How We Entered the Age of the Strongman
2nd June 2018
That the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the principal opposition party in the most powerful country of the European Union has produced remarkably little reaction in Britain. In September of last year the then German foreign minister and vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, told Der Spiegel that if AfD made it into the Bundestag, Nazis would speak in the Reichstag for the first time in more than 70 years. The German political system was constructed after the end of the Second World War to make any such recurrence impossible. It has now happened, and yet liberals in this and other countries seem largely unmoved. Last year Angela Merkel was being celebrated as the leader of the Western world, and the dull stability over which she presided lauded as a model that Britain would do well to emulate. More than any other European country, we were assured, Germany had rid itself of the ugly nationalism that had disfigured the continent in the past.
AfD are not, of course, Nazis, unless you look at them through the pink lenses of SJW Social Democracy. What they are is a natural reaction to having a government that is attempting to change Germany into some melting pot of Middle Eastern welfare state on the backs of hard-working Actual Germans; that Angela Merkel spent her impressionable years growing up in East Germany is highly relevant.
Lying behind this confidence is a faith in global convergence. Despite many regressions and diversions, most societies are moving towards a Western model of liberal democracy. As Tony Blair told this magazine in November 2016: “Of course, history has a direction. There is progress, we are making progress…” Blair is distinctive in affirming explicitly an assumption that was tacitly accepted across the political spectrum throughout the post-Cold War era. Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, François Mitterrand, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all believed a type of “democratic capitalism” was spreading throughout the world. If it is now in retreat, these liberals tell themselves, the reason is not that it is somehow flawed. Provided the model is pursued consistently and single-mindedly, history will soon be back on track.
Blair is, of course, a ‘progressive’, and this is the abiding faith of the proglodyte left. History has a direction, movement in that direction is inevitable (just see Marx), and we socialists are in the first-class seats.
Nearly all liberal regimes are confronted by a two-headed internal threat. On the one hand are the forces usually described as populist – movements on the far-right and left that challenge the post-Cold-War model. Corbynite Labour falls into this category, as well as the alt-right in the US and the neo-anarchist Five Star movement in Italy. On the other hand there is what might be called alt-liberalism – a mutant version of liberal ideology that repudiates the Western civilisation that gave birth to a liberal way of life. Embedded chiefly in universities, where they shape teaching in the humanities and social sciences, alt-liberals may appear an insignificant force in politics. But while they cannot command a popular majority in any democratic country they shape the agenda on sections of the left, and weaken parties of the centre to which many voters were attached in the past.
We see this being played out daily in the DemLegHump Media.
The denial by liberals of any responsibility for the conditions that have fuelled rising anti-liberal movements is the cardinal fact of contemporary politics. What this denial presages is not any higher phase of history – a revamped liberal order, or some purer version of socialism – but a new authoritarian era. The world has reverted to a condition not dissimilar to that which prevailed towards the end of the 19th century. Harnessing unchanging human needs for security and identity, great powers are deploying new technologies in the pursuit of primacy and survival.
When people feel their lives, fortunes, and culture threatened, they respond, and one of the strongest responses is a reversion to tribalism. The longer the threat is embraced by their ruling class, the stronger the response.