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      in World Politics

      What Happened to the Emerging Democratic Majority?

      by

      In November of last year, Donald Trump lost the presidential election with the highest number of votes for a Republican candidate ever and the second-highest for a presidential candidate. Only Joe Biden did better. Trump also managed to garner the second-highest share of the non-white vote, 26%. Only George W. Bush outdid him, winning 28% in 2004, as a number of commentaries, seeking to diminish Trump’s feat, have pointed out. What they fail to acknowledge, however, is the fact that the two candidates were very different. Bush had many flaws, but race-baiting was not among them.

      Against that, by the time of the 2020 election, there was a wealth of evidence that “racial revanchism” was central to President Trump’s political agenda. This, however, did not prevent a significant number of minority voters from casting their ballots for him. Whether or not this made a difference is an interesting question. In some cases, it might have, most notably in Texas.

      Trumpism After Trump: The Wrong Person at the Right Time?

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      To be sure, Biden won the vast majority of the Hispanic vote in the big cities like Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Trump, however, did surprisingly well in the heavily Latino counties in southern Texas along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. In Starr county, for instance, which is almost completely Hispanic, Trump gained more than 55% of the vote compared to 2016. These results, as neutral observers have charged, “ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.”

      High Hopes

      Ahead of the election, Democrats had high hopes that this time, the emerging Democratic majority was finally going to materialize. The notion goes back to the title of a book from 2002, written by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. In it, the authors argued that the future belonged to the Democrats, for a number of reasons. There was the transformation of America’s demography, there were secular ideological changes going in a progressive direction, and there was, last but not least, the growing socioeconomic and sociocultural dominance of large metropolitan areas, rooted in the growth of a postindustrial economy — what Teixeira called “ideopolises,” organized around ideas and services.  

      The idea was that the Democrats were in a better position than the Republicans to appeal to the diverse constituencies emerging from these developments: on the one hand, the growing ranks of professionals in the high-tech, finance, education, law and medical sectors, a growing number of them women; on the other, ancillary services, such as sales clerks, waiters, janitors, security personnel and teachers’ aides, a large number of them Hispanics and African Americans. Together, Teixeira suggested, they “formed powerful coalitions that now dominate the politics of many ideopolises united in their support of a politics of “tolerance and openness.”

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      In the meantime, much ink has been spilled over the crucial socioeconomic and sociocultural importance of metropolitan areas, largely confirming Teixeira’s assessment. Today’s “global cities” such as New York, London, Paris and Tokyo generate a significant part of their respective nation’s wealth. At the same time, however, they also represent quasi self-contained entities increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country.

      This is a problem, for in the process, the hinterland, which at one time played a crucial role as a supplier of myriads of inputs from small and medium-sized companies, has largely become structurally irrelevant to the metropolitan economy. With it went the middle-class labor force that was the backbone of what once was known as America’s heartland but is today disparaged as flyover country, its inhabitants dismissed as deplorable and repellent racist, sexist, homophobic ignoramuses. Proof: Why else would they have voted for somebody like Trump?

      After roughly two decades since the book was published, the emerging Democratic majority has still not fully materialized. Instead, what we have got are two antagonistic political tribes whose seemingly irreconcilable differences have polarized American politics along a wide range of fault lines: views on immigration, reproductive choice, gender, Black Lives Matter, gun control, affordable health care, social security — the list goes on. This divide’s grand signifier in today’s politics is Donald Trump. As unbelievable as it might sound — given he lost the election, given he was impeached twice, given he left the office scorned and disgraced — his legacy continues to haunt post-Trump politics and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

      Not Fade Away

      According to a recent representative survey, around 80% of Republicans continue to have a favorable view of Donald Trump; more than 70% believe that the charge that the former president incited the assault on the US Capitol on January 6 is untrue; and almost two-thirds believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. It fits that according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll, conducted after Trump’s acquittal in the Senate, three-quarters of Republican respondents said they wished Trump would continue to play a “big role” in the GOP. So much for those who think Trump will somehow fade away into oblivion.

      Trump won in 2016 because he quite skillfully managed to articulate, appeal and respond to a range of diffuse popular grievances, accorded them legitimacy and, in the process, gave the impression that he listened and not only understood, but empathized with them — reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s well-known “I feel your pain” from 1992.  Even if Trump should miraculously disappear from the American political scene, Trumpism, as The Washington Post’s conservative commentator Gary Abernathy has recently maintained, “Trumpism is the GOP’s future.” If this indeed should be the case, it means that the chances for the emergence of a Democratic majority are likely to be as bleak as they have been over the past two decades.

      The notion of an emerging Democratic majority is premised on the idea that certain groups in society, most notably the highly educated, visible minorities, women and sexual minorities, qua their subordinate socioeconomic and sociocultural position have a “natural” affinity for a certain type of politics. Any deviation is either seen as a result of “false consciousness,” a failure “to get with the program” or, worse, simple betrayal of the cause, as the singer Madonna charged in 2016. A case in point was Barak Obama’s attack on Hispanics who voted for the incumbent in 2020, accusing them of ignoring Trump’s track record of race-baiting.  

      America Is No Longer One Nation

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      The same applies to all the white women who voted for Trump, despite his record of routinely disparaging and denigrating women. As Sarah Jaffe has put it in an article for the New Labor Forum, no single fact about the 2016 election was “more confounding than the fact that Trump’s margin of victory included a slim majority of white women voters.” Things were even worse in 2020. While Trump lost some support among white men, his support among white women remained virtually unchanged.

      Political parties, particularly in two-party systems such as the United States, have to assemble a coalition of disparate groups. A case in point was the Democratic Party, which for a long time managed to hold together two factions, one from the South and the other from the Northeast, that were fundamentally at loggerheads over major issues such as civil rights. Behind the idea of the emerging Democratic majority is the expectation that it is possible to put together a coalition on the basis of shared values and shared aspirations, derived from shared experiences of a lack of recognition, if not outright discrimination.

      Radical Nostalgia

      Twenty years ago, this was a reasonable expectation, given the direction of social, and particularly demographic, change. The populist surge that has swept over the United States during the past decade or so, however, has fundamentally altered the logic of electoral choice. Populist mobilization derives its logic not from shared values and aspirations, but from disparate grievances and the perceived unresponsiveness of the political establishment to these grievances.

      Successful populist protagonists are not successful because they come up with elaborate blueprints for profound socioeconomic change, but because they absorb and reflect myriads of disparate grievances and give them a voice. More often than not, populist politics are not about the future but a glorified past, reflecting the surge of nostalgia that has become a hallmark of the current age, further enhanced and intensified by COVID-19.

      There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. In fact, new studies show that nostalgia can be a beneficial mechanism helpful to coping with a difficult situation. It becomes dangerous, however, when it provokes an aggressive response. This, it seems, is what has happened in recent years among parts of the American public — or, at least, that is what the recent survey mentioned earlier suggests. In response to the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,” more than a third of respondents agreed either completely (11%) or somewhat (25%).

      Embed from Getty Images

      In light of the events of January 6, this is quite alarming. But it jibes with the findings of a recent study of MAGA supporters, who to a significant extent consist of white Christian males beyond retirement age. Full of resentment toward assertive women no longer willing to take shit from men, African Americans seen as not trying hard enough and immigrants accused of changing American culture for the worse, they epitomize this kind of radical political nostalgia.

      Nostalgia in terms of a yearning for the status quo ante might to a certain extent explain why a majority of white women voted for Trump. More often than not, grievances stem from changes that individuals perceive as having been imposed on them. A classic case is the construction of nuclear power plants, which in the past gave rise to massive popular resistance and contributed to the rise of Green parties. In the current situation in the United States, grievances stem to a significant extent from both demographic change and the increased visibility of minorities who refuse to remain silent.

      When white women voted for Donald Trump, it was because what has been happening over the past years is a fundamental challenge to the existing racial hierarchy that had been taken for granted. A vote for Trump was a vote for maintaining a tenuous status quo, where white women might be second-class with respect to gender but first-class with respect to race. The same logic certainly does not apply to black voters supporting Trump, a majority of whom were black men. It also does not apply to Hispanics, whose diverse background (Mexican, Cuban, Central American, etc.) makes it even more difficult to come up with a common denominator. Religious considerations, particularly with respect to reproductive choice and gender issues, certainly played a significant role, as did the perception that neither party cares about their concerns.

      What has been emerging over the past decades is a new constellation of political contest, pitting substance-based politics grounded in reasoned deliberation and values, however flawed, against grievance-based politics fueled by anger and resentment. This is hardly confined to the United States. Western Europe has been struggling with this phenomenon and its fallout for decades. Yet given its peculiar system, the United States is in a unique position to serve as a laboratory to see how these dynamics play themselves out. One might wish that the vision behind the notion of the emerging Democratic majority will ultimately carry the day.

      Nietzschean skepticism informed by the notion of “human, all too human” calls for caution. Trump might be finished politically. His spirit, however, is alive and well, capable of causing mischief to no end. Trump’s recent full-front attack on Mitch McConnell is a foretaste of things to come. It portends an attempt to completely transform the GOP into a radical right-wing populist party, devoid of any kind of real substance — in other words, a replica writ large of the Great Leader.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in World Politics

      American Democracy: We Have Misread the Signs of the Coming Storm

      by

      The January 6 storming of the US Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election has left many of us pondering the future of democracy in the United States. The symbol of American democracy withstood the onslaught this time, but the question remains whether the rule of law, free elections and a free press will prevail, or whether the country will succumb to the whims of mob rule and authoritarianism? The outcome of the second impeachment trial of former President Trump on charges of insurrection will shape the answer to that question.

      We have watched the rise of authoritarianism in Poland, Hungary, Brazil and other former democratic regimes, assuming that our institutions and our Constitution were too strong to be compromised by right-wing populist movements. Looking back over the past five decades, it is clear we missed or misread the signs of the coming storm.

      Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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      Beginning with Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” to Ronald Reagan’s “government is the problem,” to the acceleration of neoliberalism and globalization under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, to the rise of the Tea Party during the Obama administration, the threads of extremism were being woven into the tapestry that Trump donned in 2016. This underlying malaise became the core of the movement that erupted in insurrection on Capitol Hill.

      Knowing the history of its evolution does not explain why the passions associated with each of these threads created a violent revolt. One author who was particularly prescient on this question is Eric Hoffer, sometimes called the working man’s philosopher. Writing not from the ivory tower of an elitist, but from his working-class background, in 1951, he articulated in “The True Believer” what has been described as the best analysis of the origins of fanatical or extremist movements. Two points are particularly salient in understanding Trumpism and today’s political environment.  

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      First, Hoffer writes, “though hatred is a convenient instrument for mobilizing a community for defense, it does not, in the long run, come cheap. We pay for it by losing all or many of the values we have set out.” The language of the extreme right has become more vitriolic as individuals become caught in the information vortex of social media. In the echo chambers on the internet, ideas become overwhelmed by angry rhetoric demonizing those who have legitimate differences on issues.

      The vocabulary of dissent becomes more hateful, a rigid us-versus-them construct is formed, and a collective narcissism fed by a narcissistic leader emerges based on a sense of aggrievement. Differences become reasons for a “war” or a “battle” to reclaim control of the future so that it will resemble the past. The language of war cheapens the values of democracy, which, while encouraging passionate stances on issues, requires resolution through thoughtful and respectful dialogue and the rule of law.

      The language for fomenting an insurrection has been there for all to read prior to the emergence of Trump as president, but as a nation, America ignored the warning signs, content that the future would advance securely without addressing the social fractures of its past. After all, we have been reassured by Francis Fukuyama that we are at the end of history. What we seem to ignore — what Hoffer recognized in 1951 — is that a leader with authoritarian tendencies can give shape to an insurrection movement by stoking the seething discontent and perceived injustices of the past, a leader with clearly definable traits. Hoffer’s enumeration of the required traits of such a leader is chilling for it describes Trump so clearly:

      “Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it.”

      Given what we know about President Trump’s character and leadership style and compare it to Hoffer’s list, his role in encouraging, throughout his time in office, what finally transpired on January 6 is not surprising — nor should his unprecedented second impeachment be. Now the challenge to secure a resilient democracy is to learn from our recent history. The outcome of the impeachment trial and the Republicans’ subsequent behavior will determine the resolve of our political system to thwart authoritarian passion. Democracy requires a Republican Party grounded in principles and policy rather than one guided by personalities, conspiracies and seditious impulses. 

      More broadly, how do we transform groups with collective narcissistic mentalities into proponents of deliberative democratic action? How do we stay alert to the ascent of autocratic leaders with the character flaws Hoffer has enumerated? If we do not address these two questions, the ashes of the Capitol Holl insurrection will be the foundation for future mass movements of violent political disruption. Maintaining a vibrant democracy in the United States requires vigilance and the recognition that exceptionalism does not make us invulnerable to the autocratic impulses of our past.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Trumpism After Trump: The Wrong Person at the Right Time?

      by

      A few days before the Senate was due to vote on whether to proceed with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump on charges of inciting insurrection, an article in The Washington Post’s opinion pages boldly proclaimed that “Trumpism is American fascism.” Equating the Trump phenomenon with fascism is nothing new. The comparison started with his election in 2016, feeding a cottage industry over the next four years. At the time, most academic experts on fascism vehemently disagreed. In August 2020, for instance, a prominent Georgetown University historian raised the rhetorical question, “How fascist is President Trump?” The response followed, stante pede: “Not that much.”

      The arguably most important reason for dismissing the fascist charge was that scholars of fascism did not want to contribute to what Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has called “symbolic inflation” — the fact that invoking Adolf Hitler has led to a process where the “value of ‘Hitler’ as an admonitory signifier has become progressively devalued over time.” Examples abound. Jörg Haider, for instance, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) who propelled it to international prominence in the 1990s, was routinely associated with Hitler.

      How Do You Tell an Authoritarian From a Fascist These Days?

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      It was only in the aftermath of the assault on the US Capitol that one of the most eminent contemporary scholars of fascism, Columbia University historian Robert Paxton, came out to state that “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol … removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

      A Diagnosis of Decline

      Behind this reassessment of Trump(ism) is the fact that those who invaded the Capitol on January 6 had no qualms about engaging in violent actions. In fact, by now, it has become obvious that many of the insurgents considered violence a perfectly acceptable means to advance their agenda. The Proud Boys — recently labeled a neo-fascist terrorist group by the Canadian government — add a whiff of squadrismo to the mix. The squadristi (this picture is taken at the Foro Italico, a piazza in front of the Olympic stadium in Rome, depicting an armed squad heading out for a punitive expedition) were Benito Mussolini’s armed goons routinely swarming out to the countryside where they terrorized socialists and trade union leaders.

      Squadrismo was informed by a “palingenetic vision of politics” that was also at the heart of Mussolini’s version of totalitarianism. The term was originally coined and developed by Roger Griffin, another leading expert on fascism. Griffin defines fascism as a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism, where “palingenetic” refers to the myth of rebirth, revival and regeneration provoked by a profound sense of decline, decay and decadence. It follows that fascism is revolutionary and, thus, by definition, the opposite of conservatism. The last thing fascists are interested in is defending and preserving the status quo.

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      From this perspective, there can be no doubt that Trumpism has certain affinities to fascism, to put it cautiously. The very slogan that informed Trump’s 2016 campaign, “Make America Great Again,” reflects the palingenetic spirit of fascism. It serves both as a diagnosis and a promise. A year ago, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat gave a sense of how the diagnosis might go. In his view, the United States, if not the whole Western world, suffers from decadence, manifested by “forms of economic stagnation, institutional sclerosis, and cultural repetition at a high stage of wealth and technological proficiency and civilizational development.”

      There undoubtedly is much truth to this diagnosis. In fact, a Pew survey from early 2019 revealed that a significant majority of the American public shared this view. When asked about their expectations 30 years into the future, a majority thought that the United States would lose importance on the world stage; that the country would be saddled with a huge national debt; and that socioeconomic inequality would be even higher than at the moment. At the same time, the vast majority of respondents had little confidence in the capability of the country’s elected officials to meet these challenges. In fact, more than half of respondents thought that “Washington” had a “negative impact” on finding solutions to the country’s major problems.

      Various studies from 2020 provide further confirmation of the perception of decline. A Brookings Institution preview of the results of the 2020 Census, for instance, painted a picture of stagnation, both in terms of population growth and mobility. A U.S.News analysis of the most recent findings of its annual country rankings found widespread skepticism that more than three years of Trump had made the country “great again.” In fact, compared to the previous year, more Americans thought the US was corrupt: at 31%, a 5% increase on 2019. At the same time, the number of Americans who thought their country was “trustworthy” declined from 61% in 2019 to 55% in 2020.

      Finally, according to a Pew study from early 2020, most American Christians have come to believe that their religion has lost, and continues to lose, influence in American life. Worse still, most also believe that there is a fundamental “tension between their beliefs and the mainstream culture.” This is particularly galling given the fact that at one time in the not-so-distant past, Christian culture was mainstream culture. Not for nothing, in 2016 and 2020, (white) evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

      Something Like Fascism

      Diagnosis, however, is relatively easy. Coming up with a genuine remedy is a fundamentally different issue, provided it goes beyond trite platitudes couched in catchy sloganeering epitomized by Trump’s MAGA campaign. “Make America Great Again” is one of these slogans that sound good but are fundamentally meaningless in the true sense of the word. As such, it is part of the new type of “simulative politics” characteristic of contemporary Western-style democracy, a politics staged as an organized spectacle, the “embodiment of a reality style of politics,” as Douthat puts it, by a president who was “performing a drama that doesn’t necessarily have strong correlates in the real world.” All of this makes Trump a “cartoonish imitation of something like fascism,” a “weird, internet-enabled simulacrum of fascism.”

      The carnivalesque mise en scène of the storming of the Capitol — a pastiche of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, itself a symbolic act given there were only seven prisoners held in the fortress — lends some credence to Douthat’s interpretation. Exemplary here is the “almost-farcical” case of “Elizabeth from Knoxville” who thought she would take part in a revolution only to get Maced (and complain bitterly about it). The farce, of course, goes only so far, given the very real violence resulting in material destruction and the loss of life. It is at this point that the simulacrum turns into reality, exposing the potential of genuine fascism hiding behind the ludicrousness and absurdity of the last days of Trump.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Trumps’ departure has not diminished the potential. Quite the contrary: His ignominious exit has added new fuel to the anger and resentment among many Americans that propelled Trump to the presidency in the first place and has done nothing to assuage diffuse political disenchantment or weaken latent authoritarian inclinations. In fact, an authoritative empirical study from June 2020 found a “substantial minority” of Americans being open to “authoritarian alternatives.” In late 2019, around a quarter of US survey respondents expressed support for a strong leader “who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections.” Overall, it concluded that between a “quarter and a third of the American public flirt with the idea that an alternative to democracy would be a good thing.”

      The study does not disaggregate the results along color lines. It stands to reason, however, that a majority of those yearning for a strong leader are white voters, the very same voters who constituted the bulk of Trump’s loyal supporters. White Americans have always considered themselves the only true embodiment of the nation, rooted in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, which was only gradually extended to Europeans of other Christian faiths. In fact, for much of the 19th century, Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Italy were considered less white than Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock and, as a result, subject to discrimination.

      Over the past several years, the universe of white American identity and pride has come crashing down. For one, as numerous projections have pointed out, by 2045, white Americans will have become a minority in what they see as “their own country.” The result has been both growing white “racial anxiety” and the beginnings of a sociocultural and sociopolitical backlash against the rise of visible minorities, reflected in the support and vote for Trump. Secondly, there is the seemingly inexorable decline of Christianity’s influence in American society. Over the past few decades, American Christians, and particularly white American Christians, have progressively lost their “cultural dominance” and, with it, the assumption, as the editor of a prominent Christian news outlet put it, “that people are like us and people understand us, and people accept us.”

      Finally, there is the notion that the United States is the greatest country in the world and, therefore, predestined and entitled to assume the leadership of the Western world. This was certainly true in the postwar period, given the essential threat posed by the Soviet Union. Today, it is a rather iffy proposition, as the skepticism of a majority of the American public about the country’s position in the world clearly shows.

      The Trump years have severely tarnished the American image among the country’s key allies. The trade war with China exposed American weaknesses in the face of a new challenge to its supremacy. The pandemic, and particularly the way it was handled, only made things worse. In late 2020, a mere quarter of the German population and around a third of the French had a favorable view of the United States. In the UK, traditionally America’s closest ally in Europe, only around 40% saw the US in a favorable light.

      Fertile Ground

      If there has ever been fertile ground in the United States for the kind of palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism Griffin has identified as the core of fascism, it is now. Fertile ground, however, is not enough. It takes the right enabler to translate the mixture of anxiety, resentment, political disenchantment, the flirting with authoritarian alternatives and the yearning for revival and the reestablishment of the “natural order” into political action. Trump might have appealed to some of these sentiments. However, in the end, the combination of egocentric narcissism and mental slothfulness assured that he would never amount to more than a cheap pastiche of the likes of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This is not to say that Trump was nothing but a fleeting moment in contemporary American politics. Quite the opposite. Trump might have been the wrong person at the right time. His impact, however, is enduring. It is reflected most prominently in the direction large parts of the Republican Party have taken. Whereas in the not-so-distant past Republicans championed various culture-war causes, from opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage to the promotion of school prayers, today, a large number of Republican officials on the federal, state and local levels have adopted positions that lean in the direction of Trump-style subversion of the American democratic system. As Chris Hayes has recently put it in the pages of The Atlantic, the fight these days between Democrats and Republicans is less about policy, where under the impact of COVID-19 “the gaps are narrowing. It’s about whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy — and on that crucial question, we’ve rarely been so divided.”

      Even after the shock of January 6, Republican officials continue to feed into the politics of anger and resentment that was at the heart of the assault on Congress. Yesterday, as the Senate voted to proceed with Trump’s impeachment 56-44, just six Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in the move to condemn the president’s role in inciting an unprecedented domestic assault on American democracy. With 17 Republican votes needed to impeach Donald Trump, a reckoning is unlikely.

      The temptation to harvest white resentment for individual gain is too strong and, with it, the temptation to follow the lure of some form of post-fascist fascism, American-style. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a novel with the provocative title, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis, of course, thought fascism was a possibility, even in the United States. It might be a good idea to give his book a second look.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      America Is Not Done Yet

      by

      Some of us have known for a long time that eventually the rest of the world would catch up with the lies at the core of America’s notion of itself. That we would be found out, exposed. Well, here we are. After decades of selling “democracy” at the point of a gun in other people’s lands, America’s capital city was secured by those same guns in order to ensure the “peaceful” transfer of power. All those guns were likely made in America.

      For a moment, watching Trump skulk out of the presidency to the tune of a 21-gun salute that he ordered for himself was too poetic not to enjoy. Then, it fell quickly to the new president, Joe Biden, to pick up the pieces of a nation in turmoil. Every commentator and pundit, including me, has a long list of what is wrong and a shorter list of how to make it right. So much was wrong before Trump, and four years of Trump and his cabal have made so much that was wrong so much worse.

      Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

      READ MORE

      President Biden has one big immediate advantage going forward — he is not Trump. And for a nation watching its soul die a little more each day amid the pandemic, just having a national leader with a heart that beats and a moral compass that projects empathy and understanding will lift the nation on its own for a little while. To sustain the advantage, Biden will have to prove that he and his administration can deliver a national plan for confronting the pandemic.

      The sad truth is that Americans, lots of them, have done their part to make the nation what it looks like today. I cannot help but remember all those unmasked boobs who shouted about their freedom as they took away mine, all those callous young people who thought “their” party would be just fine and then went home to spread disease and death to loved ones and anyone else who got in their way, and all the people who still don’t want to pay those “essential” workers a living wage after seeing what they did for us every time we made it to the grocery store or put out the trash.

      America Is Not Done

      The nation is not done with its turmoil, not by a long shot. The allure of “normal” can be a prescription for a return to normal. However, what was normal to the fortunate can never again be allowed to overwhelm the reality for so many for whom “normal” is defined by poverty, racism, poor education, substandard housing and limited access to limited health care. If you are comfortable with that normal for so many, you are likely to continue to be unmoved by the image of hungry children on your next journey to the spa, country club or suburban church.

      It was easy to be hopeful for a day as a beautifully choreographed presidential inauguration unfolded. On January 20, President Biden gave a galvanizing inauguration address and then immediately set to work undoing the symbols of as much of Trump as he could touch with the stroke of a pen. But, amid the pomp and celebration, here we are again, where we have been so many times before — seeking unity, seeking a moral response and seeking justice.

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      Every “renewal,” almost every protest march, and almost every Martin Luther King Day, someone reminds the nation that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Now, yet one more time, America is beginning the long journey with that first single step. How come we have to do this over and over again? What about the steps that follow if the journey is ever to be completed? It remains so disheartening that Americans need to take that first step again in the fight for a nation that is finally unchained from the fundamental lies that stain its collective soul.

      Some of these lies are old lies, some are as new as yesterday. America is a shining beacon on some hill to some because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. America is the world’s last best hope to some but only because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. And Americans have always been ready to indiscriminately kill others for our nation’s honor or cause, without ever making the connection between them and us.

      While this discussion needs to be about more than systemic racism and racial justice, the homegrown lies about race in America are so profound and so undermine any moral high ground that those lies have to be collectively addressed before addressing any of the other lies will be taken seriously by those who understand the pernicious impact of the lies. When all is said and done, white Americans can only be freed from the burden of the lies by moving far beyond their continued repetition.

      Racial Reckoning

      Much will be said in the months ahead about “reckonings” in both the racial context and the accountability context. Racial reckoning has long been a subject of fierce debate in America, and now, with pandemic negligence, corruption and insurrection leading a parade of official misconduct, accountability will need to be reckoned with as well. Centuries of failed racial reckoning can serve as a guide to the difficulty of national reckoning in any context. Lies have been allowed to overshadow history when repeated over and over again, when believing them seems so much easier than confronting them.

      While it is hard to define a formula for success, reckoning is not a process — it is an end result. The journey to reckoning is the hard part, with racial reckoning and accountability among the most difficult journeys to complete. While neither may require the full journey of a thousand miles to be achieved, neither will ever be achieved after only one step and a few more to follow.

      To escape the past, Americans have to seize the present moment and finally take something more than those first steps on the long journey forward. It would be a good start to simply commit ourselves to the truth.

      *[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Conspiracy Pushers: QAnon’s Radical Unreality

      by

      “Where we go one, we go all.” This tagline from the now infamous QAnon conspiracy has been seared into our hive minds since the insurrectionist events of January 6 on Capitol Hill. The question now becomes, where do Q’s followers go from here? Their “coming storm” prophesied that Donald Trump would seize power, overthrow the deep state and arrest a cabal of Satan-worshipping, pedophilic Democrats. Luckily for everyone else, this storm was little more than an afternoon drizzle. However, the threat from these conspiracies remains.

      Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening?

      READ MORE

      Much has been written about the radicalization of QAnon adherents since the coup attempt, and there is an available body of work for anyone brave enough to wade into this conspiracy pool. There have also been extensive follow-up attempts to dissect the QAnon mindset since President Biden’s inauguration, given Donald Trump’s failure to deliver on the promises made by Q.

      Turbulence Ahead

      While some are taking a certain satisfaction in watching the QAnon worldview crumble, the situation is poised to grow even more complex. This presents an even deeper challenge to the long-term social and political health of the United States. Observers who are commenting on the disillusionment of QAnon communities now that Biden’s presidency has become a reality are missing the point, since reality was never the point to begin with. The point has always been escapism — absconding into a world of fan fiction where the entanglements of our political and economic lives can be distilled down to memes, anonymous “transmissions” and a binary choice between good and evil, filled with legions of heroes and villains. None of this will be abandoned any time soon, let alone gracefully.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Because of this, there is deep turbulence ahead, namely what to do with potentially millions of people who now adhere to an untethered ideology. These digital communities are not going to vanish, nor are they simply going to recognize the absurdity of their ways and come back to the mainstream. Doing so would undermine the investment they have made in the conspiracy that has consumed them, forcing them to acknowledge that their estrangement from family, friends and colleagues is actually of their own making. There is also another dimension, one that goes even deeper. Letting go of the conspiracy and admitting that their beliefs are misplaced is to also acknowledge that they allowed themselves to be deceived and manipulated.

      Having this expectation is a heavy lift and one that cannot be expected without programs or mechanisms that support personal disengagement. Arab countries battling extremism have pioneered these kinds of deradicalization programs and have been running them for years. Unfortunately, programs like this that are currently available in the US do not exist on the scale needed to be effective. What we are left with is much more rudimentary and reactive, allowing us to only assess the pathways these individuals are taking and how their digital communities are supporting their radicalization.

      There are five main QAnon archetypes currently in play. Each has a role in either disrupting or scaling the radicalization behind the next version of the conspiracy. The first group are those who can be reached. These will be individuals who understand they unwittingly fell into something and are looking for a way back to their lives pre-QAnon with a minimal amount of embarrassment. The second group are those still consuming the conspiracy but who are negotiating their belief system within it as Biden settles into his presidency. The cracks have started to form for these individuals, and it could go one of two ways: Either they are reached and brought back into normative political and social life or they will evolve in the direction of the new conspiracy.

      The third group are the enablers who are still committed to trafficking in conspiracy regardless of the form it might be taking. They are the content creators, communicators, logistical planners and recruiters. They have influence within their digital communities, which they will protect by espousing whatever version of the conspiracy keeps them most relevant.

      The fourth group are the ideological drivers of the conspiracy, those not only with the most followers and content but those capable of articulating the most radical aspects of the conspiracy. Many of the previous ideological leaders of QAnon have dropped out due to a loss of legitimacy within these digital communities. But in doing so, they have left behind a vacuum. This space is now being filled by opportunists who need to make even more outlandish claims as a way of establishing their bona fides to the millions of followers looking for what comes next, accelerating the potential for radicalization.

      Turn to Anger

      The fifth group is the most worrisome and where intelligence gatherers and federal law enforcement will need to be most focused. These are individuals who recognize the conspiracy was a lie, but still maintain all of their underlying resentments, specifically white grievance. This will turn to anger, which can be easily exploited, not just because they realize QAnon was a lie, but because they believe they were abandoned by the same politicians who told them the election was stolen. These individuals will be looking for new digital communities that are less keen on fan fiction and more prone to direct action as a way of exercising their grievances. They will be prime targets for white supremacist groups and militias who are looking to recruit, plan and engage in violent action. The recalibration of these relationships is already ongoing.

      Believing the followers of QAnon have lost faith in the conspiracy in any meaningful way is naive. Their reality is flexible. Spend a few minutes in any QAnon Telegram channel, and you can see that the unreality of their beliefs is only accelerating. A new conspiracy is already claiming that Trump will become president again on March 4 under a “restored republic,” which links to a belief that the US was dissolved in the 19th century. Individuals who have retreated from normative social and political life into their conspiracy-driven digital communities will continue to find ways to thrive because they have no other choice. Their emotional investment in the conspiracy has become their personal identity. This is only going to make the conspiracy more dangerous and the radicalization stronger. 

      The FBI cannot arrest its way out of this problem, nor can the tech companies be counted on to regulate their own platforms in a way that addresses the complexity of these vast challenges. While radicalization is nothing new, it is new in the American context. This is a knowledge frontier in its infancy and one we are wholly unprepared for — for all the reasons that led us to this place to begin with. If left unaddressed, we might soon find ourselves in a position where our unreality has indeed become our reality.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Is US Democracy Still Exportable?

      by

      On Inauguration Day 2021, the nation’s capital looked like it has just experienced a coup, not successfully survived one. Streets were blocked off, barricades were up, and armed police and National Guard were everywhere. The inauguration itself took place in front of a deliberately minimal crowd as if the authorities are somehow pulling off an inside job. These precautions were eminently sensible, given the threat of right-wing violence. And the last thing the new administration wants on its first day in office is to hold a very visible super-spreader event in the nation’s capital.

      A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

      READ MORE

      But it’s not a good look for American democracy when the peaceful handover of power has the appearance of a banana republic installing a tinpot dictator — or resembles the America of 1861, for that matter, when a huge security presence at Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration presaged the outbreak of civil war. The brain turns the images it receives from the eyes upside down so that we can ultimately perceive the world right side up. Our brains must now perform the task when looking at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

      Cracked Vessel

      Washington, DC, might look like a city besieged, but this day is in fact the culmination of a vigorous and successful defense of democracy. Voters have removed an autocrat from office by way of an election. The courts and state officials have prevented his attempt to perpetrate electoral fraud. Those who broke into the Capitol on January 6 are belatedly being subjected to the rule of law. And the dictator wannabe is slinking out of town with the smallest and least triumphant farewell parties imaginable. Not only did a coup not happen on January 6 to keep Trump in power, but a coup wasn’t necessary to remove Trump from power. Two cheers for democracy!

      The Biden administration has promised to repair the political damage that Trump has caused. The proposals on the domestic side, such as undoing some of the Republican Party’s voter suppression efforts, are no-brainers from a progressive standpoint. But the foreign policy recommendations around democracy promotion are not so contention-free. A promise to bring together a global Summit of Democracies, for instance, has met with considerable skepticism.

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      There is no question that American democracy has been tarnished, not only by the events of January 6 but by the entire four years of the Trump administration. As I wrote right after the 2020 election, “The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.”

      The events of January 6 have prompted many observers, in the United States and abroad, to declare an end to US pretensions to democracy promotion. As Emma Ashford writes in Foreign Policy: “How can anyone expect — as Joe Biden’s campaign promised — to ‘restore responsible American leadership on the world stage’ if Americans cannot even govern themselves at home? How can the United States spread democracy or act as an example for others if it barely has a functioning democracy at home? Washington’s foreign-policy elites remain committed to the preservation of a three-decade foreign policy aimed at reshaping the world in America’s image. They are far too blasé about what that image has become in 2020.”

      Of course, US democracy has always been a cracked vessel, from the limitations on the franchise that accompanied the country’s birth and the near-constant eruptions of mob violence to the deformations of executive power by practically every president. So, when Roger Cohen writes in The New York Times that the “images of the overrun Capitol will be there, for those who want to use them, to make the point that America would be best advised to avoid giving lessons in the exercise of freedom,” the natural retort would be: There have always been such images.

      From its inception, the United States has continually needed to put its own house in order. When it comes to democracy, America has always been a work in progress. Actually, over the last four years, it was a work in regress, but the point still holds. Democracy in America is not perfect. But does that mean that America’s recent slide away from democracy has disqualified it from engaging in democracy promotion?

      Exports and Brands

      Countries are always promoting something. The French want you to buy their wines. Russia hawks its oil and natural gas. South Korea lobbies on behalf of its boy bands, Saudi Arabia its Wahhabist version of Islam, India its Bollywood movies, Israel its security forces, and so on.

      Democracy might seem like just another export. And, indeed, some American promoters treat their work as if it were an extension of the US brand. They are promoting not democracy in general but American-style democracy. Consultants in Europe, for instance, have evangelized about increasing the role of private fundraising in elections, an American innovation that hitherto has not been so prominent on the continent. In other cases, the promotion of democracy has been just a cover for the projection of US power and influence, as in Iraq after the 2003 invasion or Ukraine after the Maidan revolution of 2014.

      In other words, “democracy promotion” either boils down to the promotion of the US version of democracy or the promotion of US interests, actual democracy be damned. Either way, the phrase and the program have acquired a poor reputation, particularly in their linkage to the political agenda of neoconservatives throughout the Reagan years and again under George W. Bush in the 2000s.

      As with the support of other exports like soybeans and soda pop, there’s a lot of money in democracy promotion. USAID, for instance, has a budget of a couple of billion dollars for “democracy, human rights, and governance,” which includes Elections and Political Processes, the Human Rights Grants Program, the Global Labor Program, the Disability Rights and Inclusive Development Program, and so on. Various foundations and civil society organizations also put a lot of money into the global promotion of democracy and human rights. All of this has been put at acute risk by what Trump and his followers have unleashed upon the United States, much as a sour batch of wine can send an entire wine industry down the drain.

      “Repairing the substantial damage to U.S. image in the world and regaining credibility on democracy issues will be tough and take a long time, even under the best scenario,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based study group, told the Los Angeles Times. “The problem is not so much Trump himself, but rather his enablers and those who have remained silent and been complicit in his patently antidemocratic rhetoric and behavior.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Progressives have long pressed the United States to support labor rights overseas. If another country is throwing labor leaders into jail merely for organizing strikes, the United States should protest. If corporations are employing slave labor or child workers, the United States should sanction them. If a country is abusing its migrant laborers, Washington should say something.

      And the United States should do that even though its own record on labor rights is inconsistent at best. Sometimes US failings are connected to a lack of enforcement of rules on the books. Sometimes the rules on the books are lousy. And sometimes, as was the case in particular during the Trump years, administrations have gone out of their way to depress wages, ignore or actively worsen miserable working conditions and otherwise engage in a veritable war on labor.

      But none of that means that progressives should urge the incoming Biden administration to keep quiet about labor rights abuses overseas until it compiles a perfect record at home. Foreign and domestic policy ideally should go hand in hand. In this way, the United States can demonstrate how to repair an imperfect labor record even as it urges other countries to do the same. The same applies to other elements of the progressive agenda: access to reproductive health care, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations. The United States has an imperfect record on every issue on the progressive agenda.

      Promoting Progressive Values Overseas

      The way out of the apparent contradiction between what the United States says for export and what it does domestically is relatively simple. Don’t do as we say; do as the world says. Focus, in other words, on international standards. All countries, including the United States, should adhere to these standards on labor, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations and the like.

      So, does democracy fall into the same category as these other planks in the progressive platform? To the extent that democracy consists of protections for human rights and political rights such as freedom of speech and a free media, progressives can comfortably insist that all countries, including the United States, adhere to international standards. Let’s call this embrace of the component parts of democracy the “let a thousand trees bloom” approach, with each tree a different human right.

      The challenge comes with the “let’s plant a forest” approach. Democracy as a category can be tricky because of widely varying definitions of what the forest is exactly. Viktor Orbán insists that Hungary is a democracy, albeit an illiberal one, and so far the European Union reluctantly agrees. Brussels might grumble about certain Hungarian actions, but it hasn’t expelled the country from the EU. Plenty of Hungarian activists, however, argue that Orbán has undermined the country’s democratic institutions by compromising the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the media, to name just two violations. So, does Hungary qualify to participate in Biden’s planned Summit of Democracies?

      Although there might be an international consensus around certain aspects of democracy as enshrined in various UN human rights conventions, there is no such agreement over democracy as a whole. Plenty of non-democratic countries have signed UN human rights agreements, for instance, but they would never presume to be invited to a Summit of Democracies. It’s not so much that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Many progressives have reservations about the forest and prefer to focus on the trees.

      One of those reservations concerns regime change. Neoconservatives, in particular, used “democracy promotion” as a cover for pursuing the collapse of governments they didn’t like. In the case of North Korea, for instance, they viewed US pressure on Pyongyang as necessary to eliminate not simply the country’s nuclear weapons but its entire political system. Ditto Iraq, Iran, Libya, Venezuela and Cuba. Such a version of democracy promotion should be off the table. It is up to the people of a country to determine their own political future. And they should be protected in their efforts to do so by international pressure to ensure that the country abides by global human rights standards.

      Over the next four years, let’s by all means work to protect all of those fragile trees at home and abroad. But let’s also take some time to define what we mean by the forest, and let’s make sure to include Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, the Occupy struggles and all the other powerful examples of grassroots democracy. The trees, after all, are part of a larger ecosystem, and they can’t prosper if the overall environment deteriorates.

      Once we have defined what we mean by democracy, American progressives should absolutely support its promotion, even as we work to improve our own political ecosystem. After all, at some point in the future, we may need to call upon the international community to help us save our democracy as well.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Angela Merkel: A Retrospective

      by

      Americans like to rate their presidents. In fact, presidential rankings have become something of a cottage industry in political science, ever since the eminent Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. started the tradition in the late 1940s.

      In Germany, we don’t do that, at least not in a formal way. We do have, however, a sense of who was a good chancellor and who wasn’t, and there probably is something of a common understanding as to why. Chancellors stand out if they accomplished extraordinary feats. Konrad Adenauer will always be remembered for accomplishing Franco-German reconciliation and anchoring the Federal Republic firmly in the West; Willy Brandt for initiating a radical turn in West German foreign policy toward the East, culminating in the reconciliation with Poland; and Helmut Kohl for seizing the historic opportunity in 1989 and bringing about the peaceful reunification of the two Germanies.

      The Downward Spiral of Angela Merkel’s CDU

      READ MORE

      What about Angela Merkel, the first woman to hold Germany’s most powerful political office? Her tenure will end in a few months’ time, at the end, one hopes, of a horrific pandemic. On September 26, Germany will elect a new parliament, and Angela Merkel will retire. By then she will have been in office for more than 15 years, second only to Helmut Kohl, who managed to hold on to the office a few months longer. When Angela Merkel took over in November 2005, she was largely dismissed as “Kohl’s girl” who was likely to have a hard time asserting herself in a political party, the Christian Democrats (CDU) largely dominated by men.

      The Anti-Trump

      In fact, shortly after the election, then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder insisted on national television that there was no way that his Social Democratic Party would ever accept an offer from Angela Merkel to form a coalition with the CDU under her leadership. As it so happened, the Social Democrats did, and Schröder was finished. In the years that followed, it became increasingly clear that Merkel was quite capable of asserting herself in the treacherous waters of Berlin’s political scene. In fact, in 2020, Forbes magazine ranked Angela Merkel as the most powerful woman in the world — for the 10th consecutive year.  

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      Throughout her 15 years in office, the chancellor has, on average, received high satisfaction scores. As recently as December, more than 80% of respondents in a representative survey said that Angela Merkel was doing a good job. Appreciation for Merkel, however, has hardly been limited to Germany. In an international Pew poll from September 2020 covering 13 nations, Merkel was by far seen as the most trusted major world leader. More than three-quarters of respondents rated her positively; by contrast, more than 80% saw then-US President Donald Trump in a negative light.

      Poll data also suggest that during Merkel’s tenure, Germany’s stature in the world has substantially increased. In a Pew study of 10 European nations from early 2019, almost 50% of respondents agreed that Germany played a more significant role in the world than a decade ago; fewer than half said the same thing about France and the UK. Germans are, for obvious historical reasons, understandably concerned about the country’s international image and reputation. Not for nothing, Canada’s The Globe and Mail referred to her in 2018 as the “anti-Trump,” only to add that “We need her kind more than ever.” This in itself will secure Merkel an eminent place in post-reunification German history.

      Ironically enough, the article was written at a time when Merkel’s star appeared to be rapidly waning, the result of serious electoral setbacks on the national and regional level. In the election to the German Bundestag in September 2017, the Christian Democrats lost more than 8 percentage points compared to the previous election, which meant a loss of 65 seats in parliament. At the same time, the radical right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered parliament, garnering more than 12% of the vote. In subsequent regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, the Christian Democrats lost more than 10% of the vote, setting off alarm bells in Munich and Berlin.

      By the end of 2018, Merkel appeared to be up against the ropes, her days numbered. Particularly the upsurge in support for the radical populist right caused alarm, particularly in Bavaria. In response, the powerful Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavaria’s independent arm of the Christian Democrats, seriously contemplated once again to reach beyond Bavaria and create a genuinely national-conservative party, competing with both the AfD and the CDU. The CSU had always maintained that there must never be a democratically legitimated party to the right of the CSU. With the AfD, there clearly was, and Merkel’s Christian Democrats appeared not in a position to stem the tide.

      Corona Winner

      Yet Merkel managed to survive the various challenges to her leadership, despite continued electoral setbacks, which largely benefited the AfD. But skepticism abounded. In late 2018, a majority of Germans thought that Merkel would not serve out her mandate, due to expire at the 2021 parliamentary election. At about the same time, however, 70% of respondents in a representative survey said they wished she would finish her mandate. Once the pandemic hit Germany in the spring of 2020, Merkel’s stock started to soar once again. International media celebrated Germany as a most likely pandemic winner that had proven particularly resilient to the virus.

      What a joke. Only this time, nobody’s laughing. At the time of writing, Germany is a coronavirus disaster zone. The country has proved, once again, to be completely unprepared in the face of the second wave of infections that threatens to overwhelm the health care system. Starting in early December, Germany posted record new infections, and this before the arrival of the UK mutation. By now, the situation in some parts of Germany is nothing short of catastrophic. At the same time, the situation on the vaccination front leaves much to be desired.

      In mid-January, Germany recorded more than 22,000 new infections on a single day and more than 1,100 new COVID-19-related deaths. This is at least partly the result of the German government’s indecisive, hesitant and confusing response to the pandemic, made worse by Germany’s federal system, which provides for a plethora of veto points. This means that not only has it been difficult and quite tedious to arrive at a coordinated policy but also that every Land introduced its own measures, some more stringent than others. The result has been a certain degree of public exasperation. In a recent survey, more than half of respondents said they were annoyed at the measures that were “often contradictory.”

      To be sure, Angela Merkel cannot be held personally responsible for the dramatic deterioration of the situation once the second wave hit Germany with full force. A lot of time was lost in December in attempts to get the various political officials from Germany’s 16 Länder to agree on a common strategy. And even in the face of a potential disaster in early January, Merkel had to do a lot of convincing to get support for more restrictive measures.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Cultural Revolution

      Under the circumstances, Angela Merkel’s other accomplishments as well as her failures are bound to fall by the wayside. They shouldn’t. On one hand, Angela Merkel has dragged the Christian Democrats into the 21st century. The CDU used to be the party of “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” (children, church, kitchen). Politics were a men’s world for, as my neighbor, a woman, used to tell me, politics is a “dirty business” — and dirty businesses should be left to men.

      Angela Merkel dared to appoint a woman to the most male of all ministerial portfolios, defense. The German armed forces did not like her, despite the fact — as even Germany’s conservative flagship publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has conceded — that she managed to substantially increase their budget as well as and their image. Today, that former defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, heads the European Commission, another novum. She was replaced by another woman, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who in 2018 succeeded Angela Merkel as the head of the CDU.

      Probably nothing exemplifies the cultural revolution Merkel set in motion than the question of sexual and gender identity. Those of us who grew up in the postwar period probably recall that once in a while, our parents would hint that somebody was a “175er.” This was in reference to Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code according to which homosexuality was a punishable offense. The paragraph goes back all the way to 1871, establishing that any sexual activity between two males (there was no formal mention of lesbians) was subject to criminal persecution and punishment.

      During the Nazi period, gays suffered from severe persecution, many of them ended up in concentration camps. After the war, the Federal Republic not only retained the paragraph; it also used the Nazis’ “pink lists” — in the camps, homosexuals were marked by a pink triangle on their prisoners’ shirts — to initiate some 100,000 proceedings against homosexuals. It was not until 1994 that the “gay paragraph” was finally abolished, not least because of East German insistence during the negotiations on reunification.

      More than 20 years and many gay parades later, in 2017, the German Bundestag voted on legalizing same-sex marriage. On the occasion, Angela Merkel allowed representatives to vote their conscience rather than following party discipline. Quite a few Christian Democrats came out in the support of the law, which was passed by a substantial majority, much to the chagrin of Germany’s conservatives. Some of them defected to the AfD given its vocal opposition to the law, which, as one of its leaders suggested, threatens to undermine Germany’s traditional values and harm society. Polls showed, however, that a substantial majority supported the law. In June 2017, 60% of men and more than 70% of women came out in favor of same-sex marriage across Germany.

      We Can Handle This

      Angela Merkel’s resolute position during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015-16 also comes out as a positive. In order to understand the enormity of the event, it might be useful to recall one of the great Lebenlügen (delusions) of the Federal Republic, the notion that Germany was “not a country of immigration.” Given the fact that by the 1980s, Germany was home to millions of guest workers and their families, many of whom had permanently settled in Germany, the notion ignored the reality on the ground. Yet it was not until 2001 that an expert commission of the German Bundestag came to the conclusion that the notion was “no longer tenable.” By 2015, a significant majority of Germans agreed with that statement, and in 2019, more than 70% of respondents agreed that in the future, Germany should accept as many refugees as in the past.

      This is quite remarkable, given the storm Angela Merkel provoked when in 2015 she cleared the way for welcoming a million refugees, many of them from war-torn Syria. Her main argument was that Germany is a strong country: “Wir schaffen das,” Merkel announced — “We can handle this.” The German public was not entirely convinced. Perhaps they remembered Merkel’s predecessor, Helmut Kohl, who in 1990 had promised that unification would lead to “blossoming landscapes” in the eastern part of the country. The reality, of course, was the opposite. The West German taxpayers would have to pay the bills for decades to come while in the east, resentment continued to grow only to erupt in substantial support for the AfD.

      Under the circumstances, German skepticism in 2015 was quite understandable. In early 2016, around 80% of the population expressed concern that the government had lost control over the refugee situation; among AfD supporters, it was virtually 100%. As expected, the radical right made the refugee crisis the central focus of their mobilization — a winning strategy, as the party’s success in subsequent elections demonstrated. But in the end, Merkel prevailed; early concerns that the refugee influx would lead to major social problems were largely proved wrong, and, in late 2018, a comfortable majority of Germany’s public agreed that the chancellor had done a good job with respect to her refugee policy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      With Angela Merkel, the CDU moved to the left — or so her critics have insisted and complained. Others have argued that the left-wing turn of the CDU is largely a myth. The reality is somewhere in between. Empirical studies suggest that in the aftermath of reunification, all major German parties gradually moved to the center. With reunification, Germany added millions of citizens from a socialist regime whose value system and views on major social issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, were considerably to the left of the dominant value system that prevailed in the western part of the country. As a result, the conservative ideational elements in the CDU got progressively weakened, provoking vocal protest from the party’s right wing. A study from 2017  (but based on interviews held before the refugee crisis of 2015) found that CDU members largely agreed. They saw their own party “distinctly to the left” of their own position and that way before Angela Merkel’s now-famous “Wir schaffen das.”

      Grey Spots

      Yet against all party-internal resistance and opposition, despite calls for her to hand in her resignation, Merkel once again prevailed — a remarkable feat in these turbulent times. Future historians are likely to consider Angela Merkel’s 15-year tenure in an overall positive light. To be sure, there are grey spots, such as Germany’s handling of the fallout of the financial crisis of 2007-08 and, more recently, Berlin’s intransigence with regard to Italian pleas for “Corona bonds” during the first wave of the pandemic.

      Another grey spot regards the question of gender equality. Officially, the European Union has been committed to gender mainstreaming since the mid-1990s. More often than not, the results are wide off the mark, particularly in Germany. To be sure, even here critics would concede that Angela Merkel has “contributed fundamentally to the recognition of women as leaders and decision-makers in Germany.”

      In other essential areas of gender politics, her record is rather dismal. Her government did little to nothing to narrow the pay gap between men and women or to do away with Germany’s “anachronistic tax system” that privileges married couples “as long as one of the two (usually the husband) has a high income and the other one (usually the wife) earns little or nothing.” And actual reforms, for instance regarding child care and parental leave, were less intended to promote gender equality than to enhance the position of the family, in line with traditional Christian Democratic doctrine.

      The record was equally dismal with regard to public life. As a semi-official account from late 2018 put online by the Federal Center for Political Education noted, in the course of Merkel’s tenure, the number of women in her cabinets progressively declined, from 40% in her first cabinet to 30% in her forth. At the same time, the CDU failed to attract new women members. In 2018, women made up around 25% of party ranks.

      Things were not any better with respect to the composition of Germany’s Bundestag. At the end of the red-Green coalition in 2005, the share of women MPs had been more than 40%. After the election of 2017, it had fallen to a bit more than 30%. In the Christian Democratic parliamentary group, women made up barely 20%. And although Angela Merkel appointed a woman as defense minister, the most important ministries — interior, foreign affairs and finance — remained firmly in the hands of men.

      This was to a large extent also true for Germany’s civil service. In 2020, 35% of top positions in the public sector were held by women. And, as the ministry for justice and consumer protection recently noted, “the higher up in the hierarchy, the lower the share of women.” But at least here, change is underway. By 2025, all senior positions are supposed to have closed the gender gap.

      Klimakanzlerin

      If Germany is a laggard with regard to gender equality, it has prided itself to be a leader when it comes to the environment. The reality, however, is somewhat different. In fact, when it comes to arguably the greatest global challenge, the fight against global warming and climate change, Angela Merkel has been a major disappointment.

      As a reminder: Angela Merkel entered office as a strong advocate of decisive action against climate change. In fact, in the years that followed, German media nicknamed her the “Klimakanzlerin” — climate chancellor. Yet over time, she gradually abandoned her convictions, caving in first to the demands of German’s powerful automobile sector and then to the coal industry. Germany continues to rely heavily on coal for the production of energy. To a significant extent, it is the environmentally most disastrous type of coal, lignite.

      Lignite power plants are among Europe’s worst polluters. Most of them operate in Germany and Poland. And while a number of EU countries, such as France, Italy and the Netherlands, have decided to stop coal-fired power production by or before 2030, Germany won’t phase out its coal plants until 2038. Mining lignite is an important sector in the southeastern part of former East Germany, in Lusatia, around the city of Cottbus. Electoral considerations, particularly given the AfD’s strength in that part of the country, of course have nothing to do with the Merkel government’s reluctance when it comes to coal. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Overall, Merkel’s climate policy has been suboptimal, to put it mildly. As a former environmental minister recently put it, for the government, political opportunism and convenience counted more than tackling an essential problem. That was before the pandemic hit. COVID-19 appears to have caused somewhat of a reconversion. By now, Angela Merkel has once again started to promote herself as the Klimakanzlerin. And for good reasons. COVID-19 has largely been associated with environmental destruction, the dramatic loss of biodiversity and global warming. Polls show that Germans are quite sensitive when it comes to these issues. A recent survey found around 85% of the German population not only concerned about these issues, but also willing to make lifestyle changes to “protect the climate.” Under the circumstances, Merkel’s return to her environmentalist roots is hardly surprising. It makes a lot of sense, politically speaking.

      Despite a vigorous 15-year resume as chancellor, it is now it is clear that COVID-19 will define how Angela Merkel will be judged once she leaves office and by how well Germany will master this challenge over the months to come. This might be unfair. After all, Merkel is what Americans call a “lame duck.” But, as Donald Trump so eloquently put it, it is what it is. The German government’s recent frantic attempts to regain control of a situation that has largely spun out of control are an admission of unpreparedness paired with incompetence and mismanagement paired with wishful thinking. In March 2020, Angela Merkel stated on national television that COVID-19 represented the “greatest challenge since the Second World War.” She was right.

      As long as Merkel holds Germany’s most powerful political position, she is in charge and ultimately bears responsibility. At the moment, a large majority of Germans have full confidence that once again, she will be at the top of her game and handle the challenge. It is to be hoped that their confidence is justified.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More