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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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You're forgetting that what causes the right to rise is the left, and (just one example) in Austria the communist party is about to get seats in parliament for the first time in generations

If the recent fortunes of the German communists are any indication, then it won't take any involvement by the right for them to falter and slide back into oblivion.

In case this means Die Linke, my understanding is that it's arguable that their bad fortunes are the direct result of power moving from the old East-German, SED-successor parts (who at least had a certain history of governance) to the anarcho-liberal West German radicals.

That's certainly one partial cause of their malady, but hardly the only one.

IMO it's important to keep in mind that the vilification of all things right-wing is probably stronger in Germany than in any other democratic country in the world. By far. By orders of magnitude. I suppose I needn't explain why or how. The German moral compass consists of "nazi" on one end and "good" on the other, and any political activity will attempt to place itself right on the good end, moving away from it only so far as practicality demands, and such practicality must always be accompanied either by a certain amoral or asocial streak, or by extensive burden of justification.

What this means is that it's trivially easy to just be an uncritical, perfectly fanatical, purity-spiralling ever-more-extreme leftist in Germany, and even in establishment Germany. By being maximally distant from the moral pole of all evil, and pushing further away from it, you automatically have the moral high ground and you can rightly consider yourself beyond reproach, and no reproach will come to you from polite society.

This in turn has the consequence of the left being absolutely loony, and there being no mechanism to reign it in. And naturally this effect is strongest in the nominal Left party, Die Linke.

In my view that's the strongest cause for their misfortunes - their increasing disjunction from reality, which can only increase over time due to the German moral compass.

Unrelated: The German right is also insane, also due to this moral compass, but in different ways. It takes madmen to go and occupy the moral pole of all evil.

Context, I guess.

From the footnotes:

...and the British did what they always did: Invent a tax that didn't bring in significant revenue while antagonizing the natives...

Facing armoured columns carrying tax-free Belgian coffee through the Ardennes, the British decided that fighting through the Ardennes three times in as many decades was enough and they'd rather not enforce the tax, thank you very much.

Any idea where I can read more about this tax (and the British Occupation Zone more generally)?

Nice historical tidbits in there and overall quite right, but I think one can tentatively say that it did not age well since the last election.

I might as well ask: how so?

Let's go party by party. I'll not try to hide my biases, and I'm not going to look for sources unless you insist.

Merkel is out of office and out of politics, and it didn't take anything drastic. I'd say it was simply a combination of exhaustion and national crises that a politician of her type was ill-equipped to deal with. As the article says, her M.O. was to remain above politics - but that was really workable only so long as politics stayed out of people's lives. Mass immigration and hysterical covid responses both actually affect people and thus reflected poorly upon Merkel, and my guess is that she's really happy to have gotten out before needing to respond to the war in the Ukraine or to take responsibility for the economic effects of the environmental policies she put underway. There's not much else to say about the CDU. They have a core of loyal voters who'll keep this party going for as long as they live. Sadly the party has absolutely no idea what it stands for or what policies it espouses. The CDU is first and foremost a club for doing politics, getting posts, and maybe keeping the other parties from screwing things up too badly, but only if it's not too much of a bother. Right now their leadership is undecided on whether to pretend to be environmentalists or conservatives.

The NPD hasn't mattered in any way in a long time. Everyone's new favorite scarecrow is the AfD, and the AfD really soaked up any sizable voting blocks the NPD ever had.

The AfD, coincidentally, has gotten into several state-level parliaments and was prevented from government participation only by opposing coalitions. They're not doing much, as all the other parties are still doing their damndest to sabotage them even if it means throwing parliamentary protocol overboard or inventing new rules, but they're also slowly taking root in the east where people are getting downright used to them.

The fortunes of the SPD have been wild, fluctuating between near-irrelevance a few years ago and somehow getting really lucky and becoming the largest government party and providing the chancellor in the last election. The War in the Ukraine really threw a spanner into their works though, and as I see it they haven't recovered yet. The German left's brand of pacifism has a hard time coexisting with their cathedral-approved hatred for Putin. Some of their ministers are still trying to just power on and do what their party is ostensibly there for, protecting the working class by forever expanding the bureaucracy, but they're also running a little scared at the prospects of what the Greens are cooking up.

The Greens are by now one of the strongest parties, with what I'd guess to be the second-largest block of loyal voters - second in size only to the CDU's, but also much younger and thus more likely to last, and they're firmly the woke/progressive/cathedral favorite. They're also in government and really getting things done. Their co-ed candidates for chancellorship ended up not getting the post thanks to the SPD's outrageous luck in the election, so they instead grabbed the ministries of foreign affairs and of the economy, and they're both trying their hardest to make names for themselves. The M.o. Foreign Affairs, when she isn't loudly proclaiming the age of feminist foreign policy, is also our standout warhawk in matters of Ukraine - a position most unusual for someone of her hardcore pacifist party. The M.o. Economy is instead leaning into the environmentalism, actually going through with Merkel's policies for national economic ruination, and adding a few more of his own to make sure that every German household gets to really feel it.

The FPD also made it into the current government, and their most known ministers are those of Law and of Finance. Their two standout contributions are respectively playing along with the other two parties to get a sexual-minorities'-rights law underway, and sabotaging all else as hard as they can to keep especially the Greens from destroying Germany's economy overnight. They've been rebranding themselves as a party that's socially progressive and economically not insane, and it seems to work. Naturally most young Germans hate them and blame them for causing the end of the world, and tend to completely ignore that the FDP did the legwork for the sexual-minorities'-bill and ascribe that one entirely to the Greens instead. Someone should tell the FDP about conflict theory.

In short, the last election went unexpected ways, and the war in the Ukraine broke a lot of people.

Thank you, this explains a lot.

Does it actually, or are you just being polite because I typed a lot? Sincere question for feedback; I'm rarely sure whether I'm on point or just blathering.

I'd like to second @HalloweenSnarry and say your post was genuinely interesting. Your view of German politics and @Stefferi's take on Finnish politics is something I'd have to put some effort into finding outside TheMotte. American politics gets so much attention--and admittedly, it's important on some level, even for non-Americans--that it tends to drown out the collective opinions of other peoples. Thanks for providing this window into Germany.

I was genuinely educated, I'd say (this made a couple other past comments about German politics make more sense), and of course I do have to show appreciation for the otherwise-thankless effort you put in. I like these kinds of local non-US politics updates.

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