The larger significance of Merkel’s fate is that the materialist assumptions of Western liberalism no longer capture the reality of Western politics and culture. It is in the nature of liberalism, a credo founded on rationalism, secularism, and utilitarian calculation, to regard material interests—i.e., your pocketbook—as real and the realm of values as ephemeral. That is why in What’s The Matter With Kansas?, the economist Thomas Frank could argue that Republicans had hoodwinked working-class Americans into voting against their true interests by seducing them with traditionalist values. That is also what Barack Obama was thinking when he said during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
It is, of course, no coincidence that the wave of populist nationalism now breaking over the West began in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, when millions of working- and middle-class voters lost savings, jobs, and future prospects. But the wave engulfed liberal politics even where economic pillars remained intact. Poland was Eastern Europe’s economic engine—its Germany—when the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party defeated the classically liberal Civic Platform in 2015. Civic Platform Prime Minister Donald Tusk had described his platform as the maintenance of “warm water in the tap.” When I was in Warsaw the following year, Konstanty Gebert, a columnist and former Solidarity leader, said to me, “He thought that was enough, but he was wrong. People wanted history, they wanted glory, they wanted meaning. And PiS offered a meaning. Their meaning was, ‘We’ll make Poland great again.’”[...]
It is also no coincidence that hostility to immigrants and refugees runs much hotter in eastern Germany than in the wealthier and more open west. Yet during several visits to Dresden, near the country’s eastern border, I found that economics was not uppermost in the minds of either the officials of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party whom I met nor even among the marchers in the weekly rally of the anti-immigrant group Pegida. The demonstrators were not lumpen; most were small-town folk who had seen a few Muslim refugees—often very few—and concluded that their world was under siege. The nationalist spirit has begun spreading westward: In elections this month in wealthy and worldly Bavaria, the AfD won more than 10 percent of the vote and entered parliament there for the first time. The right of center fell, the left of center collapsed, and both extremes profited.
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