AfD Just Shattered Liberal Mythology

Foreign Affairs In Saxony-Anhalt, anti-Western agitators suffered a major setback. Photo by Peter Gercke/picture alliance via Getty Images Hide your kids, hide your wife. For the first time since the Nazis (cue woman screaming), a far-right party won a German election this week. At least, that’s the mainstream media’s narrative about the stunning results of a state election held Sunday. In the eastern province of Saxony-Anhalt, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won 44 percent of the vote, trouncing the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), which finished second with a measly 17 percent. “This was the most significant election we’ve had in Germany since the fall of the Berlin wall,” Filip Gaspar, a political advisor and member of the AfD, told The American Conservative. “Something big is going on.” Liberal elites find themselves in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation. “Let’s be clear, this is not just a right-wing party that we call ‘far-right,’” explained Ben Rhodes, a former advisor to Barack Obama, on a podcast. “This is a far-right party.” Maybe so, but as the shepherd boy learned when a wolf really did attack his flock, at some point the villagers stop believing you. To the dismay of liberals across the Western world, all the scary talk about the return of Nazism doesn’t intimidate voters nearly as much as it used to—even, gasp, in Germany. From a right-wing perspective, of course, AfD is the shepherd, not a prowling predator, and it’s trying to protect Germany from the biggest and baddest wolf of all: mass migration. Liberal analysts tend to pathologize right-wing views, treating them as outgrowths of economic anxieties and déclassé resentment, but opposition to mass migration is clearly the main driver of support for right-wing parties. Conservative voters never fully bought into the idea that their historic nations don’t or shouldn’t exist, that they are merely “civic” nations comprising a hodgepodge of disconnected strangers. That’s certainly true of conservative voters in Germany, especially in the east, where Soviet domination during the Cold War habituated residents to rolling their eyes at state-imposed ideology. Flouting liberal orthodoxy, the AfD promises to halt and reverse mass migration lest ethnic Germans become an aging and despised minority in their own ancestral homeland. To you and me, that sounds like common sense. But to the blinkered technocrats in Berlin and Brussels, it sounds like Nazism. That’s why the AfD’s ascendance is uniquely significant for right-wingers across the Western world. It proves that the official mythology of the Second World War is losing its power over political discourse. That mythology—which puts Nazi crimes at the center of Western history—underpins the hegemony of liberalism. Whenever any right-wing politician or party challenges liberal pieties, just evoke the mustached psychopath who tried to conquer Europe and voilà, the rising challenger will soon crash into a hard ceiling of support. Breakdowns of ideological hegemony can be exhilarating—and also dangerous. In the 1920s, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci observed that Western states relied more on ideological consent than brute force, but that the latter came to the fore whenever the former failed to materialize. Gramsci ought to have known: The left-wing subversive developed his theory from inside a prison cell. Thus, one sign of the collapse of liberal hegemony in Germany is that the government has been employing coercive means to preserve the establishment’s control. Last year, the domestic intelligence agency responsible for protecting the constitution—or Verfassungsschutz—labeled the AfD a right-wing extremist party. That designation, which remains under legal review, enables the agency to surveil the party’s communications and even dispatch informants to spy on its meetings. There’s just one problem. Since then, the AfD has become the most popular party in Germany. More and more, the Berlin establishment appears to be thwarting the democratic will of the German people, not protecting the constitution from “extremists.” And more and more, opponents of the AfD sound like the actual extremists. It’s a strange habit of many European liberals to dismiss their right-wing compatriots as a radical faction no matter how numerous they become. During an interview with The American Conservative this January, Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, recounted a strange conversation with one such European liberal: I had a hostile reporter grilling me, and he said, “Can you name anyone in any of these countries who support you, who’s not in one of these right-wing parties?” And he listed these parties: Reform, National Rally, AfD. And I said, “If you look at the polls in these countries, Reform is the largest chunk of Brits; that’s the plurality of Brits. National Rally is the largest chunk of French; that’s the plurality of French. So, you’re basically accusing me of drawing most of my European support from people who are in the majority European opinion.” Rogers can now add the AfD to that list, though the ruling class in Germany remains loath to acknowledge political reality. On the eve of this week’s election, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz reiterated that his CDU party would never form a coalition with the AfD. Many things, he said, were up for discussion, and many things were open to change, but one specific thing made the AfD verboten: “Germany has left nationalism behind and will never again allow ethnic nationalism in Germany.” Merz said the rejection of ethnic nationalism (in German, Völkisch nationalism) was necessary to ensure that Germany remained a broadly European country. Yet it’s precisely non-European migration—and the refusal by politicians like Merz to stop it—that has fueled the backlash against liberalism. To my knowledge, Norwegians and Czechs haven’t been ramming their cars into revelers at Christmas markets in formerly quaint German towns. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox German right-wingers detect a political calculation, rather than ideological conviction, in the CDU’s continued refusal to work with the AfD. “Some of them really believe that the AfD is a new Nazi party,” Gaspar conceded. “But for the more normal people, it’s just about power. If the CDU forms a coalition or government [with the AfD], they won’t be the ruling party in this coalition, they’ll be the little brother.” Regardless of what actually motivates Merz, Sunday’s results didn’t seem to induce much critical reflection. Speaking after the election, the chancellor maligned the AfD’s policy of remigration as “ethnic cleansing,” though he didn’t consider the corollary: that mass migration has amounted to displacement and dispossession for ethnic Germans. Perhaps he thinks the Germans deserved it. “We know that Germany carries special responsibility because of its history,” he added. But no people carries the responsibility to commit collective suicide, and anyway, the anti-Western agitators don’t distinguish between the land of Adolf Hitler and the nations that fought against him. This week in Saxony-Anhalt, the agitators and their masochistic ideology suffered a major defeat, and right-wingers across Europe and in America should thank the AfD for that.