When a individual deals with news about a large political event, the audience’s reactions can be more informative than the study itself.
Recently, I had this experience erstwhile I watched an interview with the German ambassador to the UK on SkyNews a fewer days after local elections in Thuringia and Saxony. I'm more curious than the interview itself. Audience comments.
As the chorus repeated its belief of the anti-democratic character of the "mura", which does not let another political parties to enter into a coalition with the right- populist alternate to Germany (AfD): "He fundamentally says that no another organization in Germany intends to cooperate with them and accept the will of the nation!" Or, “Mur = ignoring voters. And who is the far right?" Or, “This is happening all over Europe, and they inactive find excuses??? Don't they understand??? Is it so hard to perceive to the people of Europe??”
When the left is incorrect with the center
In fact, the charge is simple, but hard to defy without resorting to ludicrous claims that so - called average people have been manipulated. Here is another typical reaction from the recipient, giving an first reply:
"To reduce the number of right-wing voters, these problems simply request to be resolved. little mass migration of unskilled, little economical migrants and asylum seekers, little ideologies woke and possibly a small little collectivism/communism".
There is nothing “just” about these problems. The mass migration of low-skilled workers present keeps the Western economy alive: in the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany, most of the physical work and care for aged and sick people are carried out by immigrants. If they were to get out of the country, the full economy would collapse. No wonder the voices are heard that Britain's attractiveness to immigrants is simply a good thing: deficiency of labour will endanger it little than another Western European countries.
But to confuse this purely capitalist attitude towards migration with communism is simply a sad indicator of where we are today. The misunderstanding can besides be seen in another comment: "People are tired of the regulation of the far left" – absurd. AfD supporters say they are not far right, but they make the same mistake, including (still) the hegemonic liberal order to the "extreme left".
No, this order is not far left, it's simply a progressive-liberal center that is much more curious in fighting the left (or with what is left of it) than with the fresh right. If what we have in the West present were the governments of the far left, Ursula von der Leyen would be a Marxist-communist (as Viktor Orbán fundamentally claims!).
Racism is an identity problem
When the populist right collects millions of votes in the elections, we hear that “the problems of average people request to be addressed.” This standard expression sounds arrogant and condescending due to the fact that it means that the people are stupid, they escape him the real culprit of the problems and request to explain to him who is the villain here: not immigrants, but Global Capitalism. specified a basis for “global capitalism” under “immigrants” is simply unwise and does not work.
The alleged average people know that large corporate capital is behind immigration, and fresh populists are constantly taking advantage of this fact. On the another hand, the threats to their lifestyles, which migrants are expected to make, are directly, on their own account, triggering autonomous racist dynamics. It is not adequate to promise the left that it will “take care of deeper causes”. They want the problem solved at the level of their own regular experiences.
So the only way to fight this is to take seriously people's complaints, not idealizing immigrants, but besides deeper into racism and highlighting its interior contradiction. To put it simply: what a racist considers to be an obstacle to his identity and to the undisturbed realization of who he is (i.e. a neighbour of a foreigner) is actually a condition for that identity. The racist needs a “other” as a threat that sustains him. Without another identity, racists break. cultural diversity as a threat yet serves to obscure its own crisis and decadence.
Political Lessons From Islam
Another reaction to AfD's support is the statement: "The far right is Sharia, not AfD." The right answer should be: I agree with the first part of this sentence, I disagree with the second. There should be no taboo themes in a critical approach to Islam. We should shamelessly break the ban on criticism of this religion, which many leftist people have observed, which is confused with Islamophobia.
The fact is that the separation of state power from spiritual power was profoundly rooted in Christianity (give back to the emperor what is imperial...), although he was regularly violated. There is no specified fundamental separation in Islam. Islam's unity with politics was full expressed by Ruhollah Chomejni, stating clearly that politics is its foundation: "Muslim religion is political religion; it is simply a religion in which everything is politics, including acts of piety and worship." He put it most clearly in the sentence: “Islam is politics or is nothing.”
For this reason, Chomejni is described as a realist of the "decolonization of politics", in terms of his ability to establish and consolidate social relations. It is worth seeing the grain of fact in these beliefs: the alleged Chomejni Revolution was a unique case of passionate political engagement of the masses, the minute of the re-establishment of society, the full structure of social ties. However, this actual political act, which boasts itself as a "decolonization of politics", has in fact established full unity between what is political and what is religious, thus excluding any notion of secular politics, a policy not based on the holy book.
Boris Buden rejects the dominant interpretationwhich considers specified phenomena to be a regression caused by a failure to modernise. For Buden, religion as a political force is simply a consequence of post-political disintegration of society, a breakdown of conventional mechanisms that guaranteed unchangeable social relationships.
Fundamentalist religion is not only political, it is politics itself, that is: it sustains space for politics. More specifically, it is not just a social phenomenon, but a social tissue, so that society itself in a sense becomes a spiritual phenomenon. The purely spiritual aspect of religion cannot then be distinguished from its politicization. In the postpolitical world, religion is the main space to which antagonistic passions return.
What has late happened under the cover of spiritual fundamentalism is so not the return of religion to politics, but simply the return of politics as such. In fact, the question is: why has politics in a radically secular sense, the large accomplishment of European modernity, lost its power to form society? This extremist attitude is increasingly replaced by the spirit of pragmatic compromise.
Anti-immigrant Cross Alliance
Here's another reaction:
"When the extremist right-wing organization is not yet gaining an absolute majority, the coalition is an excellent chance to exposure this party. This organization has no solution, and its participation in the authorities of the Land would clearly show it. And at the Land level, little harm can be done than at the national level.”
The experience of Trump's presidency shows, however, that specified a strategy is very dangerous: alternatively of subjugating the utmost right, it opens up space for gradual radicalisation. The simple and honest approach of another recipient, who claims that we request a fresh racist apartheid, is more appealing to me: "The only destiny of this erstwhile large nation [German] is to become South Africa of Europe."
My favourite reaction is this: “It is simply a pity that in Saxony the BSW [Left Alliance of Sahra Wagenknecht] cannot cooperate with AfD. Both parties want peace and small immigration". ‘Peace’ means not helping Ukraine here. This sounds logical due to the fact that this is the coalition of those who “really mention to the problems of people.”
The contrast between Germany and France must be noted. In France, 3 incompatible domains (new populist right, liberal center, left) clearly separate themselves. In Germany, the dividing lines blur: the old discrimination to the right and left, with all the shades of meaning, replaced a series of new, false and at best secondary opposites (pro- and anti-immigrants; pro- and anti-woke). So we have a fresh political cartography (or alternatively the imposition of different maps).
In this fresh space of things that were unimaginable a fewer months ago, present is being considered seriously. any factions of the Christian-Democratic Union even consider a broad coalition with the left to block AfD's participation in power. From an anti-immigrant point of view, the perfect expression would be the opposite: a large coalition between AfD and BSW. From this point of view, the BSW is simply a left-wing organization that does precisely what anti-immigrant voters want: it takes very seriously the celebrated "problems of average people". Thanks to the electoral success of the BSW, we have schism in the anti-immigrant field: the coalition between the 2 groups is – at least for now – impossible. (AfD wants her, BSW rejects her).
What makes AfD akin to BSW is avoiding vulgarity à la Trump. Although AfD occasionally slid into open racism, both parties talk "civilized", average language.
The Apologies of Extremeism
Even the extremist left tries to normalize recently. On the outskirts of the political spectrum, there is simply a fresh phenomenon that cannot be called a "moderate utmost left". Her main promoters are late deceased Domenico Losurdo or Gabriel Rockhill. (Rockhill analyzed the relation between Adorn and Horkheimer and the CIA, and dismissed me as a “capitalist fool”.)
This trend is highly left-wing due to the fact that it storms the wall defining the post-war western left: it rehabilitates “real socialism”, including Stalin and Mao. However, he does not do so in the exulted speech of Stalinism. He speaks the language of average and ungmatical, realistic pragmatism, so that he does not only rehabilitate but normalizes Stalinism and Maoism.
In her opinion, Stalinism should be seen as 1 of the stages of the complex improvement of socialism. Yes, he had his excesses, but he besides had large accomplishments, and was created as a understandable reaction to the boycott and the force exerted on socialist countries by the West. After taking power, revolutionaries had to admit that they lived in a real planet in which – in order to last – they had to establish their own secret police and another forms of oppression.
Similarly, the deadly excesses of the Chinese revolution (although 10 million victims of the "great leap forward" in the late 1950s) are presented as moments of internally contradictory, gradual improvement of socialism, oscillating between 2 extremes (revolutionary panic and partial return to the capitalist economy). It is easy to admit in this standardisation the exact mirror reflection of utmost right-wing attempts to "normalise" fascism by placing it in a historical context.
Unwanted burden of democratic choice
In order to deal with this mess, democracy itself must first be problematic (or at least how its concept works today). It takes courage to reject a simple explanation that what is missing is the mobilisation of people, a actual democracy sustained by universal commitment.
If any conclusion can be drawn from fresh populist-right protests, it is time to reverse the saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln:. "Some people can be deceived always, and sometimes they can be deceived all, but they cannot always be deceived all." Today’s version should preach: most people can’t be fooled. any people are not constantly fooled. But most people get fooled sometimes.
Honest, emancipative commitment of people is simply a uncommon and fleeting event. It's not just Western democracy. During the cultural revolution, Mao Zedong sent thousands of intellectuals to agrarian farms to learn from average farmers, raised to the rank of “knowledge subjects”. It can be argued that knowing the real life in the countryside was healthy for intelligence, but it surely did not gain a deep insight into social life. present there is no privileged group that truly understands society.
It's not so much that most people fall for it, but that most people fundamentally It doesn't matter.. Most of them are afraid that their comparatively unchangeable lives will proceed smoothly. She does not want a real democracy in which she would actually decide. He wants the appearance of democracy, where he takes part in the elections, but any higher authority, which the majority trusts, presents them with options and tells them how to vote.
When most do not get a clear hint, they start to get lost. The situation in which they are actually to decide is paradoxically seen as a crisis of democracy, a threat to the stableness of the system. But erstwhile the alleged silent majority starts to care erstwhile they start to feel like a victim and to burst with actual anger, the state of affairs mostly turns for the worse. As the inactive rising wave of right-wing populism shows, people become even more prone to manipulation and magnetism conspiracy theories.
Find divided Lines
So today’s mess lacks not so much wider unity as its opposites. He was right Alain Badiou erstwhile he said that real ideas were those that let us to draw a actual line of division – a division that has a meaning that defines what is truly going on in the political struggle.
Today's Hegemonic large Significs – freedom, democracy, solidarity, justice – can no longer do so (if they always could, but that's another matter). Democracy is regularly utilized as a justification for neocolonialism, and any hard socialist countries (from East Germany to North Korea) have besides called themselves democracy. Freedom is utilized as an argument against public wellness protection ("limits our freedom of choice") or universal education. "Justice" can besides mean that "everybody should act in accordance with the right place in the social hierarchy" – and so on.
To face the large challenges of today, appropriate dividing lines must be pursued. The old saying must be reversed. Discord builds and consent ruins.
**
In English she translated Aleksandra Paszkowska.
