The performative morality of the left and the pragmatist threat, or: Why our political establishment has become so childish and naive, and so deranged by the phantom "extreme right"

A modest theory of present-day political dysfunction.

Leftists demonstrate against the right following the knife attack in Solingen. The central banner reads “Fascism is not an opinion, but a crime.” Source.

I am still preoccupied by the aftermath of Issa al Hassan’s attack in Solingen. It has unleashed all manner of typically lunatic and pathological discourse.

Our largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published an interview with an odious Green politician (and Syrian immigrant) named Lamya Kaddor, in which Kaddor expresses her regret that “Many Muslims and people with a migrant background … are now afraid … that the same debates will start again, that they will be stigmatised and placed under general suspicion.” Germans stabbed by Sunni Muslim terrorist, Muslims most affected: we are so much in the realm of parody that I find no room for satire of my own.

Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, meanwhile, has released a long, rambling statement, about how we can’t succumb to “grief, anger, powerlessness and rage” by letting “terrorists” fuel the “fight of ‘the Muslims against ‘the West’” and giving in to “racism and Islamophobia.” To counteract the grave threat of terrorist-inspired racism, we must cede the state more surveillance powers, ban knives in city centres and “fight against radicalisation” – among other things by forcing internet platforms to combat extremist propaganda. Practicing elemental border security and deporting people who don’t belong here are not solutions that Habeck even once considers.

We’ve heard all of this before. In fact, we’ve grown so accustomed to our politicians responding to the misdeeds of their imported clients in this way, that we fail to recognise how bizarre it all is. Were we to take an average statesmen from 1910 and transport him forward in time to observe present-day politics, what would he make of it all? Could he fail to conclude that we had all gone mad?

I’ve spilled many words here at the plague chronicle trying to describe what is wrong with our politics, and today I want to throw another theory onto the pile. In particular, I want to discuss an important change that has been growing within Western politics for a long time, but that has become especially predominant in the last two generations. This change is related to the ascendancy of the left, the cultural dominance of the 1968 generation and the growing prominence of head girls in the systems that rule us. It is a major reason that our politicians have become so irrational and childish, and why they seem helpless in the face of so many concrete problems, from terrorism and mass migration to the energy crisis and beyond.