Probably not, but for sure we here are not anywhere even remotely close to the situation in the US, where the borderline fascist party governs a significant number of states, controls the constitutional court, and is just a few tens of thousands of votes away from the highest office in the land. Our âChristian Democratâ conservatives would probably pass for âcommunistsâ in the eyes of large swathes of the GOP.
Also, thereâs a lot to be said for proportional representation. The German electoral system is not without its problems, but the fact that usually no party gets to command an absolute majority in parliament means that there needs to be a certain amount of give and take, and more interests are taken into account. It can also mean that nothing much gets accomplished, but looking at the US that seems to be the case there, too â at least we here donât tend to end up in a situation where one or two people can basically bring the whole system to a halt.
You are willfully ignoring the point others are making about no democracy being safe right now. Youâve convinced yourself that yours is, and I hope thatâs made you feel better.
When bigoted right-wing populists are getting even 10% of the vote (13% in 2017) in Germany of all places, that tells me liberal democracy is far from safe there. Especially sinceâŚ
Give-and-take with fascists like AfD never ends well in Germany, or anywhere else.
The post-war economic anomaly is over, the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s are dying out of living memory, conservatives and right-wingers have spent 40 years gutting history and civics education on the pretext that the âfreeâ market has made them obsolete, and autocrats like Putin are actively funding and supporting fascists abroad. No citizen of a Western liberal democracy should get complacent or smug enough that these scumbags gain an opening.
I agree, and in fact we donât actually do that here â so far no other party is prepared to give right-wing extremists the time of day. In addition, with all their in-fighting and general lack of direction or a unified message the AfD specifically seems to be on the decline in any case (certain areas in the former GDR excepted, and that does indeed warrant close observation). Incidentally this fade into obscurity is what has eventually happened to all far-right parties in Germany since WWII, so at least for the time being there seems to be little appetite for that sort of thing in the general public. Certainly less so than in places like the US.
Having said that, if one person out of ten actively holds borderline â or not-so-borderline â fascist views (and as we have seen, with AfD the real number is closer to one out of twenty, and probably not even quite that) that is of course a legitimate cause for some concern but not the immediately impending end of freedom and the rule of law as we know it. In fact, a vibrant and resilient democracy ought to be able to deal as a matter of course with the unavoidable noise floor of thugs and kooks that every human society contains, as long as there is broad consensus that they are thugs and kooks. What we need to do, instead of âcancellingâ them, is to engage the thugs and kooks in vigorous debate wherever and whenever they show their heads, debunk their claims into oblivion, give them every conceivable opportunity to make idiots of themselves in the eyes of the general public, and prevent their ideas from taking hold in society at large to an extent where they actually win elections and gain control of important government institutions like in the US. This should, however, be a normal and unremarkable part of day-to-day political hygiene and not the equivalent of crying âwolfâ again and again until, if ever a real wolf should arrive, nobody cares anymore.
That fade to obscurity isnât as predictable as it once was. As I noted above, political-economic conditions on the ground have changed radically since 2008 in all Western countries (which reminds me, I should add the toxic influence of social media to that mix).
Itâs cause for alarm, especially in a country thatâs already had a catastrophic go-round with a minority fascist party taking over.
Legitimate majority votes arenât the primary means by which fascists take power under any pre-existing democratic system. Theyâll game the system and cheat, politicise the courts, gain the support of conservative âcentristsâ and large corporations, engage in âgive-and-takeâ with opposition parties, etc. And suddenly a party that 70% of the country thinks are thugs and kooks is in charge.
No. Engaging them as equals and peers is not the answer. Mock them, expose their toxic aims to sunlight, impose consequences for their horrible views, etc., but reputable organisations and politicians should never give them a serious platform or space on the rostrum. Popperâs Paradox is most definitely operative.
No-one here is arguing that Germanyâs liberal democracy faces the same degree of peril that the U.S.'s does. They are simply saying that the peril is present everywhere and is very real. Right-wing populists won 13% of the vote in a country that was once taken over by actual Nazis; sado-populists in the âmother of parliamentsâ managed to split their country from the EU mainly on the basis of racism; a modern exampler of Scandinavian mixed economies that once rescued Jews from the Nazis is now regularly the site of incidents of discrimination against refugees from conflicts in the middle east; the capital and some border crossings of a diverse and polite liberal democracy whose motto is âpeace, order and good governmentâ were shut down for weeks by trucker convoys organised and funded by fascists and white supremacists. All of these far-right elements will only be emboldened if the U.S. goes down Russiaâs path toward one-party right-wing authoritarianism.
The wolf is active to one degree or another in all OECD countries right now. Raising the alarm but not letting it onto the property is the most effective response to its presence.
Providing any and all political positions the same opportunities to participate in the public discourse as if they were equally valid is a terrible idea. Even if they donât win, putting an outright fascist on the stage pushes the Overton window farther to the right and makes the far-right-but-less-overtly-fascist candidates look like centrists.
We need to demonstrate that these positions are in fact not equally valid â that theyâre terrible and inhuman and donât deserve to be taken seriously. Unfortunately that means engaging them head-on. By denying that they even exist they are only made more interesting because if The Establishment⢠is suppressing them, there must obviously be something to them after all. Itâs easy (and a lot less hard work) to pretend that these positions are so odious that they are not worth engaging with in the first place, but that does nothing to actually get rid of them; it only allows them to fester in places where theyâre difficult to get at and dislodge.
If we donât actively engage the right-wing kooks and prefer to âcancelâ them instead, that only means that the right-wing kooks will remain entirely unopposed in their own bubble, and over time that bubble may expand to concern-causing proportions. In the US we have seen what happens when the right-wing kook bubble suddenly encompasses most of the Republican party. People are now wringing their hands because nobody (including in particular nobody in the more moderate, more reasonable, Republican party way back when) actively put a stop to the kooks when they were still the kooks and not yet the mainstream. The weird and unfair system the US use to figure out who should be in power plays a big role in this, which is why this is less of an issue (albeit not by any means a negligible issue) in more modern democracies like Germany.
No. We do not need to provide a podium for everyone who wants to advocate killing the Jews or bringing back slavery just so we can carefully and rationally explain why they are wrong.
It used to be 13%, now itâs 10%. This is obviously not great but it means that 90% of voters are against right-wing populism, which is not bad going, either. If we canât get rid of right-wing populism altogether (because, freedom of expression and so on) then keeping it thoroughly in check is the next best thing.
The other thing is, you have to offer a credible alternative. If half of the right-wing populistsâ support comes from people whose main motivation is not that they like the right-wing populist policies but that they donât like any of the more mainstream parties then that is another big problem right there.
Yes, but the problem is that modern right-wing populists â certainly here in Europe â arenât primarily about killing the Jews or bringing back slavery. Theyâre often about ideas that at first glance seem more reasonable or appealing (âletâs give French jobs to the Frenchâ, âimmigrants are committing most criminal offenses now, so they must be kept outâ) and need more careful debunking.
Considering Germanyâs history, thatâs an understatement. Americans can delude themselves into giving the death cult party power because âit canât happen hereâ, but as youâre well aware it did happen in your country. Youâre not going to completely eliminate right-wing populism but 10% or frankly 5% is a shameful and disturbing figure.
âWeâre not fascistsâ is credible enough as a starting point. The problem with the establishment Dems is they donât go much further than that.
No âbutâ. Whatever they pretend are their primary issues, anyone with basic knowledge about fascists knows what their real aims are. We donât need to to humour their pretense that this is about âeconomic anxietyâ.
Also, you keep using this word âcancelâ. It may be a language/cultural issue, but in the U.S. the term is used mainly by the far right to complain about facing consequences for or being denied a reputable platform for their fascist or white-supremacist contentions or behaviour.
you pretend they argue in good faith. yet you will never ever convince them or come to an end to their arguments. they will infinitely drown out the discourse thatâs actually relevant to the needs of real people when you engage
look no further than internet forum discussion. if you let a place be overrun by trolls, it will be
germany is more restrictive around hate speech than the us. and it helps
( also: at this point this discussion should probably be split into another thread )
Yes. That number ought to be a lot lower. But 10% is something that we can live with if we need to. Hopefully at the next federal election it will be 7%, and 4.9% at the one after that. If the AfD persist in making idiots of themselves that is not entirely unlikely.
If your voters prefer the right-wing populists because their candidate cuts a dashing figure with suave rhetoric and denounces you as corrupt, ineffectual, weak on crime, wasting tax money on people who donât deserve it, a tree-hugging communist baby-killer, etc. (you name it) then countering that yes, but at least thankfully youâre not a fascist probably wonât get you very far.
I believe there is a bit of a miscommunication between @Anselm and the rest of the forum here.
What you are hearing is him advocating for engaging fascists in debate, which you rightly point out normalises them. That normalisation is indeed happening to a frightening degree in places like France, Denmark or Austria, all of which have fascist parties close to government or have had them in government in the recent past. And of course it has already happened in Poland and Hungary.
This normalisation is not, however, happening in the same way in Germany. The AfD has been trying their darnedest to appear like a legitimate party but they were completely stonewalled by all the other parties. They literally had to change the seating arrangements in parliament because no party wanted to sit next to them. Even laws that have nothing to do with their agenda sponsored by the AfD caucus were not endorsed by other parties, even if they brought forward changes those parties wanted. There have been some breakaway state offices of the conservative party that were willing to go into local coalition with the AfD but they were immediately disciplined by the federal party.
If I understand @anselm correctly within this context, that is what he is talking about. We have to allow them to be a part of the system as long as they are legally elected but that doesnât mean we canât and shouldnât shun and block them at every turn. And of course there are efforts to ban them. They are already being watched by the internal intelligence service as a potential security threat against the constitution. Which would be a lot more reassuring if the internal intelligence service wasnât riddled with far right sympathisers.
So far this system works and it has weathered even the stress of the refugee âcrisisâ of 2015. But that doesnât mean we can drop our guard and become complacent. This only works because this countryâs political system was designed primarily to guard exactly against this eventuality and we need only look at Austria to have a control study where that isnât the case. And there is no guarantee the wall is going to hold forever. If they manage to get seen as a normal party like all the others itâs all over.
What I am trying to say is that in a German political context âengaging them in debateâ doesnât mean taking them seriously or compromising with them as if they were real politicians rather than smug agents provocateurs, it means shouting them down on TV and in parliament as well as on the street. And that, I think, is the crux of the linguistic and cultural misunderstanding here.
