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While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.
The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.
So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.
In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.
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But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.
I don’t see this as a requirement to “tolerate intolerance”. I see this as an explanation of why we’re seeing the results we do. I’ve always had a kind of feeling that the extreme resurgence of the right is a hard reaction to the specific reforms of the left. The more reform, the more angst and reaction. It’s just nice to know this “feeling” has a name, and a proper theory.
Basically, the more social woes we fix, the more conservatives get pissed. Like they need time to adjust to their new reality or something.
So our options are: Pick and choose priorities, and slow it down, or face the right’s backlash, populism, and calls to arms, risking political turnover. This is not arguing appeasement. Just explaining their behavior, and the choices the left needs to make in how they govern. I.e., Slow and steady, or risky business.
Finally, I don’t think the right will ever stop trying to pull us towards The Handmaidens Tale, but given time to adjust to significant societal changes, their base becomes less charged and the backlash is less severe. See: Abortion rights.
This is a very thoughtful take. I just have one issue, which is the adjustment you’re talking about, where the base becomes less charged, isn’t something we can rely on anymore. The base in many cases doesn’t even understand the reforms, whether they’ve been implemented, or how they affect them.
For example, the ACA in the US gave health care to tens of millions of people, a huge amount of whom were stupifyingly demanding to not be given health care because it was “Obamacare.” Polls show that those people strongly wanted more affordable health care options, oppose removing the more adorable health care they are using, but also want “Obamacare” repealed.
Their reality is somehow kept separate from their experience, since their reality is defined by their consumed propaganda and their experience is subservient to their reality.
All that is to say: we still need to fix the right wing propaganda problem before any solution works, even the logical map in your post.
See here’s your problem you didn’t call it “Patriotcare”.