Europe drifts to the right. This is not due to the system, but to the people. A polemic
Just about 30.000 Austrians prevent a right-wing to radical right-wing federal president. A Gluck. But the election also showed how far the brown swamp has penetrated into the bourgeois center. For the (factually existing) failures of politics, both left and right once again blame the evil system and enter into unpleasant rhetorical alliances. But the real problems are not systematic at all – they are all too human. Nothing demonstrates this better than the rampant shift to the right.
"Right and left", Erich Jandl wrote in 1966, "you can not / velwechsern. / what an illusion." Most of them still know this poem from school. It has not lost its actuality. The classic topics of the left are now occupied by the right again – in a perfidious way. The rejection of the system, the establishment, the lobby republic, the disastrous social policy. And so on. All this is written on the flags of Pegida, next to xenophobic slogans, in a similar aggressive tone as at many left-wing demonstrations. When people march against TTIP, tens to hundreds of thousands gather; Antifa is among them, as are the NPD and Pegida supporters. How does it go together?
There is so much justified, factual criticism of the free trade agreement, why do we allow the brown fringe to occupy the ie for themselves?? Although there are clear attempts to defend oneself against this and to demarcate oneself, and it is hardly possible to control who marches in mass demonstrations, one sees gallows being carried around, and they are the ones that remain in the collective memory afterwards. This works because the right-wing movements also try to take over classic left-wing ies – partly, unfortunately, with success.
Ten years ago, the left was still a classic protest party. Like the Grunen in the past. Today, it is naturally present in the political spectrum, without playing a significant role anywhere. This is also due to the fact that the right-wing has taken away its protest potential. Protest voters (a surprisingly large number of former left-wing swing voters) are now turning to the AfD, which is currently closing ranks with the xenophobic Pegida.
The fact that AfD would rather be an establishment party than CDU and SPD, that its election program contains nothing less than the complete abolition of the welfare state and that it would deepen all social and economic problems and make the marginalized even more marginalized – this is what comes to the minds of the people who blame their own inadequacies on the enemy image of the refugee or the refugee. Muslim, not to.
The fact that the AfD’s social Darwinism will first and foremost affect those who today see themselves as the losers of economic change is completely lost on many of them. Others know it – and still believe that a cross with the AfD is a legitimate electoral protest that could at some point improve their situation. What an illusion!
But here we are at a problem in the perception of politics, at a wrong basic amption: Namely that politics should do something for me personally, should improve my concrete situation. But it is not supposed to do that at all, as a rule it cannot fulfill this claim. It is not its task. It is the task of politics to create a framework to enable positive conditions for as large a part of the population as possible. The keyword is consensus – and that only works in the political democratic center, which can and must never (as is always the case with the left and right fringes) be a dictatorship of the majority, but has the task of integrating all, even the smallest social groups and their interests. That it can never come to the fulfillment of maximum demands is not only logical, but also good.
It goes without saying that in this context mistakes are made and in the end not everyone can participate as they would like to. Nevertheless, participation, freedom and prosperity in a parliamentary-democratic system coupled with a free market economy are per se always much more widespread and on a higher level than in all other political systems we know today – at least this is true inwardly. The fact that the values and rules guaranteed in the treaty are being trampled on (see the refugee deal with Turkey) is another matter. An important one, however – because it is a matter of credibility on the one hand, and on the other hand, the fulfillment of one’s own standards and aspirations.
That a party which monothematically rejects two important anchors of the Basic Law, the right to asylum and freedom of religion, cannot and must not have a place in this democratic consensus system should be self-evident. But it does not. And that is because a frightening number of voters are prepared to put fundamental aspects of democracy up for grabs in order to confirm their enemy images. If they are known at all. The Basic Law must be the yardstick of all political action. If anything in the Federal Republic of Germany is without alternative – it is this!
The new man
And here he is already: The problem factor man. "Mankind today is no further along in its moral development than it was more than 3000 years ago in the time of Moses", writes Detlef Kuhn in an extensive essay about the "New Man":
The idea of the new human being has long since found its way into the laboratories of biologists, doctors and genetic researchers. But the idea that one can breed better human beings by interfering with the genetic material is not something that should appear to us as an act of betrayal.
The idea of a new man went along with every rough upheaval, with every revolution, it is the basic principle of totalitarianism – and it is deeply religious, even with Nietzsche. No matter whether God and Noah, no matter whether Marx and Engels or Hitler: the fixed idea of the new man resulted in millions and millions of deaths.
When there is talk of truth and untruth, then it becomes dangerous for those who are supposedly on the side of the lie. Then they must be, as Engels announced, "and thereby remove the untruthfulness".
Detle Kuhn
Nothing else means those who "Lugenpresse" grolen and in the next night an asylum accommodation anzunden. They want supposedly better conditions for themselves and try to enforce them by using violence against those who are even weaker than they are.
The effect can also be seen in the emerging dictatorship in Turkey, whose president is in the process of rewriting the treaty to his liking, in order to achieve his goal of a "constitutional state" "New Turkey" (Yeni Turkiye) – the new man is also immanent here, a man who follows the principles propagated by the ruling party AKP, or rather, a man who follows the principles propagated by the ruling party AKP. submits to them. But this is illusory in view of the fact that hardly one third of Turks are AKP supporters. Since all others are unwilling to be transformed, they are fought, imprisoned, murdered or forced to obey.
No matter if a political system is left, right or religious, the result is always the same, and willing fan soldiers with a small ego, who want to feel like something better, can always be found by the thousands. They blindly follow those who promise them the better, the new man, which they themselves liked to be. But, as the Persian poet Hafis (1315-1390) knew:
Those admonishers, who on pulpits bared themselves with pomp, act differently in secret, than they speak before the crowd.
Hafis
Hafis’ "Diwan" is the one book that the regime in Tehran cannot ban, it is too deeply rooted in Persian culture. Instead it has its house and court writers, who bring its ideology in literature and film under the people. That exists in every dictatorship, is one of its characteristics. The AfD also liked this: if it could, it would only call for such culture as "a positive reference to their own homeland" delivers and "Encourage identification with our country".
The party shows on the one hand once again its true face, proves on the other hand that it has not understood at all, what art is and wants. And so, luckily, it won’t be able to win over any serious artists either, because local patriotism is more popular than almost anything else among artists. At least the AfD already has a poet: the Berlin author Boris Preckwitz has offered himself to the party. His texts deal with "Country hater" and "Left-wing", he feels "as if one’s own country is foreign to one" – he breaks the language of the forum trolls and occident preservers into awkward verses. You can laugh at it. One can also simply ignore Preckwitz, freely according to the motto "don’t feed the troll".
But one can neither laugh at nor ignore the fact that prominent intellectuals like Peter Sloterdijk, Reinhard Jirgl, Rudiger Safranski or Botho Straub side with right-wing border guards, identitarian cultural pessimists or tone-deaf Germanists, because they are able to give the anti-democratic nonsense of the new right a pseudo-intellectual veneer. Corrupt politicians, lying media, anti-American conspiracy theories – from the old wise masters of the cultural establishment sometimes comes the same forum troll mush, just packaged differently, addressed to a bourgeois-educated audience.