The SPD should instead examine why they themselves are losing votes.
The result is they're even less connected to the societies they are nominally a part of. It also makes them much more invested in perpetuating the system and less receptive to society.
edit: This was intentional as it was thought that such a system would reduce international conflict.
How might we start to fix that, do you think? I don't imagine globalization is going anywhere.
When dealing with complexity tooling usually helps. I tend to think instead of redacting documents when FOIAd everything should be public by default. We could have graph tools that markup the connections and make the world more comprehensible.
> The result is they're even less connected to the societies they are nominally a part of. It also makes them much more invested in perpetuating the system and less receptive to society.
With a leader like Willy Brandt and the historical SPD they'd easily get 40%. The current mediocrities in the SPD are old enough to know that. Yet they still prefer their positions over actually serving the country.
> The SPD should instead examine why they themselves are losing votes.
Extremist discourse is appealing. Much like using lead in gasoline. It's very hard to compete with hate-based politics when you don't have to outline actual actionable and long-term viable policies and can rely on soundbites for effect.
edit: burn, karma, burn
Anyone looking at the rise of AfD should also look at the example of Denmark, which some years earlier had also seen a strong rise of radical alt-right parties, but once the centrists switched their stance against immigration, at the next elections the radicals went back down to their rightful 1% or so of votes. That is also an example which shows that indeed it is possible to compete with hate-based politics with actual actionable and long-term viable policies.
Indeed, SPD should instead examine why they themselves are losing votes and consider it their duty to provide some alternative for German voters so that a person can vote against immigration without getting the full neo-nazi package in addition to that.
Is it that so, or is it that hate-based shallow arguments appeal to a particular audience more than "more reasonable" policies or discourse?
> once the centrists switched their stance against immigration
Then the far-right would have won and turned the political mainstream into xenophobes. Not a great outcome for the society as a whole. Would arguments centered on supporting immigrants (and refugees fleeing humanitarian crisis) and integrating them into their host society have the same appeal for people who have been fed a diet of fear and hatred?
There has to be a line that should never be crossed in any democratic society. The far right has crossed it.
Also, speech you hate ≠ hate speech.
I agree, but...
Does it cross that line to say that too much immigration, too fast, causes some definite, specific negative effects on society?
Does it cross that line to say that therefore we should accept less immigration?
(It definitely crosses that line to say that immigrants are evil, or worse, subhuman.)
I apologize if you're genuinely interested, but I really have 0 desire to respond to sealioning.
EDIT: For starters https://afd-verbot.de/beweise?category=demokratiefeindlichke... seems to have a comprehensive list of potential evidence. The site and material are German though.
https://chomsky.info/20081010/
I'm disappointed but not surprised that you are trying to discredit a comment based on a single term that saves a paragraph of explanation. The same tactics that we talk about in this submission.
"Uniparty," as in that exact word, is very much a Trumpean era creation, brought back into popularity by right wing q-anon aligned USA presidential candidate (I believe candidate?) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Someone's usage of it generally indicates not that they're an anticapitalist but that they're aligned with this new form of reactionary thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
"Supporters of the 2000 Green Party presidential bid of Ralph Nader used the term extensively, and Nader himself called the prevailing political structure a 'corporate uniparty' in his 2002 book Crashing the Party."
Pinning this term the right is the usual tactic to outlaw the term and remove it from the dictionary.
Besides, the complaint that the SPD under Schroeder destroyed the welfare state and was increasingly indistinguishable from the CDU predates the AfD.
Arguments like these of course require historical knowledge and nuance rather than crying "far right".
You created your account today, this was your first comment, and I perceive it to be exceedingly aggressive and antagonistic. You're also putting words in my mouth. I don't believe you're acting in good faith and engaging with you is not a productive use of my time.
Uniparty specifically is a term Americans mostly use from the right wing to describe what they call Globalist interests, which almost means the same thing as when anticapitalists describe Capitalist interests, except the points they differ on identify them as fundamentally opposed ideologies.
I've never heard any european politicians use the actual term "uniparty," if someone on this sub is using that exact term, they're likely adopting the American right wing definition of the term in the same way if you see someone referring to "libertarian values" on this sub they probably don't mean values like forming cooperative relationships of mutual aid, they probably mean american libertarian values like privatized unregulated industry. My sibling comment mentions that we're discussing Germany, and that's why I'm being a stickler, if you hear a German refer to the concept of "one party" meaning many parties being enthralled to capitalism, that's very different than the typical usage english word "Uniparty."
Chomsky is talking about capitalist interests, he's not talking about the modern American right wing "globalist interests" which is a sort of umbrella term vaguely blaming economic hardship on trade deficits, exporting factories, importing cheap labor, and sometimes simply antisemitism (global jewish conspiracy to pump nations dry for example). What chomsky is talking about is more like how both parties are required to serve capitalist interests e.g. by not socializing healthcare since that would hurt the bottom line of healthcare companies, or by not banning fracking since that hurts the profits of massive transnational oil companies.
I disagree with your "totalitarian measure" comment, it is the AfD who are not compatible with the German constitution and the majority of Germany's society who prefer a fair democracy should not bulge the shouting of demands by populists, Reichsbürger, Querdenker. The connections to the AfD do exist, AfD politician Malsack-Winkemann (then already not a member of the Bundestag anymore, a security issue in my eyes) toured through the Reichstag with people from the Reichtsbürger group around Heinrich XIII. Prinz Reuß. Local AfD politician Andreas Geitz was even part of the Reichstagsturm in 2020.
Do you know how much support the remaining power centers had? Does it mean he had majority? Does it change your argument? If so, how?
I am avoiding addressing the meat of your argument so far and I am letting small things like Bush 2020 slide, because you are not wrong about power. You do, however, appear to be blinded by the convenience of Left/Right political spectrum.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/ex-afd-abgeordnet...
Connections to the AfD exist, because extreme right people will always choose the most right wing viable party (NPD or successor is too small) as their home. The question is the percentage of these people and if all of them are genuine or some of them are planted.
I agree with the CDU here that the purported issue is not clear enough. It is a shame that we do not have the relatively normal political era of Schmidt, Kohl and Genscher, but that's the fault of the CDU/SPD.
In April 2018, Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), estimated that Reichsbürger movement membership had grown by 80% over the previous two years, more than estimated earlier, with a total of 18,000 adherents, of whom 950 were categorized as right-wing extremists. [Wikipedia]
For context: the RAF probably had no more than 100 members at any point, but no one would think to call them "irrelevant".
Also, I'm fairly sure Strafgesetzbuch section 86a is not what bans parties and membership of them, but censors their symbols and imagery. The Basic Law (Grundgesetz) article 21(2) is what bans parties.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany_v._...
The article literally has a list of political groups that were banned on the basis on the law.
But what bans the parties? Who decides parties are unconstitutional? That is Grundgesetz article 21(2):
Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional. The Federal Constitutional Court shall rule on the question of unconstitutionality.
Parteien, die nach ihren Zielen oder nach dem Verhalten ihrer Anhänger darauf ausgehen, die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung zu beeinträchtigen oder zu beseitigen oder den Bestand der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu gefährden, sind verfassungswidrig. Über die Frage der Verfassungswidrigkeit entscheidet das Bundesverfassungsgericht.We should prevent that from happening again. Now... how would we go about that?
By doing the same thing as last time; wait until the party takes over?
Otherwise, the loud idiots with simple-sounding solutions (that don't work) will gain power.
In the case of the Weimar Republic, it was fucked over by the victors of WW1 imposing a crippling financial burden on it. So, don't wreck your enemies so hard, you might create a monster.
This rethoric always sounds to me like "it's the big parties' fault the people are voting for extremists because the big parties didn't create a perfect world full of rainbows and sunshine".
I'm not convinced that the quality of the current government(s) is the reason for extremists gaining popularity.
What if the Weimar Republic said "screw it, we're not paying"? It might have prompted military invasion, or further sanctions from the victors, making it a pariah state, but it might also have relieved the misery felt by ordinary citizens, and they might not have been so receptive to the big lies of the future dictator.