Canada is burning, figuratively, that is. Though literally too in British Columbia and a few other places. Carney has lost in virtually every trade spat he's had with Donald Trump, since becoming P.M. a year and a half ago. "Elbows Up!" my ass. I'm sitting here in Alberta, avowed separatist and all, bemusedly watching the sniping between pro and con in the forthcoming referendum to hold a referendum - don't ask - on Oct. 19, 2026. I'll make a bold but very safe prediction, the referendum will go for the status quo, so no forthcoming actual referendum on Alberta's separation from Canada. The same shallow idiocy that possesses such a large percentage of my baby boomer generation; that allows them to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Mark Carney is doing a splendid job as Canada's Prime Minister and is at least ten times as good as Pierre Poilièvre - our leader of the official opposition - could ever be were he the Prime Minister; is the same viral idiocy that possesses a majority of Albertans and blinds them to the many decades of abuse Alberta has endured at the hands of the politically hegemonic central Canadian Laurentian elites. So the majority of Albertans will vote for the status quo so that they, we, all Albertans, will get to go down with the faltering Canadian ship of state as it slips quietly into the abyss of a post-national neo-Communist nation with barely a whimper. Carney isn't an idiot like his bunny hopping predecessor, Justin Trudeau. The damage Carney is inflicting upon Canada is no accident, it's being done by design.
So I'll watch with some mild interest the upcoming German state elections as another western democracy tries to scupper itself in the pursuit of a post-national fairyland that put humanity's social progress back 1500 years. This while my own nation is circling the drain. All while the Chinese dragon lies in a corner, watching with great anticipation. And the Jihadist hordes are milling about the gates of our western societies. Anyone taking wagers, what happens first? Do the Jihadis destroy us from within? Does China take us down, through cyber attack and economic war, not real kinetic war? Or do we just implode through apathy, lethargy, and self-delusion? One thing's certain, I'm glad I'll probably not be around to see the worst of what's to come for our erstwhile free nations.
I can see things edging that way myself. I think the country will more likely implode first with the Muslims fighting it out with the Khalistanis (Sikhs) to see who gets what of what's left. Hope I'm long gone by the time that happens.
The Jihadis are already gaining traction in the US. They figured out that calling themselves socialists distracts the useful idiots from noticing their true motivations.
I will qualify, most gays are just that, gay. Just straight up gay, pardon the pun. I do believe most gays genuinely don't like transgender dorks. If you are a man who seriously believes you are a woman you are mentally ill, not sexually confused, mentally ill. I believe likely 95%, maybe more, of all transgender people are scheming, conniving deviants. They do it because they're sexually depraved, conniving for attention, scheming for fame, glory, and wealth, or they are pedophiles or fetishists. And yeah, a transgender "woman" protesting alongside Palestinians is probably stupider than an actual gay guy doing it. I do not live in a large blue American city, I live in the most left wing place in Alberta, Edmonton. But because I live here in Alberta, even in the leftist utopia that is Edmonton the Alberta government laid down the law on those "peaceful" pro-Palestinian protests and campus occupations. They tried to start that crap here but the province told the cities end the occupations and enforce the laws regarding protests or the province would directly intervene. The campus occupation at the University of Alberta in Edmonton was shut down within 24 hours, the one at the University of Calgary was shut down in 48 hours. The very few protests were small, watched closely by police with the occasional arrest, and often counterbalanced by counter-protesters which were usually much larger. So in Canada it's really only Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto that saw those really big protests. They never became a thing in Alberta, thank heavens for that. Still, we have our share of stupidity here but there is still a thread of sanity in our provincial government.
"Should the voters go rogue and install any such party at the state level, a prominent police union functionary openly hopes for insurrection and federal intervention."
I don't know how that is *anything* other than a precursor to civil insurrection. Everyone talks about the UK being a tinderbox, but this is bad. *Really* banana-republic-level bad. And do they not know their own history? Weimar Germany was a seething mess of competing police and paramilitary organizations tied to specific parties and all armed to the hilt. If anything it was the NAZI party that cleaned that up and introduced a level of uniformity to the uniforms.
Just how stupid are office-holders in Germany? Their voters? Every day my old impression of German intelligence and industry seeps away ever further.
Apparently, the German constitution allows civil insurrection in a case like that. In another comment eugyppius replied: 'Article 91 permits the federal government to intervene in state affairs in the case of "an imminent danger to the existence or free democratic basic order" – either by commanding state police directly or sending in the federal border police.'
Oh I'm sure that will end *really* well. Imagine being in Eastern Germany long enough to have seen statist authoritarianism make a comeback where you hoped it had been done away with forever. At that point the east may as well break back off again entirely.
My first thought is, *who* gets to decide there's an imminent danger, and on what basis?
Such squishy language is ripe for exploitation.
The same people who get to decide what's "disinformation" or "misinformation".
They are not only stupid or incompetent, they are evil
Should such an insurrection occur, this "prominent police union functionary" may be in some distress to learn that s/he will be on the receiving end of it.
That seems like the sort of attack that might trigger NATO Article V.
There was always a clear divide between industry and the politicians - even back in the 1970s.
Now the industrial leaders are infected with wishy-washy thinking.
It's not going to end well.
'"…state riot police should work together with the Federal Police on the strength of article Article 91 of the German Basic Law to intervene against the government of this East German state…"'
'…a prominent police union functionary openly hopes for insurrection and federal intervention.'
So the Constitution mandates insurrection against the democratically elected government in order to protect the Constitution? I haven't finished drawing my chart yet, but this feels very circular.
[edited to fix a stupid copy/paste blunder]
Article 91 permits the federal government to intervene in state affairs in the case of "an imminent danger to the existence or free democratic basic order" – either by commanding state police directly or sending in the federal border police.
AKA anything they don't like.
Absolutely fascinating what is happening in the old West Germany.
Remember it was East Germany that used to live in a totaliterian state.
Will the penny ever drop that the East Germans might actually know a totaliterian State when they see one?
But- no - East Germans are the new Nazi Hitler loving people who are siding with Nazi Russia. Lol.
I just love History inversion but it is so sad that so many swallow it. One only has to look at Covid Clown World to see the perfect divide between East and West Germany.
The difference is the wording: Does Article 91 "permit" the federal government to intervene in a case of imminent danger, or does it "mandate" such federal intervention?
Another interesting question is: *who* decides about the imminent danger, and how?
(Chartertopia is my near-anarchist fantasy.)
One feature I kept coming back to many times, and always rejected, was having a Royal Naysayer whose sole power was to disband the legislature and simultaneously abdicate. (Crown princes were elected, so the Royal Naysayer had no say in his successor.) The problem was the eternal one of Who Decides? As soon as someone is given that power, it will be abused. Imagine a Royal Naysayer who threatens to disband the legislature if they don't pass a law he wants. The minute they even introduce a bill to rein him in, he disbands them. Get enough Crown Princes with the same attitude, and who knows what would happen.
In the end, the only way I could see to solve the problem was to invert the legal hierarchy: any district can override its parent districts' laws within that district, and the district voters themselves can hold an election independent of government control to override their district laws.
I simply don't see any way to use government to prevent government from going rogue. There has to be some way for the people themselves to override government, short of revolution.
> any district can override its
> parent districts' laws within
> that district,
In a sense, that is exactly what the US Constitution attempted to do, but in a static, pro facto sense, rather than via the means of overriding legislation at the local level. As originally conceived, and as clarified in Amendment 10, the federal government had supreme authority but only in specifically acknowledged arenas. In everything else, the several states were intended to retain their own individual sovereignty.
That understanding is pretty much gone now, but that is what the founders and ratifiers thought they were doing.
I got my idea from the original Federalism, but went full retard: states can nullify federal laws within the state, cities can override state laws within the city, and voters can override city laws.
The real problem I see is not the partial federalism of the Constitution, but that federal politicians, judges, and bureaucrats have the final say on when the federal government has gone too far. In effect, my lower districts, and voters, have an ironclad a veto over higher district overreach. No level of government has any final say in defining itself.
It's fun to imagine theoretical forms of government.
Tending to think of things anthropologically, and taking into account the proportion of born sociopaths/psychopaths in Homo sapiens, I think Dunbar's Number is the most important factor.
However, wishing us back to Paleolithic hunter-gatherer status isn't much of a solution. Sorry.
Wasn't the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia almost exactly what you first suggested? A group of delegates free to imagine and debate theoretical forms of government? What a time to be alive.
Eh? What did I say about Paleolithic hunter-gatherer status?
"having a Royal Naysayer whose sole power was to disband the legislature and simultaneously abdicate."
I'd like to dub him "The Ombeesman."
The same people who were in charge of the COVID response . . . whoever they were.
Come to think of it, this has parallels to Abraham Lincoln and the Confederacy.
Does it also parallel the recent suspension of civil rights in order to cure a respiratory virus?
"your loss of constitutional rights protects me, my loss of constitutional rights protects you. Now go get your experimental gene therapy to protect me."
;)
Deployment of the BGS in Sachsen-Anhalt would be a pure through the looking glass moment. They would cross from west to east the border that they were formed to protect from westward incursions from the soviet empire.
Article 91, that's some article......
If the broomsticks with which they are armed in a good day when sick notes don’t keep them home presumably German police can be reinforced by EuroGenFor.
I so appreciate that you're a rigorous chronicler and not an opinion writer.
And we should all be honest about politics. If you have a "side" it's because you dislike the policies or philosophies of the other side, and therefore you would never want them to win, right? Otherwise it's just a board game. But policies affect our real lives.
The concept of bipartisanship is a lie against human nature, isn't it? We've seen in the US from the postwar era that the guys who go into politics see it as a fun club where they can trade small favors to achieve their overall common goals--to run everything forever and get rich.
And because of this I don't mind in the least Trump and his family finding all sorts of new fun ways to get rich as long as the Trump era destroys both parties as they've been constituted, forever.
This is the comment du mon jour.
I am not aware the Trump family is profiting from office. Not like the Trump clan.
It is important to analyse what went wrong g with the parties and the political class. We know what went wrong with the institutions the left took them over from within as per the decades old plan.
But why did non or marginal socialists get so disfigured.
The consequences of a non-elite majority will not be as your police commentator suggested. When their bluff is called they will be grovelling g cords ours of the sort the old elites gave.
They're making tons of money from all sorts of jolly schemes and I don't give the least damn about it.
Socialism is a religion like any other and its adherents are as little tethered to reality as any cult members are. People find it desperately hard to give up the foolish aspects of the beliefs of their parents/ancestors and they try to fill the hollow place with what they imagine to be a modern rational way of dealing with the world. It never turns out to be modern and rational.
'They're making tons of money from all sorts of jolly schemes and I don't give the least damn about it.'
I find myself feeling the same way, especially when I point out to my progressive friends complaining about Trump enriching himself that Biden, and before him Obama and the Clintons, did exactly the same thing—as has almost every other high-level politician in modern history, if not all history.
My progressive friends express horrified disbelief, at least about the Democrats on the list. Secondarily, they consider it a defense of Trump, which it absolutely isn't.
(I know some would call this what-aboutism. Like the label "conspiracy theorist", that's just dismissing by smear something uncomfortable to contemplate.)
It's really simple for me these days. I voted for Trump so the other guys would lose. They did.
To this day, I shudder to contemplate President Kamala.
And VP Walz. I can say entirely outside dogma but with full sincerity that the Almighty saved us.
"What-aboutism" is a legitimate counter-argument.
You're on a roll today 😜
I ain't always this sharp? I better take more vitamins.
To rephrase, you're *especially* sharp today 😬
Thank you my dear.
Adderall.
Irish Breakfast Tea does me just fine.
Repeated login to the site is tedious.
I prefer evidence. What do you have to support your claim.
Do your own research.
It seems that's no longer permitted. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or Grok will do your research for you.
Well heck whatever he needs to use.
Which claim? Paragraph one or paragraph two?
I don't really care, but without being more specific your comment appears to be knee-jerk emotional rather than genuine interest.
Evidence includes you pointing out what claims you find lacking.
Evidence also includes your claims to the contrary.
An unfalsifiable claim like yours is worthless.
Nothing like the Biden racketeering family. Minimally the Trump family dabbles in private enterprise while the Biden racketeering family either shook down other countries, sold access or used their position to legislate for their families advantage.
The problem is that the Trump administration is actively promoting AI, which will, indeed, eventually neuter (but probably not destroy) the political parties, but will also eliminate privacy and freedom in the process. And they and their buddies are finding ways to get rich also, while the national debt continues its rapid climb. It will not end well.
Cynical me wants to reply that privacy and freedom were well on their way to destruction already; AI will simply accelerate the process.
how is that cynical and not just a description of the historical trend?
They're the same.
"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it."
-Mark Twain
It is an interesting theory (the “shared party state”). I wonder if it can really stand up with rigour against the more common-sense explanation that this is multi party democracy in action, with what in other countries is called “the establishment”. I suppose a forensic question would be, has any other party ever been treated the same as the AfD (there was a party banned as being continuation NSDAP I believe?) or conversely if any insurgent party has been treated differently than the AfD? You mention the Greens. I think a stronger explanation would be needed of how the Greens became an exception, beyond “because Reunification”?
The Greens were excluded and demonised for years, through the early 1990s - at which point they were allowed into the fold after purging their own ranks of anti-Atlanticist elements. This really was related to a general party-political shakeup after 1990, and probably a belief on the part of the SPD that the Greens were not a serious threat.
The other major post-reunification party to enter BRD politics was the ex-SED (later Die Linke), which got the full defensive democracy treatment from the constitutional protectors and everything for years.
Then there are of course a multitude of small parties that got the rough treatment after they started to win regional elections, like NPD.
Of course there are also the two parties banned under Adenauer to mention - the post-Nazi SRP and the KPD. These also important for understanding the political system, although the bans themselves didn’t matter that much as both parties were already in decline.
It’s not ordinary party politics when state organs actively intervene in the political landscape via intelligence agencies, judicial interventions and the like on behalf of ruling parties.
Of course I’m totally in agreement about the police letter. That’s extraordinary. Thank you for explaining the background on the Greens and the SED/Linke. It certainly supports your thesis. Very interesting!
No other party has ever been treated this way because no other party has been gifted every rational policy position by such an irrational government. AfD is a danger to the cartel parties because the AfD is right.
>>It is an interesting theory (the “shared party state”). I wonder if it can really stand up with rigour against the more common-sense explanation that this is multi party democracy in action, with what in other countries is called “the establishment”.<<
Yes, it sounds a lot like what some people in the USA call "the uniparty."
I think the Greens are useful. They advocate for policies the establishment want or can at least exploit. Rationing energy being the main one.
"... embarked upon a sustained temper tantrum about the interference of alternative media and populist elements in court nominations."
OMG! God forbid we might have to hear from the people in "our democracy"!
The irony is rich enough to cut with a dull knife, yet they can't see it.
Once again, an excellent big picture overview of not only German government, but human affairs in general.
Should the AfD have the temerity to win in Sachsen-Anhalt, will you then become a Police state, in order to protect the Constitution, of course?
So in order to save democracy, it has to be destroyed?
As Brecht suggested in Die Lösung, why not just dissolve the people and elect another?
“ The people get the government they deserve …good and hard “ ..HL Mencken
They are feverishly working on it. We call it Artificial Intelligence.
Most call it mass immigration.
Mass immigration might eventually replace the people, at least in "white" nations. The purpose behind Artificial Intelligence is to eliminate voting itself, which is more effective in the long run. It may also eliminate most of the people.
We need to violently suppress dissent to protect the democratic process!
Squash democracy to save it ?
Similar situation in the Netherlands where a minority centre-left government is holding the country to ransom. It won’t end well.
Voting every 2, 3, 4, or 5 years for some asshole to make decisions on one's behalf is the pinnacle of human achievement. The Greeks got it wrong with their notion that democracy is direct and participatory. To allow plebs to vote online on matters that affect them would be anarchism. The American system is best. The US has twice the number of people that China has who have an IQ in the "mentally retarded" range and only 1/10 the number of people with an IQ in the "superior" or "very superior" ranges. 2/3 of Americans have an IQ below Chinese mean IQ. Allowing their votes to dominate the outcome in terms of which assholes are elected to make decisions is the best of all possible worlds.
Yes. Democracy is fine. It is universal suffrage that hammers it. At the very least it needs to be net contributors only.
Making it officially an oligarchy, as the US Founders intended.
Many of us, especially in the US, will struggle mightily with our lifelong indoctrination about universal suffrage.
Same everywhere in the West. It has become a right just like everything else.
I think the Iron Law of Oligarchy makes population IQ rates moot.
My neighbor is a dual citizen German, a lovely man, and his frumpy over-educated American wife. He was up on his backyard shed trimming one of his big trees that came into our yard. I grabbed a ladder to help work with him to shape the thing, so it wasn't taking over the neighborhood. We talked.
I have known both of them to be quite liberal. I can hear some of his wife's phone conversations in the back yard. She is loud. She is a died-in-the-wool hard-core liberal. In one conversation with a friend, they were planning a trip to a "No Kings" march. I generally steered clear talking politics with them... although one of their sons is a hard-core Republican and I have chatted with him.
I asked the tree-trimming father how his job was going and when he would retire. He is younger than me. He is a chemical engineer for a company that makes synthetic fertilizer. Well in the next hour I learned that he had been red-pilled, liked most of Trump's policies and ideas if not his character, and had to keep it quite around his wife. He supported AfD and wanted the liberal German UE government removed. He said that his German family, mostly liberal, had turned the corner in accepting that Germany's mass immigration support had been a terrible mistake.
He was quote despondent though about his homeland. His opinion was that the liberal EU power was never going to allow AfD to take power, and the German people would remain too soft from their still-remaining guilt over starting two world wars, and also they had their weapons confiscated, and AfD and any attempt to pull the country back to the center again would fail. He said there are too many Germans like his wife that had their heads so clouded with propaganda from their education and from the regime-controlled media that they would continue to push for more and more collectivist authoritarianism until it becomes yet another German attempt at totalitarianism.
My friend thinks Germany is lost yet again.
He blames the German people as they are doing again what they did twice during the 20th century.
He thinks the US will recover from the same sickness and again will eventually end up having to bail out much of Europe for its collectivist drift idiocy.
Oh my. Thank you for your detailed report of your neighbor's feelings. I feel so bad for him.
I'm sure books have been written about this, but what is it about the Germans that makes them so different from neighboring Europeans…?
Or maybe in today's situation they're not so different, since other EU countries are going down similar paths.
> starting two world wars
I must say that Germany had a hell of a lot of help getting the first one started.
Did they act stupidly? Yes, but so did every single other government in Europe too.
One thing to take into account: the US population is quickly entering the "bailout fatigue" zone. "Would you send a gun to save a British home?" has become a literal punchline to the hardcore political wonks over here.
We were there before we entered WWI and WWII. But problems in Europe tend to force our hand.
" ... their heads so clouded with propaganda from their education and from the regime-controlled media ... "
Exactly right. I'm not sure it's all that different here.
By the way, he should leave his wife. Life with a woman like that is miserable. I have friends stuck with women like that. They are very unhappy men.
U.S. political reporting, with rare exceptions, is insipid dross. Germany’s political scene thanks to Eugyppius is entertaining and even enlightening.
Liking this comment at the risk of schadenfreude.
Say it once, say it a thousand times:
Nothing above the Party, nothing without the Party.
The Party is always right.
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Nothing short of a coup can now save the Central European and Northern European nations.
Meanwhile, over here in Canada, our own Nero, Mark Carney, runs off to Italy while Rome... er, Canada is burning, figuratively, that is. Though literally too in British Columbia and a few other places. Carney has lost in virtually every trade spat he's had with Donald Trump, since becoming P.M. a year and a half ago. "Elbows Up!" my ass. I'm sitting here in Alberta, avowed separatist and all, bemusedly watching the sniping between pro and con in the forthcoming referendum to hold a referendum - don't ask - on Oct. 19, 2026. I'll make a bold but very safe prediction, the referendum will go for the status quo, so no forthcoming actual referendum on Alberta's separation from Canada. The same shallow idiocy that possesses such a large percentage of my baby boomer generation; that allows them to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Mark Carney is doing a splendid job as Canada's Prime Minister and is at least ten times as good as Pierre Poilièvre - our leader of the official opposition - could ever be were he the Prime Minister; is the same viral idiocy that possesses a majority of Albertans and blinds them to the many decades of abuse Alberta has endured at the hands of the politically hegemonic central Canadian Laurentian elites. So the majority of Albertans will vote for the status quo so that they, we, all Albertans, will get to go down with the faltering Canadian ship of state as it slips quietly into the abyss of a post-national neo-Communist nation with barely a whimper. Carney isn't an idiot like his bunny hopping predecessor, Justin Trudeau. The damage Carney is inflicting upon Canada is no accident, it's being done by design.
So I'll watch with some mild interest the upcoming German state elections as another western democracy tries to scupper itself in the pursuit of a post-national fairyland that put humanity's social progress back 1500 years. This while my own nation is circling the drain. All while the Chinese dragon lies in a corner, watching with great anticipation. And the Jihadist hordes are milling about the gates of our western societies. Anyone taking wagers, what happens first? Do the Jihadis destroy us from within? Does China take us down, through cyber attack and economic war, not real kinetic war? Or do we just implode through apathy, lethargy, and self-delusion? One thing's certain, I'm glad I'll probably not be around to see the worst of what's to come for our erstwhile free nations.
For Canada, I predict the Jihadis effectively destroy you from within and effectively take over in the aftermath of that destruction.
I can see things edging that way myself. I think the country will more likely implode first with the Muslims fighting it out with the Khalistanis (Sikhs) to see who gets what of what's left. Hope I'm long gone by the time that happens.
The Jihadis are already gaining traction in the US. They figured out that calling themselves socialists distracts the useful idiots from noticing their true motivations.
Nobody stupider on the planet than a gay guy chanting with a bunch of Palestinians "From the river to the sea."
There is one thing stupider: A gay guy calling himself a transgender woman chanting "From the river to the sea."
That's a rare one, kinda like the albino timberwolf.
You think that is rare? You must not live in a large blue US city. That infestation is all around.
I will qualify, most gays are just that, gay. Just straight up gay, pardon the pun. I do believe most gays genuinely don't like transgender dorks. If you are a man who seriously believes you are a woman you are mentally ill, not sexually confused, mentally ill. I believe likely 95%, maybe more, of all transgender people are scheming, conniving deviants. They do it because they're sexually depraved, conniving for attention, scheming for fame, glory, and wealth, or they are pedophiles or fetishists. And yeah, a transgender "woman" protesting alongside Palestinians is probably stupider than an actual gay guy doing it. I do not live in a large blue American city, I live in the most left wing place in Alberta, Edmonton. But because I live here in Alberta, even in the leftist utopia that is Edmonton the Alberta government laid down the law on those "peaceful" pro-Palestinian protests and campus occupations. They tried to start that crap here but the province told the cities end the occupations and enforce the laws regarding protests or the province would directly intervene. The campus occupation at the University of Alberta in Edmonton was shut down within 24 hours, the one at the University of Calgary was shut down in 48 hours. The very few protests were small, watched closely by police with the occasional arrest, and often counterbalanced by counter-protesters which were usually much larger. So in Canada it's really only Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto that saw those really big protests. They never became a thing in Alberta, thank heavens for that. Still, we have our share of stupidity here but there is still a thread of sanity in our provincial government.