It Is Time To Stop Worrying About Allegedly Right-Wing "Political Extremism"

A response to Jeremy Stern’s Tablet Magazine article, “Can Germany’s Far Right be Stopped?”

German politics is like being in trapped in a truck that some time ago jumped a red light and ran over a bunch of pedestrians. “That was terrible!” the driver exclaims. “Indeed, we shouldn’t have done that!” his passengers agree. “We must make sure we never do that again!” the driver intones. “And to be sure we never do that again, we need to put as much distance between ourselves and that intersection as possible!” The driver begins to accelerate, eyes glued to the rear window. “It’s working!” his passengers report. “Yes, we’re now much further from that dangerous intersection!” the driver cries. And as we all shoot down the highway at ever greater speed, it never occurs to anybody to ask where we’re going and what still greater hazards might lie ahead of us. The Unprotected Class:... Carl, Jeremy Check Amazon for Pricing.

“Can Germany’s Far Right Be Stopped?” – a long, ambivalent and occasionally infuriating piece published this week by Jeremy Stern in Tablet Magazine – is an almost archetypal example of this plague of rear-window analysis. In its many paragraphs, Stern provides a Jewish-American commentary on many of the same post-Merkel developments in German politics that I’ve covered here at the plague chronicle. His thesis is that an “incoherent yet firmly anti-Trumpian political consensus,” involving such things as “open borders,” the “Green New Deal” and a “China-dependent mélange of politically correct ideas” has provoked a scary and ominous “resurgence of populism, extremism, and even political violence in Germany.” In this way Stern blends the standard, shallow media critique of Alternative für Deustchland with a rather more sophisticated centrist scepticism of the progressive attack on Trumpism in the United States. In 2019, the neoconservative Robert Kagan argued that Trump risked reigniting destructive midcentury German nationalism by withdrawing support for the “multilateral institutions” that have suppressed it all this time. Stern turns this doubtful thesis around; it is not Trump, but rather the “anti-Trumpian policy consensus” that bears the real responsibility for the resurrection of political extremism in Germany.

Viewing a rear-facing video feed from our truck of state, in other words, Stern has begun to worry that we’re only apparently departing the carnage. It’s hard to know, because nobody will look out the windshield, but we may have taken an exit that will by some magic redirect us to that fateful intersection. The main thing is that we continue to put space between us and that past catastrophe, and that we navigate by taking our bearing from landmarks that we’ve already passed. We must not return to where we’ve been; where we’re going is secondary.

Stern’s article opens with fuzzy concerns about German “extremism” and its alleged rise. It would at least be helpful to have evidence that this new extremism exists, but here the gruel is thin. Stern begins by referencing a rise in “German” antisemitism in 2019, which he links to surging support for Alternative für Deutschland:

On May 25 [2019] Felix Klein, then as now the government’s “Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism,” responded to a steep rise in antisemitic crimes in the country by recommending that German Jews no longer wear kippahs in public. The next day, Germany held European Parliament elections in which Angela Merkel’s centrist ruling coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats suffered major losses, while the far-right AfD came in fourth and won 11 seats.

Klein issued his recommendation four days after the New York Times ran a widely-read article on “The New German Antisemitism”; its reporting revolves largely around the anti-Jewish tendenices of Islamic-world immigrants to Germany. Klein no less than the “far-right AfD,” in other words, represent different reactions to the growing presence of foreigners from the global south and the increasing social prominence of their ethnic resentments in European society. It’s a discouraging first strike for his argument.

Stern finds his way to somewhat firmer ground by rehearsing the assassination of Walter Lübcke and the Halle synagogue shooting from the official catechism. While I obviously condemn both attacks, it’s just not convincing to divine from them an ominous new trend. The usual tactic is to blend references to these incidents with official statistics showing that “right-wing” political crimes are on the rise in the Federal Republic. The vast majority of these offences, however, consist of things like incitement and verbal abuse. They’re essentially speech offences that many other countries don’t even criminalise, and their increase reflects the ever more hysterical enforcement actions of an embattled establishment against the opposition.

To this comes two additional, incontrovertible facts:

1) Germany, and Europe in general, are among the most peaceful countries on earth outside of East Asia. Violent crime in the Federal Republic is at or near historical lows, and would doubtless be even lower without migration. Ageing populations just do not get up to very much criminal activity. This is not the Weimar Republic with party militias doing battle in the streets.

2) Political violence represents a very, very small subset of all violent crime in Germany, and it is present across the political spectrum. The left no less than the right have their unsavoury actors, and it’s disingenuous to construct political violence as an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, especially in a country where the RAF terrorist Daniela Klette could reside undetected among sympathetic leftist dissidents in Berlin-Kreuzberg for 30 years; and where a violent leftist group just a few weeks ago carried out a spectacular act of sabotage that cut off electricity to various villages and a Tesla factory in Brandenburg.

Stern might not be hostile to these latter observations, for he seems to vacillate on the question of whether it is right-wing extremism, or extremism in general, that is the problem. Thus he also deplores the alleged rise of the far left, lamenting that on 27 October 2019, “the Left Party, the direct descendant of the Marxist-Leninist SED … became the largest party in the east German state of Thuringia.” By bizarrely characterising the AfD as “in some ways a right-wing descendant of the SED” because “its platform includes leaving NATO and ‘dissolving’ the EU”1, Stern can hitch the AfD’s second-place finish in that election up to the same general thesis, which I guess is that DDR politics are returning to the east.

This is so flagrantly wrong that it’s hardly worth addressing. I’ll say only that Stern’s analysis would’ve been more complete (if less coherent) had he explained that Bodo Ramelow of the Left Party only retains his position as Minister President of Thüringen after the uproar surrounding the election of the FDP candidate Thomas Kemmerich to replace him in 2020. Angela Merkel intervened personally (and anti-constitutionally) to force Kemmerich’s resignation, effectively restoring the leftist Ramelow to power. She did so because CDU representatives had joined votes with the AfD to elect Kemmerich, violating the religiously maintained cordon sanitaire. Here as elsewhere, the Left Party emerge not as the worrying DDR-era extremists of Stern’s imagination, but as an important if decaying component of the German party cartel.

The Power of Myth Moyers, Bill Check Amazon for Pricing. This error in assessment cascades through this section of Stern’s analysis, causing him to misread the developments surrounding Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party. For Stern, it is further evidence of rising (left-wing) extremism that Wagenknecht has “announced the formation of a new, far-left populist party aimed at poaching voters not only from the populist right, but from the Social Democrats, Left Party, and Greens.”

Polls have put support for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)—a cult of personality whose platform combines unfeigned communism with a hard stop to immigration and the green transition, sanctions on Russia, and aid to Ukraine—at 7%-9% of the electorate. Combined with the AfD, the potential of the “extremist” vote in the next federal elections is between a quarter and a third of all Germans. It may soon be impossible, in other words, to govern Germany—and therefore Europe and NATO—without them.

The reality is more complex than this. Thüringen aside, the Left Party is in long-term decline, and Wagenknecht’s BSW offshoot will likely kill it for good. At the same time, the prospects of BSW are far more uncertain than Stern allows. They have not fielded a single candidate anywhere, and they’re unlikely to compete in the upcoming state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg. This makes BSW poll numbers impossible to interpret. Nor are Wagenknecht and her BSW the anti-establishment extremists that Stern makes them out to be. They’ve had a lavish reception in state media, who hope (contrary to all data) that they’ll split AfD support and perhaps also constitute a viable coalition partner for the Social Democrats and the Greens, should the FDP lose their position in the Bundestag in the 2025 federal elections. Put another way, the BSW is an effort to rebrand the Left Party and to harness some of the ambient populist energy on the left for establishment purposes.

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