Beware the authoritarian on a bike

The "be nice" lecture has failed.

Like reading The ‘Schland for free?

This is probably what the frog said when the water got a little bit warmer, but it was difficult to get all that worked up over the result of European parliamentary elections earlier this month. It was clear ahead of time that populist right and illiberal parties and candidates would do well, building on the gains they have been making in Germany and around the European Union for years (yes, years!). Ringing the alarm bells now feels like an empty gesture — and maybe a tad disingenuous?

If anything, mazel tov to the anti-democrats for besting the democrats at their own game. (Again.) Where the former beat the latter, they did so fair and square, so the “anti-” might be an inaccurate characterization. If you fail a test, you probably need to work harder; if everyone fails a test, the teacher probably does. So when 30% or more of your electorate are “failing” at voting, the problem is surely coming not from the students taking the exam but from the instructor at the head of the classroom who made the rules.

Germany, Schoolmaster Lecturer Nummer Eins, is failing fabulously.

At 5% or 10% you can maybe get away with dismissing supporters of far-right populists as the dumb racists of your society who are beyond saving. At 30%, you can’t. And even if you could, it would be a pretty damning statement about that society and what it claims to be. (Looking at you, sogenannte Wiedervereinigung …)

So what we have learned from the elections is what we already for the most part know: Liberals kinda suck. They’ve now spent at least four decades hollowing out the system they revere in the service of illusory market efficiency and at the cost of rising economic inequality, yet refuse to take much responsibility for the fragile state of things today. We broke it, we deserve to keep owning it. Even after the EU electoral shellacking, to riff off the spirit of Obama, Crown Prince of Libville, in places like France and Germany, the Greens and erstwhile center-left have expressed little remorse and even less humility. They may soon vanish from parts of the electoral map, but scoffing at misguided voters while pandering to them with the far-right’s talking points remains the go-to strategy.

Celebrate Churchill, act like Chamberlain.

Should we be surprised that the Greens and Liberals fared the worst? No, we should not.

In the campaign calculus, of course, as we know from their Democratic counterparts across the Atlantic, losing is winning and failure is success. Keeping an external enemy around is an effective way to maintain solidarity on your “side” without having to do much for it. Whether its reproductive health, climate, or issues of discrimination, better to weaponize constituents’ feelings of victimization in an endless culture war with the so-called anti-woke than pass laws and advance policy to alleviate those feelings. Which, by the way, is what the right-wing politics of resentment seeks, only for a different set of people. Trauma is identity and identity has captured democratic politics.

The New-Alt-Illiberal-Populist-Nativist Right is not playing some advanced game of multidimensional chess — some of them, if I may mix my parlor game metaphors, aren’t even playing with a full deck — it’s more that what passes for liberalism does not take Napoleonic genius to attack. It’s easy to turn a profit when you don’t have to pay your workers a decent wage, and it’s easy to balance a budget when you can just cut public benefits under the austere eye of Schäuble, Europa Destructor Extraordinaire. Despite ample evidence of policy failure, there seems to be no escape. It looks like we are trapped in the Post-war (Neo)liberal Imaginary, which has convinced itself that the aberration of latter 20th century regional peace and prosperity is the historical norm and thus can persist through the sheer force of centripetal political drift and the unrealized promise of socioeconomic mobility that actually achieves the opposite.

Its origin story is one in which World War Two was fought with the entrepreneurial spirit of a private sector free of government interference in a triumph of innovation over pure-evil Commie-Nazis, whose only real crime was colonizing the wrong part of the world while trying to exterminate the wrong kind of people. Nearly every adversary since has been depicted as the second coming of Hitler, simultaneously cheapening what the Holocaust was while ensuring we can never get beyond it.

In reality, the louder the evil-doer rhetoric (remember “Islamofascists”?) the less just — let alone worthwhile — the war. Even the narrative of the “good war” OG runs into problems. While the good guys were freeing upstanding parts of the world from the bad guys they were simultaneously busy subjugating its less important parts and, in the likes of Jim Crow America, less important citizens. Today’s liberal talk of kein Platz für Nazis! isn’t new; in the 1920s and 1930s they were saying Germany is much too civilized for such a thing to happen here. Of course, they were already doing such a thing — only over “there.”

Tell that to the beloved Dr. Oetker.

On this both liberals and illiberals agree, sharing an inflated sense of superiority for their home turf. Tribal feuding and political bloodletting are for other places. Here in the Borrellian garden, we are far too evolved — our values, laws, and institutions far too advanced — to succumb to such Anthropocene folly. That’s why Hamas’ brutality is a “massacre” and “barbaric,” while Israel’s leveling of neighborhoods is just war, oh what a pity. Both sides are driven by illiberal and ethno-national maniacs, but only one side can carry out its pseudo-messianic mission with the civilized decency of high-tech bombs dropped from high-altitude aircraft.

“European values” becomes just a nicer way of saying the quiet part out loud. Never mind that zero-sum concepts like hardened nationalism and consumption-addicted industrialization are largely western inventions that were exported to colonies in exchange for their resources upon which these laudable, higher-minded values have been able to flourish. At least liberals, to their credit, have framed these values as universally obtainable, whereas the illiberals want to reserve (or restore) the good life for the Chosen few.

That distinction is rapidly dissipating as the strongest pitch by parties from across the liberal spectrum has become well we are the least bad option. That’ll get people to the polls, for sure. To take just the German context, which we see replicated in various degrees around the EU and out of Brussels, the center-left talks the language of deportation; the Greens have all but abandoned their climate agenda; the eponymous liberals make no secret of their belief that prosperity is a privilege; and the center-right has gained ground on the argument that better the salonfähig devil you know strip you of your citizenship than the brutish devil you don’t.

These are the sorta centrist factions that talk endlessly about the importance of the "Brandmauer” to keep out or at least contain the far-right, only to then light themselves on fire, anyway. At the European level, the concept adopts the French “cordon sanitaire,” which with its connotation of cleanliness and purity is an awkward term in the context of contesting the Nazis’ present-day counterparts.

Even if they wanted to, it is too late to do a mea culpa and join forces with the left — whose political reincarnation remains to be seen — because the fait accompli of half-baked politicking is cooked. Yet so-called centrists, despite their do-gooder talk of antiracism and inclusion, will always pick the right over the left because the former is about feeling bad for an underclass of the left behind while the latter might actually make you do something about catching them up. This is why they have to draw a false equivalence between left- and right-wing ideas, as if they are equally dangerous and the threat to democracy is the same. Otherwise they’d have to question their own motives, and most of these overtures to diversity are designed to avoid precisely that — a derivative effort to assuage guilt without addressing power.

What is this supposed to mean and, given the English, for whom is this intended?

Communism was all about eliminating inferior classes and Nazism was all about eliminating inferior races so post-war western liberalism, which set itself up as diametrically opposed to both, cannot be about either. It must reject both class struggle and racial inequality, which helps keep poor people poor while giving a performative fist bump to racialized minorities. Protest bombing kids in Gaza, say, and take up space on campus to advocate for that end, and that fist is quick to go from bump to quash — the language of tolerance becoming that of deportation and McCarthyist jingoism faster than you can say from the river to the … .

With a liberal system like that, which is quick to throw its beloved fundamental rights under the bus in the service of ahistorical narrative or the pernicious chase for clicks, who needs a reactionary right? Civil-rights abuses, general suspicion of entire groups threatened with exile from the nation-state to which they tenuously belong, and Gleichschaltung are already well underway. The result can only be a push to the extremes and a retreat into tribalism — the place where democratic ideas go to die.

Left: What the Imaginary wants. Right: What the Imaginary does.

Contemplating all this, I went for a run a few days after the election. Jogging has a clarifying effect on things. The route takes me over the Elsenbrücke, which spans the Spree between Friedrichshain and Treptow and is about halfway through an eight-year reconstruction project. (Why a minor bridge needs so much time to get repaired is beyond me, I’m not an engineer, but the way these things go in Germany it will probably need twice that long; in 2021, it was hastily shut to traffic for two days when sensors went off suggesting it was unsafe to use.)

As such, the bridge is a traffic labyrinth. There is a makeshift lane for automobiles, another makeshift one for bikes and, on the other side, a bit of broken up sidewalk for pedestrians that can be difficult to access. As you might reasonably conclude, some flexibility and independent thinking is required to navigate this stretch of urban Tetris. My best bet, it seemed at the time, was keeping to the right of the separated bike lane.

Anyone who lives in Berlin, and Germany more broadly, probably knows and can identify with what happened next.

Good luck.

I couldn’t tell you what exactly the 40-something cyclist with graying locks flowing from his unhelmeted head was shouting at me as he lumbered past. It has taken me many years to learn to ignore these kinds of outbursts because provoking a reaction is the point, and one best to deny. Though that didn’t keep him from trying, as rather than just pedaling away from my slower foot power he slowed down to accost me for the length of my time on the bridge.

For the uninitiated, what’s important here is why he was so furious. It’s not because I was engaged in some kind of action that put him or anyone else in danger. My decision to use the bike lane, while technically not allowed, had no impact on anyone. If anything, his distracted focus on me behind him rather than the road ahead was the riskier behavior, causing him to lose balance at times and fail to see yet more rule-breaking heretics approaching on foot from the other side. He had to swerve to avoid running into them.

The source of his ire was instead an immutable understanding of, and urgent need for a particular kind of order, which my pedestrian existence in his midst was deeply offending. It didn’t matter that it didn’t matter; it was wrong. The only way to correct for it is to eliminate it. Enough of these encounters with vigilante aggression poisons the public square and the civility required for it to function. The next person who approaches you on the street might need help, but it will be difficult to give the benefit of the doubt.

This kind of antisocial behavior repeats itself so widely and regularly in the lived experience here that you can start to make some broader observations about it. It expresses some of Germany’s worst habits: condescension, lecturing, pedantry — a besserwisserei that coalesces to present as a kind of high-functioning spectrum disorder at the societal and political levels. The collective failure to see the proverbial forest from the trees is more disconcerting than any right-wing talk of replacement theory or remigration because it is more disingenuous.

Symbolically if nothing else, the incensed cyclist fits a profile — a person who votes for the “correct” parties, makes “sensible” comments on social media, and participates in the “right” kinds of public demonstration. Perhaps he was just on his way to the organic grocery, or coming back from a Berlin ist bunt! rally against the AfD, when he had the grave misfortune to overtake me with plenty of room to spare. He was surely at a train station to welcome brown-skinned refugees in 2015, only to call them antisemites in 2024.

It is in these moments that the Imaginary crashes into reality, advocating for freedom only to recoil in horror when seeing how some might use it and then take steps to curtail it. The liberal order gets heard with a different emphasis — not as a response to authoritarianism but as a catalyst for it. If you can’t have a bridge all to yourself, at least you can dictate who accesses it and how.