A Buttery Pastry posted:

I feel like The New Right doesn't entirely get across the name/brand? It's literally New Bourgeoisie, like their brand is specifically respectable/intellectual fascists as opposed to the populist/street thug kind.

ekuNNN posted:

Interesting, we have the same thing here in the Netherlands. Our main fascist party used to be PVV (Party For Freedom), but that is mostly for the working class racist. In the last few years our most popular fascist party is the FvD (Forum for Democracy), which tries to position itself as the fascist party for students and intellectuals and businessmen, and who really embrace alt-right language and imagery, and directly use dog-whistles such as cultural marxism, as opposed to PVV who just yell that they want to ban the koran and deport all dutch-moroccans.

Truga posted:

https://twitter.com/wilderko/status/1318533705753874432

quote:

While the partial symmetry between new would-be populist movements on the left and right is often observed — and the similarities often exaggerated — the curious fact that both AfD and Aufstehen drew on the heritage of the German form of neoliberalism, better known as “ordoliberalism,” is often overlooked. As co-founders of the Mont Pelerin Society and members of the so-called Freiburg School, Ludwig Erhard, Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and other mid-century ordoliberals contended that a competitive market order could only be secured by a “strong state,” a rule-bound “economic constitution,” and a technocratic approach to anti-inflationary monetary policy. For nearly a century, the ordoliberal tradition has proven both durable and influential for German practitioners of law, economics and politics.

The AfD’s connections to ordoliberalism are many and well-known. The expert commission of the AfD at its origins included Mont Pelerin Society members and ordoliberals Roland Vaubel, Joachim Starbatty and Charles Blankart, and the party program articulated traditional demands for balanced budgets and global economic competitiveness. While these particular intellectuals have since left the party, the leadership and party program remains a fusion of opposition to inflation and state spending with ethnonationalist pronatalism and Islamophobia, the so-called “blue” and “brown” wings of the party.

Aufstehen’s links to ordoliberalism are more surprising. Wagenknecht, the most important thinker and leader in Aufstehen, began appealing to ordoliberalism in the wake of the global financial crisis, when she was elected to the Linke leadership in 2011; the same year she defended her dissertation and published a book, Freiheit statt Kapitalismus (Freedom Not Capitalism). In these, and other writings, Wagenknecht praised the Freiburg School architects of the “social market economy” and embraced Germany’s foundational myth about the postwar “economic miracle” created by the ordoliberals themselves. She argued that Erhard, Eucken, Röpke and Rüstow offered a middle way between neoliberal laissez-faire capitalism and GDR-style centralized state planning. While she used the term “creative socialism,” one might also dub it “ordo-socialism”: an attempt to rehabilitate and repurpose German neoliberal thought for the left.

Described by the center-left newsmagazine Der Spiegel as an “archliberal manifesto” that at times plays loose with ordoliberal policy commitments, Wagenknecht argued in her book that “Erhard’s promise” of “prosperity for all” had been broken, thus requiring what she called an “Erhard Reloaded” and a new economic order. Five years later, in another book called Reichtum ohne Gier (Wealth without Greed), she elaborated on this vision for a “strong state” that would not abolish markets, but rather save untethered capitalism from itself: “We need that which the neoliberals write on their flags but destroy in reality: freedom, initiative, competition, performance-based payment, and the protection of self-acquired property.”

A new economic constitution is needed to “reform capitalism,” Wagenknecht argued. Framed by new principles, it would foster “real competition” through aggressive anti-monopoly regulation, incentivize new business creation with minimum quotas for bank lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, reel in the power of speculative financial markets, establish a progressive wealth inheritance tax, require worker representation on corporate boards, and raise the minimum wage. With her earlier language of class antagonism largely absent, Wagenknecht now prescribed welfare-state capitalism with a human face.

quote:

It began with a hashtag. The beta version was #fairLand, listed at the head of a document that leaked to the German press in May 2018. Tinkering followed and the movement debuted officially in August across social media platforms as #aufstehen, or “stand up,” with a stick figure logo raising its arms inside of the “a.”

The official website featured a mosaic of interviews with people on street corners, playgrounds, harbors, and benches—all shot by the Cologne-based advertising agency Dreiwerk, better known for its work with clients like T-Mobile and eBay. Signaling the constituency for the movement, the videos included a well-curated palette of faces spanning gender, race, age, and apparently class: “Rene the DJ,” “Margot the pensioner,” “Thomas the businessman.” Streeck would snark later about other political parties with their “PR departments” and “impression management,” but #aufstehen was a start-up social movement self-conscious about just such issues from the jump.

The most important feature of the website was the text box for names and email addresses at the top of the page, hailing the viewer to “be part of the movement!” In coming months, the volume of email addresses accumulated would be cited as crucial evidence of the growing movement’s scale. By the time of #aufstehen’s September 2018 launch—a traditional government-style press conference with veteran politicians from die Linke, the Greens, and the Social Democrats—100,000 users had registered on the site. The number later peaked at around 170,000. The sum made headlines across German media, which noted that the movement’s “membership” was around twice that of die Linke.

The figure was impressive. Yet there was something odd about this would-be grassroots mobilization. Social movements are not typically planned from above with a readymade hashtag, logo, and a date marked on the calendar. Left-populist theorists, some of whom #aufstehen’s leaders quoted, teach that “the people” is always constructed in the course of mobilization. Aufstehen (they dropped the hashtag after a threatened lawsuit from an Austrian group with a near-identical hashtagged name and logo) seemed to be reading the instructions backward. They were conjuring a people before the movement was underway, rolling out a social movement like the latest iPhone.

quote:

Theorists of left populism like to argue that “the people” needs an adversary against which it can define itself. Who was “the adversary” for Aufstehen? It was an eclectic group. At its head was Merkel’s government, followed by the forces of what they called “Goldman Sachs capitalism.” Arrayed behind them were a less typical crew for the left: an alliance of migrants (some of whom were suspect followers of “hate preachers of radicalized Islam”) and the naïve leftists who loved them. Together, they played the role of useful idiots for a ruling class intent on driving down wages by swamping the remains of the welfare state.

Against this union of elites and outsiders, Aufstehen offered “the realistic left” a middle approach that distinguished between “forced” and “economic” migration—lest all “competitors for scarce resources at the bottom of society” be given access to the German labor market and social welfare benefits. “If the core concern of leftist politics is to represent the disadvantaged,” Wagenknecht explained, “then the no-borders position is the opposite of being on the left.”

Although Aufstehen’s leaders insisted at every opportunity that their movement was not defined by its opposition to migrants, their consistent tack was to recast migrants as either pawns in the game of finance capital or as the phony poster children of misguided urban idealists. “Cosmopolitanism, anti-racism, and protection of minorities,” Wagenknecht claimed, “are feel-good labels to conceal crude upward redistribution and to preserve a good conscience for the beneficiaries.” Streeck went further, calling the use of taxpayer euros for migrant resettlement “morally obligatory expropriation” and casting doubt on the motives of the refugees coming to Germany. In one snide remark, he complained, “we send our own troops into the Afghan fire and simultaneously take as refugees Afghan men who are fit for service and have no desire to stand by our side to fight the Taliban.”

According to Aufstehen’s theorists, real international solidarity meant helping foreigners stay at home and fight their own struggles. In an interview-debate with former AfD leader Frauke Petry, Wagenknecht criticized the AfD for being too open to immigration—specifically, for drawing “highly qualified people from poorer countries,” who would be better off in their native lands. Or, as Streeck put it in an interview: “Would you want Nelson Mandela to be a refugee in Germany? No! He’d be a mail carrier bringing Amazon parcels to your house. . . . he was needed somewhere else.”

Against the Alternative for Germany, Wagenknecht and Streeck posed Attrition for Germany: barricade the remaining territory of the welfare state against the invaders without and their witless accomplices within.

quote:

If part of Aufstehen’s argument rested on debatable assertions about an irreconcilable tension between economic migration and social welfare, the inner logic of the movement relied on an even more dubious chain of equivalences between “postmodernism,” “identity politics,” “political correctness,” and “neoliberalism.” Here the surest guide is the only professional showman in the quartet, Bernd Stegemann.

Described by the media as Aufstehen’s “mastermind” or “éminence grise,” Stegemann called himself “the dramaturge of the movement.” “A dramaturge,” he explained, “talks with the director and the actors, gives input, makes suggestions about what, how, and where things could be done, and so on. In principle that’s my role.” His most recent books—Critique of Theater (2014), In Praise of Realism (2015), The Specter of Populism (2017), and The Morality Trap (2018)—develop what he calls a “political dramaturgy.” When one newspaper described In Praise of Realism as Aufstehen’s secret script, Stegemann clarified that his most recent writings on populism “explain more precisely what we’re trying to do with #aufstehen.”

Stegemann casts “neoliberalism” and “postmodernism” as the dramatis personae of our time. It was this twin menace, he argues, that decimated the welfare state, exterminated class consciousness, and transformed race, gender, and class into matters of mere “social construction.” To reclaim power, left populists need to Make Class Hegemonic Again, thereby blurring established lines between right and left.

The first step, it would seem, is casting opponents of immigration as the designated representatives of “the people.” This also meant catering to AfD voters, who studies have shown tend to be of average or above-average income, disproportionately male, over thirty, of average education, and skeptical of not only immigration but also gender equality and the human provenance of climate change. By design, migrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and non-white inhabitants of Germany are left on the margins of “the people.”

Observers have compared Stegemann’s polemics against the German left to Mark Lilla’s denunciations of American liberals, and for good reason. Both trace the breakdown of the center and the rise of the right to the evils of identity politics, and both envision center-left coalitions reforming around concepts like border security, national citizenship, the traditional family, and the homeland.

quote:

Stegemann was successful only at creating diverting dramas, capturing headlines even as whatever momentum Aufstehen had faded. He was also trapped in a performative contradiction of his own making, summoning the working class to the stage to fight the cultural elite of which he was transparently a member.

gradenko_2000 posted:

so between

a register of muslim kids
the government holding ultimate authority over a widely-persecuted minority religion
no public accountability of it's police and security forces

how much of a bullet did France actually dodge by not voting in Le Pen

gradenko_2000 posted:

so between

a register of muslim kids
the government holding ultimate authority over a widely-persecuted minority religion
no public accountability of it's police and security forces

how much of a bullet did France actually dodge by not voting in Le Pen

spankmeister posted:

Everybody who knew anything at the time he was elected knew that Macron was sus as gently caress

gradenko_2000 posted:

so between

a register of muslim kids
the government holding ultimate authority over a widely-persecuted minority religion
no public accountability of it's police and security forces

how much of a bullet did France actually dodge by not voting in Le Pen

Electronico6 posted:

I really did believe that when the Super TV judge failed, that the Portuguese media would always close ranks not to allow your Farage/Trump-esque characters from ruining their silent deals with the main political parties, but what happened was that the dumbass judge got elected for the wrong parliament.

That fascist trash is 100% doing better than CDS and PCP next elections, probably even BE.

gradenko_2000 posted:

V. Illych L. posted:

either hamon or melenchon should've dropped out. realistically hamon, since he was seriously trailing

it's amazing how hollande managed to be bad enough at his job to just shatter his whole party

HerraS posted:

thinking melenchon would've treated the muslim population any better is a

Truga posted:

i find your lack of accuracy disturbing

https://twitter.com/warren_bass/status/1331043461458518021

(the guy in the pic is orban tho)

HerraS posted:

thinking melenchon would've treated the muslim population any better is a

ekuNNN posted:

One of the Dutch fascist parties seems to be melting down after it turns out the youth wing of the fascist party is full of fascists:

Maximo Roboto posted:

https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1333897672189644801