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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.
We can’t keep tolerating intolerance. That’s our problem. We are afraid of being called intolerant so we allow a fascist to spread their ideas about not being tolerant.
I’m sorry but no, it doesn’t work like that. The only way to face fascism is through intolerance. You can’t dialogue with a fascist, you either kick them out of politics the good way or the violent way. There is no dialogue possible with someone that thinks democracy shouldn’t exist. It’s black or white, it’s either you accept democracy or you’re my enemy. There is no option to let them be “a bit fascist” so there is non opinion here. Or rather, there’s a correct opinion and a wrong one, and fascism is the wrong one. This is just fact.
And if a fascist doesn’t want to understand they are wrong, then the only thing that remains is intolerance.
In other words, tolerance isn’t a paradox, it’s a social contract. If you’re not willing to abide by it by tolerating others, then you’re not protected by it and we have no obligation to tolerate you!
I see that problem also in a kind of “contact guilt” in certain topics.
That is, if there’s any polarized issue, there’s always the liberal/left/progressive position with extremely clear boundaries to what is acceptable to even discuss. And then there’s the vast conservative-fascist spectrum. If any problem arises within that issue, even mentioning it is immediately labeled as outside of the acceptable part, simply out of fear that this could be used as a wedge against the liberal position.
That in turn alienates people, they see an actual problem and the liberal side either ignores the problem or says it’s fascist. And the actual problem never gets solved or even tackled, simply because nobody wants to touch it.
This leads to a situation where for a whole bunch of people the fascists seem downright reasonable and then the radicalization pipeline kicks in and suddenly they think Hitler might not be such a bad guy after all.
So essentially, the left feeds the right gullible people out of fear they might legitimize some of their points.
Just an example from Germany: when the first wave of Syrian refugees came to Germany in 2015, they were greeted with literally open arms. Great thing. But if you let about a million people into the country, you also need about 500k new apartments for them, the bureaucracy has to be capable of processing everything, language courses have to be expanded drastically, job trainings have to be organized, etc etc. A whole bunch of problems.
Now, what happened? Nothing. There was great fanfare, the local governments did their best, but nothing substantive happened. Nobody talked about it, because that might fuel the existing resentments. Nobody tackled the problems. And within a few months, we had tens of thousands of young men, who had nothing to do, were not allowed to work, were completely alone and had no money or social safety net. Well, of course a bunch of them turned criminal, which then fueled the resentment even more, because suddenly the fascists actually had what they hoped for: criminal foreigners. Even if the actual problem was tiny, it was the spark that ignited the fascist resurgence.
I really enjoyed reading your reply, thank you for sharing!
Except that a more center/center-right government was in charge in 2015 and they just didn’t do anything. You can’t blame this on the left for forgetting about building more apartments, because the left wasn’t in charge and couldn’t do anything.
“what they hoped for” lol I wish you could hear yourself.
Right wing fears are always self-fulfilling prophecies. They enact the policies themselves
The extreme right-wing people also think that intolerance is generally bad but their own intolerance is somehow different and necessary.
They mostly seem to think something like “I’m not intolerant, I’m just stating uncomfortable facts that the liberals/socialists/etc are afraid to acknowledge!” I think @[email protected] is right in that certain topics being off-limits for acceptable discussion in liberal circles just serves to drive them towards the right. This, combined with right-wing dominance of media in the US and poor communications operations from the Democrats just serves to legitimize and invigorate the far-right here.
Just look at something like the discussion on crime and quality of life. Democratic leaders will point to statistics and uncritically say, “Crime is down, I don’t know what you’re talking about, things are fine.” Statistics require context to interpret successfully, and they also obey the rule of garbage in, garbage out. It would not invalidate the statistics at all if, for example, overall crime were down, but more crimes were being perpetrated out in the open where people could see them than occurred previously. They also only capture the crimes that are successfully reported. Sexual assault is pretty famously under-reported, owing to a variety of factors. Having lived in the hood for a long time, I’ve also experienced it first hand that cops just flat out refuse to take a report sometimes.
Whatever the case may be, if the topic of crime and safety comes up these days and you post something like, “I get the stats say its down generally, but my neighborhood/commute/city has deteriorated significantly over the last few years and I no longer feel as safe as I used to,” you’ll get a bunch of replies mocking you with a few canned responses like “The plural of anecdote isn’t data,” or calling you a Republican plant or something, and not one that actually tries to engage with it. You should be able to look at the Republican platform and realize this isn’t something that should cause one to overlook all the terrible things the GOP advocates, but many people will do just that when they feel that the Democrats have been ignoring them and their concerns for long enough.
If enough of your electoral base are voicing concerns that run contrary to your data, you really need to look into why that is and how to address it, or you run the risk of the opposition siphoning voters away when they acknowledge those concerns and validate them, even if you know for a fact they aren’t actually going to address them.