Why establishment political discourse is so vacuous, dishonest and oblivious to reality

A screen grab from Markus Lanz’s twice-weekly political talkshow on ZDF –invariably a gathering of very serious grown-up people who discuss in highly serious terms such cutting-edge issues as why we need to import millions of foreigners or why we need to force-vaccinate everybody or why it is crucial to further undermine our electrical grid by installing more wind turbines.

German political discourse sucks.

Because it is my job, I open the newspapers every morning, now and again I even turn on the television, and only the smallest part of what I encounter there addresses real themes and problems in any remotely honest way. My American readers might think the New York Times or CNN or even MSNBC is bad, but in Germany we have it an order of magnitude worse. Imagine that you’re standing in an apartment that has begun to fill with smoke, and the people with you only want to compare and contrast wallpaper samples. It’s like that.

Now and again, you get hints that even the most committed supporters of our insane discourse also understand – at least sporadically – that something has gone wrong here. They’ve noticed the smoke too, and while they don’t want to lose face by asking about it (nobody else seems to be doing that), they do get to wondering. Are other people seeing this shit? What’s going on? Is this safe? Are we allowed to say something, or would that be racist? Not being able to discuss reality openly because of prior ideological constraints can be pretty confusing.

Robert Pausch, a political reporter for the mainstream newsweekly Die Zeit, is the latest pundit to step out of line and begin asking some of the pressing questions rattling around his head. He’s just listened to a podcast debate between the right-leaning publisher Götz Kubitscheck and the AfD politician Maximilian Krah, which he believes addresses “the meaning and purpose of right-wing extremist politics.” The dialogue leaves him astounded and fascinated; for him, it is “one of the most interesting things to come out of party politics and its intellectual milieu in recent memory.”

The two men argue about what kind of party the AfD should actually be: fundamentalist and opposed to the system (Kubitscheck) or flexible and ready to govern (Krah). They discuss what relationship an anti-liberal party like the AfD should have with the liberal constitutional state, which principles should be accepted and which should be overcome. They argue heatedly about the right strategy – whether to shift the Overton Window further to the right, as Kubitscheck demands – or, as Krah sees it, to use self-restraint and thereby to allow the state a face-saving way to back down from its fight against the AfD.

(None of that is quite right – the whole thing is filtered through Pausch’s terrible liberal fun glasses – but it is close enough, and right now the details matter less than Pausch’s sudden unease with his own political world.)

Pausch proceeds to ask why “discussions of this depth and substance are currently happening only on the radical right.” Why, for example, aren’t the CDU debating how to implement their “conservative” principles, after being forced to shred nearly their entire programme to form a government with the Social Democrats? And where is the introspection among the Social Democrats following their worst electoral result in history? Instead they now pledge merely to “go out, listen, and make politics for ‘the people,’” which is the kind of thing they and the Greens are always saying.

Where is the intellectual ecosystem that poses a challenge to politics, as we see on the right? Where are the texts by left-wing, liberal or conservative intellectuals that get everybody talking? Today, the radical right is the place where politics are discussed most vividly. That is a sad finding and probably also a factor in its current success.

“The good news,” Pausch says in closing, “is that this … should be relatively easy to change.” In this Pausch is completely wrong, and the first clue is the extremely outraged comment section below his article. Everybody there is ready to tar and feather the good Herr Pausch for the sin of even airing these questions. All those people want their political discussions to stay vacuous and oblivious. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Then there is the fact that this problem is much, much bigger than Germany. Every Western country that I have any experience of suffers from the same issue. For whatever reason, and via whatever arcane processes, the establishment political scene has managed to denude politics itself of the political. This was the state of discourse in America when I lived there before Trump reforged the Republican Party, and it still seems to be the way of things in Democratic circles. The United Kingdom and France and I am sure pretty everywhere else has succumbed to this selfsame disease too.

If it weren’t all around us, we might have trouble imagining what politics without political content even looks like. It is akin to watching a film that has no plot. In our present apolitical politics, all acceptable discussion devolves to a series of tiresome technocratic debates about optimising various metrics and tweaking or expanding different schemes to give poor people more free stuff. The centre-right opposition agrees that all of this is totally necessary but would prefer that we just do everything a little more slowly in perhaps a slightly different order. Beyond these stultifying discussions, all involved raise endless paeans to the wonderfulness and excellence of “our democracy,” with an urgency an objective observer would find unsettling.

This has made all political discussion totally exhausting. Almost everybody finds things like parliamentary debates unendurably dry and most of us have to force our way through the political section of the newspaper. Much more than our own overburdened attention spans are at stake here, though. The political discussion has become so impoverished that especially left-establishment parties like the Democrats in the United States, Labour in the United Kingdom and the Social Democrats in Germany can’t even conceive of (let alone articulate) the reasons for their widening unpopularity.

Below the fold, I want to explore what is going on, and why all sensible discussion has migrated to the political fringes. I want to argue that, without a serious political upset, it can’t be any other way, and that if our side is ever in power, it will probably suffer a similar degradation of its ability to debate and describe problems.