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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.
I think that pro-immigration policies from centrist and left-of-centrist parties have been a major strategic blunder. Large numbers of people are really unhappy about that and, in my experience, even people who had been reliable left-wing voters often become really unhappy if the number of immigrants (especially poor immigrants) is large enough. I don’t think political parties that support immigration ought to be so surprised when these people vote for someone else - after all, in a democracy the people get to vote for the parties that propose the policies that people actually want.
I don’t think that’s fair. White racists oppose immigration, but here in the USA plenty of Hispanic people are also unhappy about the Hispanic refugees.
People think it’s a crisis because the media tells them it is. They aren’t doing well and wondering why, and Fox News, and even Spanish news channels, tell them it’s because of the immigrants. It’s selfish, and awful to watch. I’ve had immigrant relatives wanting to shut the door behind them.