We live in an exceedingly unequal society which has long shown the trend of its life to be toward more and not less inequality, all as those who hold power are more openly contemptuous of doing anything to redress inequality than they have been in a very long time. Naturally those whose task it is to justify their ways to the public spend a lot of time trivializing that inequality's significance in the public mind. One common argument they make to this end holds that the poor aren't badly off materially, really. Only their pride suffers because "society" has placed less value on their contributions than, for example, that of such "geniuses" and "entrepreneurs" as Jeffrey Epstein and Elizabeth Holmes and the titans of shareholder activism--for where would the world be without them to LEAD!
However, contrary to this exceedingly stupid story so beloved by the psycho-babble addicts the reality is that the poor do suffer from much more than feeling "less than" (bad enough as that is), and not only psychically but materially. For contrary to what idiots who talk about a "knowledge economy" would have us believe we still live in a thoroughly material world where a great deal of old-fashioned toil is what keeps the world going round, physically tiring, dangerous, dirty, body-destroying work little relieved by the technological stagnation that has been the real legacy of our "entrepreneurs," excelling as they do not at the technological INNOVATION! they keep talking up, just the technological hype that endlessly proves to be all smoke and no fire. All as, of course, that same order of things has meant that those sneered-at working people bear the brunt of an economic situation in which the markets where they are required to meet their everyday needs for housing, health care and everything else are organized not around their demands as the "consumer is king" propaganda has it, but those of the rentiers and speculators who are the true kings here--all as, when these decide that for the moment the toil of said working folks is not required, the latter are thrown upon a social safety net said kings are eroding to nothing in the name of defending the Makers from the Takers (working people, of course, being in the second category unlike Epstein, Holmes, et. al.).
Especially when faced with these particular circumstances it is easy to imagine that life's tolls will mount up faster for the have-nots than for the haves, that they will indeed age faster and die earlier--perhaps by a significant margin. And as it happens the scientific data testifying to the correctness of this expectation seems increasingly abundant, and much of it formidable. However, it also seems that a scientifically-based or scientist-endorsed "big picture" view is elusive, certainly if one equates such a picture with, for example, an estimate of how much more quickly the poor age, or how much "older" the latter are likely to be physically or mentally at a given point in their lives when compared with the better-off. Certainly the layperson who sifts the research can feel that the researchers are looking at lots and lots of trees without seriously trying to describe the forest--while the explanation that this is just a matter of scientists being rigorous in handling the data will not do. After all, said scientists are operating in a field where hucksterism and quackery run rampant, as one sees in the media's breathlessly reporting dubious results ("Studies show . . .") ever seized upon for the sake of selling half-baked diet and fitness plans. Rather the motivation would seem to be the politics of the matter, and specifically political squeamishness about scientists flatly telling "the poors" that "You're aging faster than the rich, you'll be old beyond your years at every stage of your life, and you'll die sooner."
Still, going by the studies I have seen I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the gap between those who may be judged relatively poor and the relatively well-off numerous enough to be statistically measurable for the benefit of a study--not the super-rich with their weirdo Wellness-to-keep-us-alive-until-immortality-comes-along schemes but people we would probably think of as "middle class"--may have the former aging about ten percent faster than the latter. Now think about what that means in concrete terms. At the age of 62 the poorer man is apt to be physically and mentally functioning more like his better-off peer will at 68. At 67 he is likely to be functioning more like the other man will at 74--all as, less able to retire than his wealthier peer, he endures the greater discomfort of continuing in that job, starting with hauling himself out of bed to, perhaps, endure a long commute aboard an overcrowded bus such as his better-off peer would never have deigned to ride even in the years when their health and strength was at its peak. When he is actually 74 . . . well, at this rate he probably won't make it to 74.
None of this is obscure, but it is unpublicized by those who receive their brass checks for having made us, for example, think about Sydney Sweeney's political affiliation instead. Even so, I suspect that working people understand the reality all too well.
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Writing About Neoliberalism: Some Thoughts
Some years ago certain members of the commentariat began attacking the meaningfulness of the word "neoliberal" as a descriptor of economic policy, insisting it was an empty epithet. Initially seeming to me a very strange claim given that its use had long been established by that point it quickly became apparent that this was really an attack against those who criticized the economic policies of figures like Hillary Clinton or Britain's Blairites and preferred to them those of a Bernie Sanders, or a Jeremy Corbyn--a piece of bad faith hippie-punching by centrist political hacks who would likely never have dared attempt such against opponents who had a mainstream platform from which to fight back. Like Jonathan Chait. And Washington Monthly (of course) politics editor Bill Scher. And Nick Cohen (given space for the last in the Guardian, a reminder of where that paper really stands).
Still, considering the rancor it did seem to me that if they were false charges made in bad faith by political hacks users of the term were not invulnerable to it because of how theorists of the concept had explicated it in the past. Certainly such figures as a David Harvey, one of the principal popularizers of the concept, had provided a good deal of insight, not least in his important book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, reading which one understands that this was a particular program rooted in certain ideas and offering particular prescriptions (market fundamentalism, commending to the public deregulation and privatization, etc.) that, picked up and advanced as part of a right-wing political counter-offensive, changed economic life all over the world in significant ways, and in the process changed much else as well (not least in bringing about the postmodern "cultural condition" to which he had previously devoted a book). All the same, if getting much right there is much else that the conventional, short, explanation of the matter does not capture (many of those who explain neoliberalism miss or fail to properly stress the financialization that is fundamental to it, or to acknowledge, let alone reconcile, the libertarian and anti-statist theory and rhetoric with the reality of the massive state role in the model, e.g. less welfare for humans but more for corporations)--imperfections of which the centrists denying the concept's usefulness made the most. As this suggested broadly comprehensive explication of the concept and its various dimensions in a way that could really and truly be treated as a touchstone for those discussing the subject was scarce, in part because much of the work that would have enabled this seemed to have gone undone. Academics approaching the records of particular governments, or the functioning of economies, tended to write a lot about a very little, rather than vice-versa, in that way reflective of academic life encouraging and rewarding not those who deal with the basics on which everything else rests (like clear, strong and illuminating definitions), but those who do not worry overmuch about such matters as they set about specializing minutely, the more in as the appearance of rigor all too often counts for more than the reality. This is reflective, too, of how due to those same priorities, even after the specialists may have done very good work, few much concern themselves with "what it all means," as we can only hope to understand when someone bothers to try to produce a useful big picture from it--all as, I suspect, academics, perhaps not unnaturally for people who set store by ideas, tended to overrate the significance of these as against hard facts of power and material results in telling the story (looking too much at the musings of would-be philosophes, of whom they too often tend to be in awe, and too little at what the money men hoped to get).
To be entirely fair I do not know that the relevant scholars did a worse job with neoliberalism than they did anything else (these are, again, failures pervading the whole world of scholarship today), but these failures mattered the more precisely because the commentariat has been so hostile to their findings (such that, for example, those who criticized neoliberalism as neoliberalism had to defend their reasoning much more carefully than, for example, the Anti-Communist bashing that model). That encouraged me to try to work things out for myself--searching after a definition and description that would better account for just how contradiction-riddled (frankly, dishonest) the neoliberal Agenda was, and how the result did not go according to plan, but still represented a meaningful departure from what came before that could meaningfully be identified as neoliberalism. This extended to my examining the record of many "neoliberal" politicians in a comprehensive way (specifically Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) to see whether their records did indeed correspond to the neoliberal line. It also extended to developing a conception of how the neoliberal model works in some detail and how neoliberalism was distinguishable not just from what I called "Keynesian Fordism,", but at the same time also from mere classical liberalism, or financialization for that matter; and empirically testing that model against the available statistical data using such metrics as investment, assets, trade, profits, central government-to-GDP ratios and much else to develop a picture of how policymakers and investors and the forces they unleashed restructured the U.S. economy in particular during the neoliberal era. It extended, too, to my using this understanding of neoliberalism to examine particular facets of the matter, like what neoliberalism has meant for the expectations and reality of technological innovation, and even the ways in which working people are living their lives (or finding themselves unable to do so).
To make a long story short I concluded that, yes, neoliberalism, complex as it may be, is indeed a sound, strong, useful concept for describing the economic thinking, policymaking, economic history of the last half century; that one can justly refer to the governments of the United States and Britain of this period as having been neoliberal governments, whose policies produced a distinct economic model, with great, varied, ubiquitous consequence extending into the cultural sphere. I don't know that I convinced anyone else of all this, but then I don't know that that was a realistic prospect. Again, those in the mainstream who put down the concept were doing so in bad faith, all as those who did find the concept useful didn't need convincing, as at any rate all this was probably a bit over the heads of the public, which online rarely looks at such things as working papers of any kind, let alone about such subjects as these. Still, even after many years of researching, thinking, revising as I researched and thought again I stand by the body of work I produced, and the position to which it led me, which is infinitely more than can be said for the brass check earners who fill up the opinion pages in the newspapers, magazines, wire services, news channels and web sites that command a totally unwarranted respect from people of conventional mind--all as it seems to me that a real understanding of neoliberalism is growing only more important as we try to make sense of where the world is headed now.
Still, considering the rancor it did seem to me that if they were false charges made in bad faith by political hacks users of the term were not invulnerable to it because of how theorists of the concept had explicated it in the past. Certainly such figures as a David Harvey, one of the principal popularizers of the concept, had provided a good deal of insight, not least in his important book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, reading which one understands that this was a particular program rooted in certain ideas and offering particular prescriptions (market fundamentalism, commending to the public deregulation and privatization, etc.) that, picked up and advanced as part of a right-wing political counter-offensive, changed economic life all over the world in significant ways, and in the process changed much else as well (not least in bringing about the postmodern "cultural condition" to which he had previously devoted a book). All the same, if getting much right there is much else that the conventional, short, explanation of the matter does not capture (many of those who explain neoliberalism miss or fail to properly stress the financialization that is fundamental to it, or to acknowledge, let alone reconcile, the libertarian and anti-statist theory and rhetoric with the reality of the massive state role in the model, e.g. less welfare for humans but more for corporations)--imperfections of which the centrists denying the concept's usefulness made the most. As this suggested broadly comprehensive explication of the concept and its various dimensions in a way that could really and truly be treated as a touchstone for those discussing the subject was scarce, in part because much of the work that would have enabled this seemed to have gone undone. Academics approaching the records of particular governments, or the functioning of economies, tended to write a lot about a very little, rather than vice-versa, in that way reflective of academic life encouraging and rewarding not those who deal with the basics on which everything else rests (like clear, strong and illuminating definitions), but those who do not worry overmuch about such matters as they set about specializing minutely, the more in as the appearance of rigor all too often counts for more than the reality. This is reflective, too, of how due to those same priorities, even after the specialists may have done very good work, few much concern themselves with "what it all means," as we can only hope to understand when someone bothers to try to produce a useful big picture from it--all as, I suspect, academics, perhaps not unnaturally for people who set store by ideas, tended to overrate the significance of these as against hard facts of power and material results in telling the story (looking too much at the musings of would-be philosophes, of whom they too often tend to be in awe, and too little at what the money men hoped to get).
To be entirely fair I do not know that the relevant scholars did a worse job with neoliberalism than they did anything else (these are, again, failures pervading the whole world of scholarship today), but these failures mattered the more precisely because the commentariat has been so hostile to their findings (such that, for example, those who criticized neoliberalism as neoliberalism had to defend their reasoning much more carefully than, for example, the Anti-Communist bashing that model). That encouraged me to try to work things out for myself--searching after a definition and description that would better account for just how contradiction-riddled (frankly, dishonest) the neoliberal Agenda was, and how the result did not go according to plan, but still represented a meaningful departure from what came before that could meaningfully be identified as neoliberalism. This extended to my examining the record of many "neoliberal" politicians in a comprehensive way (specifically Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) to see whether their records did indeed correspond to the neoliberal line. It also extended to developing a conception of how the neoliberal model works in some detail and how neoliberalism was distinguishable not just from what I called "Keynesian Fordism,", but at the same time also from mere classical liberalism, or financialization for that matter; and empirically testing that model against the available statistical data using such metrics as investment, assets, trade, profits, central government-to-GDP ratios and much else to develop a picture of how policymakers and investors and the forces they unleashed restructured the U.S. economy in particular during the neoliberal era. It extended, too, to my using this understanding of neoliberalism to examine particular facets of the matter, like what neoliberalism has meant for the expectations and reality of technological innovation, and even the ways in which working people are living their lives (or finding themselves unable to do so).
To make a long story short I concluded that, yes, neoliberalism, complex as it may be, is indeed a sound, strong, useful concept for describing the economic thinking, policymaking, economic history of the last half century; that one can justly refer to the governments of the United States and Britain of this period as having been neoliberal governments, whose policies produced a distinct economic model, with great, varied, ubiquitous consequence extending into the cultural sphere. I don't know that I convinced anyone else of all this, but then I don't know that that was a realistic prospect. Again, those in the mainstream who put down the concept were doing so in bad faith, all as those who did find the concept useful didn't need convincing, as at any rate all this was probably a bit over the heads of the public, which online rarely looks at such things as working papers of any kind, let alone about such subjects as these. Still, even after many years of researching, thinking, revising as I researched and thought again I stand by the body of work I produced, and the position to which it led me, which is infinitely more than can be said for the brass check earners who fill up the opinion pages in the newspapers, magazines, wire services, news channels and web sites that command a totally unwarranted respect from people of conventional mind--all as it seems to me that a real understanding of neoliberalism is growing only more important as we try to make sense of where the world is headed now.
Not Just Thatcher, But Reagan
Recently reading the details of the German government's euphemistically named "Growth Booster" (read: big giveaway to business and the rich in the name of supply-side theory that was never really anything else) I found myself thinking not so much of Margaret Thatcher as Ronald Reagan, and not just because Friedrich Merz of Blackrock's plan also prominently features an accelerated depreciation schedule. There was also the way in which the tax cuts were combined with not just plans for social spending cuts (of which we are now starting to hear significantly details), but plans to drastically raise defense spending, which is much more Reagan than Thatcher if one is looking for precedents. After all, foreign policy hard-liner that Thatcher was, her government was anything but open-handed with the British armed forces--her deficit hawkishness more than a pose to that extent, at least.
The fact that European governments like those of the ultra-Establishment Merz are embracing bigger defense budget alongside the usual "Robin Hood in reverse" of robbing the poor to give to the rich via the usual tax and spending cuts seems worthy of remark. If continental politicians have long hoped to be their country's Thatcher, their hoping to be its Reagan is something newer, with the case of that other pillar of the European project, France, telling. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, if not without his pretensions on the international stage, was more concerned with economic reforms on the home front. By contrast the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, seems to look to the more international affairs-minded Reagan--and to go by certain of his rhetoric, that subsequent Republican President, Bush II, as well--as a model here. In this as in so many other ways it would seem that European policymakers, who were never so different in outlook from their American counterparts as those who bought into silly fantasies (or desperate dreams) of a more enlightened European elite pursuing a more enlightened path seemed prepared to believe, have been growing more brazen about that as they press harder to get more American-style policies, not only where hardcore neoliberalism at home is concerned, but the more "muscular" foreign policy they have for so long wanted. So much so that the governments of the Dutch and Czechs are apparently quite happy to turn their armies into franchises if not reserves of the successor of the World War II Wehrmacht that has now come under the control of a government headed by a profoundly uncouth yet also treacherous Chancellor whose ascent to office on an historically slight vote testifying to his lack of any genuine popular mandate has not inhibited him about going for broke pursuing an Agenda that most certainly includes arming for confrontation with "the East." Meanwhile in France, where the heirs of the "Better Hitler Than Blum" crowd are as close to (re)taking power as they have ever been since the fall of the Vichy regime, the present occupant of the Élysée Palace strives not to be outdone in plundering the public for the sake of turning what, Marianne tells us, is described by the French army's own officers as "an army of majorettes" into a more credible fighting force, also means to outdo Merz in aggressiveness about sending that force eastward as he calls for a "coalition of the willing" to be led by himself, of course--possibly to an even greater disaster than the world got the last time a President used that language.
Of course, all this is not going over well with the European publics. The German public, whose vote for Merz's party was, again, very low (less than a quarter of the electorate voted for Merz and his party), seems easily dividable into that part of it which never trusted him to begin with (likely, a great majority of the 76 percent of the German electorate that did not vote for him), and that part of it which feels betrayed by him (some 73 percent of Germans already feeling that way as he assumed office, with his subsequent performance not improving that, only 1 in 5 Germans seeing him as trustworthy), as pretty much all of that public detests him (his approval rating standing at a dismal 29 percent last month).
Of course, all this does not get the press it ought to in the States, but if anything American coverage of France may be even more muddled due to how, in contrast with Merz, whose lavish expenditures on styling and makeup seem to have not added to his charm in their eyes (he is Mr. Vain!), the American press fawns over Emmanuel Macron--with in particular a significant part of the identity politics-mad American commentariat so consumed with ecstasies over the "handsome" and "powerful" (middle-aged) man being married to a woman old enough to be his (senior citizen) mother (much more to their taste than the not-so-handsome Sarkozy's capping off his rise to the top by marrying '90s glory days of the supermodel supermodel Carla Bruni right in the Palace, cuz it's good to be the king!). Too much consumed with ecstasies over his "unconventional" began-with-a-Lifetime-Channel-movie-of-the-week marriage to spare much thought to his policies, and the opinion of his electorate about those policies--not least as reflected in his string of failed Prime Ministers, to which (the still less handsome?) Francois Bayrou has just been added by a no confidence vote prompted by the aggressiveness of his particular grab after the pocketbooks and social rights of France's working people. Still, the fact remains that anyone even minimally informed about the situation should need no introduction to his troubles that way. (After all, even the American press couldn't completely ignore the upheaval of 2023.) Especially as the hard realities of what it will take to not just fund, but man, the Not-So-New-Model-Armies of the European Establishment's militaristic dreams (make no mistake, they are inching back toward conscription) Europe's "leaders" will not be able to expect that pompous lectures about defense being "the greatest public benefit of all" will suffice to make the plebs rally to their standards.
The fact that European governments like those of the ultra-Establishment Merz are embracing bigger defense budget alongside the usual "Robin Hood in reverse" of robbing the poor to give to the rich via the usual tax and spending cuts seems worthy of remark. If continental politicians have long hoped to be their country's Thatcher, their hoping to be its Reagan is something newer, with the case of that other pillar of the European project, France, telling. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, if not without his pretensions on the international stage, was more concerned with economic reforms on the home front. By contrast the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, seems to look to the more international affairs-minded Reagan--and to go by certain of his rhetoric, that subsequent Republican President, Bush II, as well--as a model here. In this as in so many other ways it would seem that European policymakers, who were never so different in outlook from their American counterparts as those who bought into silly fantasies (or desperate dreams) of a more enlightened European elite pursuing a more enlightened path seemed prepared to believe, have been growing more brazen about that as they press harder to get more American-style policies, not only where hardcore neoliberalism at home is concerned, but the more "muscular" foreign policy they have for so long wanted. So much so that the governments of the Dutch and Czechs are apparently quite happy to turn their armies into franchises if not reserves of the successor of the World War II Wehrmacht that has now come under the control of a government headed by a profoundly uncouth yet also treacherous Chancellor whose ascent to office on an historically slight vote testifying to his lack of any genuine popular mandate has not inhibited him about going for broke pursuing an Agenda that most certainly includes arming for confrontation with "the East." Meanwhile in France, where the heirs of the "Better Hitler Than Blum" crowd are as close to (re)taking power as they have ever been since the fall of the Vichy regime, the present occupant of the Élysée Palace strives not to be outdone in plundering the public for the sake of turning what, Marianne tells us, is described by the French army's own officers as "an army of majorettes" into a more credible fighting force, also means to outdo Merz in aggressiveness about sending that force eastward as he calls for a "coalition of the willing" to be led by himself, of course--possibly to an even greater disaster than the world got the last time a President used that language.
Of course, all this is not going over well with the European publics. The German public, whose vote for Merz's party was, again, very low (less than a quarter of the electorate voted for Merz and his party), seems easily dividable into that part of it which never trusted him to begin with (likely, a great majority of the 76 percent of the German electorate that did not vote for him), and that part of it which feels betrayed by him (some 73 percent of Germans already feeling that way as he assumed office, with his subsequent performance not improving that, only 1 in 5 Germans seeing him as trustworthy), as pretty much all of that public detests him (his approval rating standing at a dismal 29 percent last month).
Of course, all this does not get the press it ought to in the States, but if anything American coverage of France may be even more muddled due to how, in contrast with Merz, whose lavish expenditures on styling and makeup seem to have not added to his charm in their eyes (he is Mr. Vain!), the American press fawns over Emmanuel Macron--with in particular a significant part of the identity politics-mad American commentariat so consumed with ecstasies over the "handsome" and "powerful" (middle-aged) man being married to a woman old enough to be his (senior citizen) mother (much more to their taste than the not-so-handsome Sarkozy's capping off his rise to the top by marrying '90s glory days of the supermodel supermodel Carla Bruni right in the Palace, cuz it's good to be the king!). Too much consumed with ecstasies over his "unconventional" began-with-a-Lifetime-Channel-movie-of-the-week marriage to spare much thought to his policies, and the opinion of his electorate about those policies--not least as reflected in his string of failed Prime Ministers, to which (the still less handsome?) Francois Bayrou has just been added by a no confidence vote prompted by the aggressiveness of his particular grab after the pocketbooks and social rights of France's working people. Still, the fact remains that anyone even minimally informed about the situation should need no introduction to his troubles that way. (After all, even the American press couldn't completely ignore the upheaval of 2023.) Especially as the hard realities of what it will take to not just fund, but man, the Not-So-New-Model-Armies of the European Establishment's militaristic dreams (make no mistake, they are inching back toward conscription) Europe's "leaders" will not be able to expect that pompous lectures about defense being "the greatest public benefit of all" will suffice to make the plebs rally to their standards.
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Germany's Rearmament Program: August 2025 Update
Back in 2022 remarking Germany's announced infusion of cash into its armed forces I acknowledged the magnitude of the expenditure, which at a stroke made Germany a candidate for the rank of the world's third highest-spending military power. However, I also argued that the sums being talked about (2 percent+ of GDP for defense bolstered by a hundred billion euro "one-off") would not result in a very much larger or more capable German military force given inflation, the country's industrial troubles, the fluctuating exchange ranges relevant to the imports clearly part of the program (like F-35 fighters), the long neglected problems of those forces (like their reportedly unlivable barracks) and of course the extremely high cost of military power, even before the way one gets into the excellence of governments and military-industrial complexes at making a lot of money go a very short away.
I do not seem to have been wrong about that, with this underlined by how three years later Germany, militarily scarcely different from what it was before the grandiose claims of "Zeitenwende", the country joined the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in committing to a far higher target. This saw them abandon the 2 percent of GDP for defense that was the old target in favor of a defense (and "defense- and security-related") outlay of 5 percent, with at least 3.5 percent going to "core" defense, by 2035. More aggressive still Germany's government has pledged to realize the 3.5 percent+ goal not by 2035 but by 2029, with the broad program facilitated by the earlier amendment of the constitution to exclude defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the "debt brake," and parliament's creation of a half trillion euro "infrastructure fund" also exempt from said brake, some months earlier.
It is also the case that this aggressive, drastic, fiscally enabled enlargement of German defense spending has been accompanied by what was absent in the wake of the Zeitenwende, specific targets for the enlargement of the forces, and massive orders of new equipment. The current plan seems to be to enlarge the German armed forces' standing component from 180,000 to 250,000+ personnel (a 40 percent increase) and the reserves from 60,000 to 200,000 (more than tripling reserves that had, like those everywhere else in Europe, been cut nearly to nothing in the wake of the Cold War reorientation to rapid-response and less conventional missions in faraway places), with the result a fully mobilized force not in the quarter-million but the half-million range. Meanwhile the German government is reportedly ordering as many as 1,000 new Leopard 2 tanks (as against the three hundred or so it now has) and 6,500-8,500 Boxer and Patria armored fighting vehicles, implying a fully mobilized mechanized force many times Germany's current force in size. A much more substantial project than anything discussed three years ago it seems fair to say that Germany has not undertaken anything to compare with this since the founding of the Bundeswehr. And of course this does not include the reality of the "Framework Nation Concept" which has turned the Dutch army's brigades into "plug-and-play" elements (insertable into German divisions), with Czechia and Romania partly ventured on this course, which would potentially mean still larger forces under German "leadership."
All in all this situation seems a reminder of how when the issue is the social needs of the public, or something else to which elites are indifferent or even hostile Authority wails about balanced budgets, admonishes the hungry and homeless to be respectful of vested interest, offers homilies about "politics as the art of the possible," and warns them that those (rightly) contemptuous of its do-nothingism and desirous of actually solving a problem are crazy people fleeing from freedom into totalitarianism who will make an Orwellian hell of the world should they get their way. But when it's something elites care about suddenly the politicians become "men of action." Not very intelligent, competent, men of action, but men of action all the same, with all this underlined by how that amendment instituting the debt brake came along back in 2009, right after the Great Recession when Berlin was intent on austerity in the face of '30s-like crisis and everything else be damned, as we saw with German bridges collapsing--but didn't seem so important when events presented them a new chance for weltpolitik and corporate welfare.
Still, in spite of themselves the program will take many years to realize, with reversal not impossible. The geopolitical situation, the economic situation (Germany is not in a great way here, all as military Keynesianism, which ain't what it used to be, may not help much), may well throw some surprises at them in these coming years. Besides, the words "On time and on budget" simply don't exist in the vocabulary of contractors, with the military-industrial complex-types second to none here. Meanwhile, though you would never know it from the media cheerleading ("Who are the heirs of Julius Streicher?"), it is very probable that this program is much less popular with the public than the chattering classes. This is all the more the case as, as the collapse of the vote for the traditional leading parties shows, Germany's political Establishment is just as despised and mistrusted by its electorate as its counterparts elsewhere, career corporate lawyer and former Blackrock Germany board member Chancellor Merz is already warning the public that his warfare state requires sacrifice of the already austerity-battered welfare state, and the idea of the German government realizing its ambitious military manpower goals on a purely voluntary basis seems like pure fantasy. Aside from the aversion to militarism on the part of the German public generally, and its disinterest in military confrontation with Russia particularly, the well of manpower on which it can draw is more limited than one may guess from the size of its population, for where fertility and age structure are concerned Germany is practically in the same boat as Japan, such that having the kind of mobilizable force they want means a very high proportion of military-age German youth putting the best years of their lives into "service." If the German government really is staying the course on this one, conscription is returning to the country, and before very long--with this obvious enough that I would imagine (not that the media will rush to report it) a great many German young people are already thinking about how to avoid the draft, as the more activism-minded among them consider the prospects for a new campaign. In fairness, Germany's government seems less and less inclined to let democratic niceties stand in the way of its goals, but this too may mean surprises in store.
I do not seem to have been wrong about that, with this underlined by how three years later Germany, militarily scarcely different from what it was before the grandiose claims of "Zeitenwende", the country joined the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in committing to a far higher target. This saw them abandon the 2 percent of GDP for defense that was the old target in favor of a defense (and "defense- and security-related") outlay of 5 percent, with at least 3.5 percent going to "core" defense, by 2035. More aggressive still Germany's government has pledged to realize the 3.5 percent+ goal not by 2035 but by 2029, with the broad program facilitated by the earlier amendment of the constitution to exclude defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the "debt brake," and parliament's creation of a half trillion euro "infrastructure fund" also exempt from said brake, some months earlier.
It is also the case that this aggressive, drastic, fiscally enabled enlargement of German defense spending has been accompanied by what was absent in the wake of the Zeitenwende, specific targets for the enlargement of the forces, and massive orders of new equipment. The current plan seems to be to enlarge the German armed forces' standing component from 180,000 to 250,000+ personnel (a 40 percent increase) and the reserves from 60,000 to 200,000 (more than tripling reserves that had, like those everywhere else in Europe, been cut nearly to nothing in the wake of the Cold War reorientation to rapid-response and less conventional missions in faraway places), with the result a fully mobilized force not in the quarter-million but the half-million range. Meanwhile the German government is reportedly ordering as many as 1,000 new Leopard 2 tanks (as against the three hundred or so it now has) and 6,500-8,500 Boxer and Patria armored fighting vehicles, implying a fully mobilized mechanized force many times Germany's current force in size. A much more substantial project than anything discussed three years ago it seems fair to say that Germany has not undertaken anything to compare with this since the founding of the Bundeswehr. And of course this does not include the reality of the "Framework Nation Concept" which has turned the Dutch army's brigades into "plug-and-play" elements (insertable into German divisions), with Czechia and Romania partly ventured on this course, which would potentially mean still larger forces under German "leadership."
All in all this situation seems a reminder of how when the issue is the social needs of the public, or something else to which elites are indifferent or even hostile Authority wails about balanced budgets, admonishes the hungry and homeless to be respectful of vested interest, offers homilies about "politics as the art of the possible," and warns them that those (rightly) contemptuous of its do-nothingism and desirous of actually solving a problem are crazy people fleeing from freedom into totalitarianism who will make an Orwellian hell of the world should they get their way. But when it's something elites care about suddenly the politicians become "men of action." Not very intelligent, competent, men of action, but men of action all the same, with all this underlined by how that amendment instituting the debt brake came along back in 2009, right after the Great Recession when Berlin was intent on austerity in the face of '30s-like crisis and everything else be damned, as we saw with German bridges collapsing--but didn't seem so important when events presented them a new chance for weltpolitik and corporate welfare.
Still, in spite of themselves the program will take many years to realize, with reversal not impossible. The geopolitical situation, the economic situation (Germany is not in a great way here, all as military Keynesianism, which ain't what it used to be, may not help much), may well throw some surprises at them in these coming years. Besides, the words "On time and on budget" simply don't exist in the vocabulary of contractors, with the military-industrial complex-types second to none here. Meanwhile, though you would never know it from the media cheerleading ("Who are the heirs of Julius Streicher?"), it is very probable that this program is much less popular with the public than the chattering classes. This is all the more the case as, as the collapse of the vote for the traditional leading parties shows, Germany's political Establishment is just as despised and mistrusted by its electorate as its counterparts elsewhere, career corporate lawyer and former Blackrock Germany board member Chancellor Merz is already warning the public that his warfare state requires sacrifice of the already austerity-battered welfare state, and the idea of the German government realizing its ambitious military manpower goals on a purely voluntary basis seems like pure fantasy. Aside from the aversion to militarism on the part of the German public generally, and its disinterest in military confrontation with Russia particularly, the well of manpower on which it can draw is more limited than one may guess from the size of its population, for where fertility and age structure are concerned Germany is practically in the same boat as Japan, such that having the kind of mobilizable force they want means a very high proportion of military-age German youth putting the best years of their lives into "service." If the German government really is staying the course on this one, conscription is returning to the country, and before very long--with this obvious enough that I would imagine (not that the media will rush to report it) a great many German young people are already thinking about how to avoid the draft, as the more activism-minded among them consider the prospects for a new campaign. In fairness, Germany's government seems less and less inclined to let democratic niceties stand in the way of its goals, but this too may mean surprises in store.
On Germany's Armor Orders
At this stage of things it is difficult to say very much about the Russo-Ukrainian War now dragging into its fourth year. The plain and simple truth of the matter is that an ongoing war, with its "fog," secrecy and deception, is a far harder thing to analyze than a past one in even the best of circumstances--and these are not the best of circumstances. Everything that has happened in this conflict has made it very clear that those experts with any sort of platform from which one can address the broad public have been profoundly lacking in insight. They did not understand either Russia or Ukraine, not just their armed forces, but also their economies and their societies and what they would and would not be able to bear up under the strains of a war like this one. (Remember how for almost three years now Russia has been on the verge of totally running out of ammunition, but it just never happened? How one side or the other has always been about to collapse, but here they still are, fighting?) But then where "Establishment expert" is concerned (and it is this which the media gives us) the accent is on the Establishment part, not the expert part, all as having understanding to impart to the public is not likely to be a requirement of their job. To go by the results that would seem to be giving the public the "mushroom treatment," which is the real "skill set" of these "experts," and a not uncommon mission for them, which they consistently fulfill with zeal.
Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to its rendering transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions in the age of the small drone. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.
Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).
What could the German government's planners be thinking here?
One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)
The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.
Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to its rendering transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions in the age of the small drone. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.
Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).
What could the German government's planners be thinking here?
One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)
The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.
Of Neoliberalism's Contradictions--and the Democratic Party's
First encountering the Roosevelt Institute report titled "The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism: The Longing for an Alternative Order and the Future of Multiracial Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism" I was intrigued by its promise of a comprehensive treatment of the implications of neoliberalism at a cultural level--precisely because really rigorous work on neoliberalism is so scarce and so potentially valuable for those interested in the subject, with this going double for the realm of cultural studies (floopy postmodernism having had its deeply unhealthy effect on such work). And initially the report appeared quite interesting, with its discussion of neoliberalism's ultra-conformism and insecurity's encouragement of atomization, alienation, isolation, "self-commodification," and self-blame in those who have problems, and its categorization of responses by individuals to neoliberalism's stresses and failures in a quasi-Mertonian way (describing, alongside those who do seek the sense of community the system deprives them of in some fashion, not always with happy result, the rugged individualism of "strivers, self-help and wellness" culture, "dropouts," and "rebellion").
However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.
This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).
In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.
However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.
This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).
In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.
The Contradictions--and Consistencies--of Centrist Thought
While one can spend quite a bit of time discussing centrism's complex intellectual lineage, it is the conservatism of the centrist that is paramount in their broad conceptualization of the world, their intellectual responses to its concrete problems, and the actions they espouse--more specifically their embrace of classical conservative thinking, attachment to a conservative-liberal social system (more attached to capitalism than the democracy it sees as having to be limited if it is to be preserved), and the capital A Anti-Communism inseparable from both.
Thus it is the case that if the centrist is famously "anti-ideological" and "anti-extremist" and insistent on "objectivity," all of which claims only hold up when one abides by their special definitions of the terms, which are again subordinate to their Anti-Communist conservatism. As is the case with conservatives generally, they identify ideology as principally a sin of the left, obtuse to how in the end everyone is ideological, not least the centrists themselves. In thundering against extremism their hard line against "extremism" on the left (which often extends to hostility to anything-but-extreme liberals) is unmatched by an equal alertness to and stalwartness in the face of the extremism of the right, as in fact they downplay any such threat, not least by all but defining the term "fascism" out of existence. (Indeed, Irwin Ross, reviewing when that book was new Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center in Commentary--the very Commentary that soon came to be the neoconservatives' flagship publication--was to remark "that Schlesinger actually seems to have little fear of reaction," not the first time such a thing would be said of those in the center.) Meanwhile in the centrist's usage "objectivity" means the absence of ideology--or rather what they would recognize as ideology--which is to say that they reduce the meaning of the word objectivity to one's sharing their prejudices.
Thus it is the case that while one can speak of centrists as "pragmatists" their pragmatism is highly qualified indeed--for if the pragmatist creed may be summed up as "I can't be sure what's real or why it happens I know what 'works' and will go on that, until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" they drop the "until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" part. The result is that they are quite happy to embrace the pragmatist's skepticism of knowledge claims in favor of "practicality" and "experience," they are also sure they have eternal truths in their philosophy and their system and their enmities--indeed, a Schlesinger or a Bell loudly announcing their adherence to millennia-old belief in sin and evil and tragedy as they show themselves rather more resistant to change than a "go with what works" pragmatist has any business being.
Thus it is the case that if they are bearers of the Progressive tradition with its reform-mindedness one notices that where the Progressive was desirous of honest and efficient government the centrist is comfortable with the grubby play of interest that, especially in its seeing the public interest consistently lose to the rapacity and the intrigues of the powerful, looked to them like plain and simple corruption. Indeed, the centrist defends that play as "just the way the world works" as they smile condescendingly at the Progressive whose objections to such things seem to them childish. Not unrelated to this is how the centrist makes much of their respect for experts, as they sneer at the Know-Nothingism of those who disagree with them, but stop listening to experts when their findings are ill at ease with their conservative aversion to change--as seen in how they insist on giving a platform to such Know-Nothings when indulging climate deniers who undermine the experts' position on the matter, cynically helping to deflect political pressure to support public intervention in the economy of a kind and on a scale they reject out of hand.
Thus is it the case that if the New Deal was important in centrist thought, there is no question that the centrist found it easy to set the measure of social democratic reform they had stood for at mid-century aside in favor of what seemed to them an embrace of neoliberalism--less aggressively and stridently than their counterparts to their right, perhaps, but the difference only one of degree, while the move is not the great stretch it may seem given the essential conservatism of their economic thought from the start. Indeed, given how the "pragmatic" center has stuck with neoliberalism even as it yielded economic and social failure, a stoking of extremism, and electoral defeat, one sees that if, ultimately, the centrist promises a more flexible, forward-looking conservatism than the avowed right, it is conservatism nonetheless that prevails over the tools they invoke as their way of making their conservatism a success.
All of this is reflected in the significant misapprehension many have about centrism, centrists themselves often included, as seen when people see the center rolling over for the right. Quite the contrary, far from flinching in the face of its duty to stand up to extremism it is realizing that duty as it understands it--by "pragmatically" dealing with a powerful right it excludes from the category of ideologue and extremist the better to hold the line against that threat from the left it has never forgotten, because however much they may have sung hosannas over the "end of history," it never truly went away.
Thus it is the case that if the centrist is famously "anti-ideological" and "anti-extremist" and insistent on "objectivity," all of which claims only hold up when one abides by their special definitions of the terms, which are again subordinate to their Anti-Communist conservatism. As is the case with conservatives generally, they identify ideology as principally a sin of the left, obtuse to how in the end everyone is ideological, not least the centrists themselves. In thundering against extremism their hard line against "extremism" on the left (which often extends to hostility to anything-but-extreme liberals) is unmatched by an equal alertness to and stalwartness in the face of the extremism of the right, as in fact they downplay any such threat, not least by all but defining the term "fascism" out of existence. (Indeed, Irwin Ross, reviewing when that book was new Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center in Commentary--the very Commentary that soon came to be the neoconservatives' flagship publication--was to remark "that Schlesinger actually seems to have little fear of reaction," not the first time such a thing would be said of those in the center.) Meanwhile in the centrist's usage "objectivity" means the absence of ideology--or rather what they would recognize as ideology--which is to say that they reduce the meaning of the word objectivity to one's sharing their prejudices.
Thus it is the case that while one can speak of centrists as "pragmatists" their pragmatism is highly qualified indeed--for if the pragmatist creed may be summed up as "I can't be sure what's real or why it happens I know what 'works' and will go on that, until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" they drop the "until experience shows me otherwise and makes me revise it" part. The result is that they are quite happy to embrace the pragmatist's skepticism of knowledge claims in favor of "practicality" and "experience," they are also sure they have eternal truths in their philosophy and their system and their enmities--indeed, a Schlesinger or a Bell loudly announcing their adherence to millennia-old belief in sin and evil and tragedy as they show themselves rather more resistant to change than a "go with what works" pragmatist has any business being.
Thus it is the case that if they are bearers of the Progressive tradition with its reform-mindedness one notices that where the Progressive was desirous of honest and efficient government the centrist is comfortable with the grubby play of interest that, especially in its seeing the public interest consistently lose to the rapacity and the intrigues of the powerful, looked to them like plain and simple corruption. Indeed, the centrist defends that play as "just the way the world works" as they smile condescendingly at the Progressive whose objections to such things seem to them childish. Not unrelated to this is how the centrist makes much of their respect for experts, as they sneer at the Know-Nothingism of those who disagree with them, but stop listening to experts when their findings are ill at ease with their conservative aversion to change--as seen in how they insist on giving a platform to such Know-Nothings when indulging climate deniers who undermine the experts' position on the matter, cynically helping to deflect political pressure to support public intervention in the economy of a kind and on a scale they reject out of hand.
Thus is it the case that if the New Deal was important in centrist thought, there is no question that the centrist found it easy to set the measure of social democratic reform they had stood for at mid-century aside in favor of what seemed to them an embrace of neoliberalism--less aggressively and stridently than their counterparts to their right, perhaps, but the difference only one of degree, while the move is not the great stretch it may seem given the essential conservatism of their economic thought from the start. Indeed, given how the "pragmatic" center has stuck with neoliberalism even as it yielded economic and social failure, a stoking of extremism, and electoral defeat, one sees that if, ultimately, the centrist promises a more flexible, forward-looking conservatism than the avowed right, it is conservatism nonetheless that prevails over the tools they invoke as their way of making their conservatism a success.
All of this is reflected in the significant misapprehension many have about centrism, centrists themselves often included, as seen when people see the center rolling over for the right. Quite the contrary, far from flinching in the face of its duty to stand up to extremism it is realizing that duty as it understands it--by "pragmatically" dealing with a powerful right it excludes from the category of ideologue and extremist the better to hold the line against that threat from the left it has never forgotten, because however much they may have sung hosannas over the "end of history," it never truly went away.
Conservative Liberalism: Some Thoughts
I have remarked the sloppiness of most people, professional commentators most certainly included, with political language--even that political language which has well-established, very lucid definitions almost universally accepted by those educated in fields such as political science (something those commentators tend not to be, no matter how much elitism-mongering idiots will jump up and down pointing to their Ph.ds and J.D.s from so-called "good schools"). This is the more important because a nuanced vocabulary is essential to discussing anything illuminatingly, with politics no exception.
Considering those politics it seems to me that one term that merits wider understanding and usage is "conservative liberalism." One may speak of this as an ideology which is conservative in the fundamentals of its political philosophy, but (in its particular way) accommodated to and defensive of a liberal societal structure. Those conservative fundamentals are to be found in their pessimism about "human nature," and the potential of reason to be of use in understanding or managing human beings and their affairs, and going with it an inclination to a view of society as an "organic," naturally hierarchical entity, and respect for traditional institutions and values--against the liberal's confidence in human rationality, egalitarianism and skepticism toward tradition and readiness to change existing arrangements in line with their values. However, they accept the societal arrangements classical liberalism is credited with producing, with their stress on individual right assured by the "rule of law" and representative institutions.
In this combination of conservative theorizing with liberal institutions the former has a shaping effect on the design and operation of the latter. The adherent of conservative liberalism is likely to be in earnest that liberal rights and institutions should not upset a social order that is anything but equal. They are thus likely to stress some rights over others--rating the right of the property holder more highly than other human rights (a tendency at its extreme in the defense of slavery on the grounds of respect for the property rights of a slave's owner in pre-Civil War America). The conservative liberal is also likely to desire a limitation of representative government as a necessity for preserving (acceptable) representative government, as by limiting the franchise to exclude those who might be thought likely to vote "irresponsibly," and also limiting the consequences to votes that would appear to them "irresponsible" when and where they do happen, most obviously procedurally, but also by attempting to put the most important areas of life "outside politics" so as to make them untouchable by such "irresponsible" action. Thus do they support qualifications for the franchise that will exclude the most threatening elements in the population (e.g. with a property qualification that excludes the propertyless), support checks on the actions of elected politicians (for instance, checking a popularly elected legislative body with a more senior legislative body not directly elected by the public, and the legislature as a whole with judicial review by an unelected judiciary), and favor limits on government's sphere of competence altogether (for instance, via legislation or interpretation of the law so as to constrain rather than enable government, particularly with respect to its authority over property holders), thus sharply reducing the chances of the kinds of change that would be threatening to the social order--most obviously keeping the poor from using their votes to challenge the elite's power and privileges. As this preference for "liberty" over "fraternity" and "equality" implies, the conservative liberal is apt to be more attached to liberal capitalism than to liberal democracy, and to see the market as the domain of freedom as against a state in which, should it go beyond their view of its legitimate functions (above all, the protection of property), they are quick to see tyranny--by comparison with the "less conservative" liberal, who will often see it as necessary for the state to regulate property in order to preserve liberty.
In understanding the conservatism of this form of liberalism some will argue that liberalism has been conservative from the start--that liberalism has always been just an ideology of property owners pursuing their interests, speaking of "the rights of man" when this was an effective weapon against absolutism, feudalism and the princes of the Church who stood above them in the Old Regime, while even then ready to preempt any challenge from the peasants and proletarians and others below them. (Indeed, it seem relevant that while just about every scholar of the matter seems to identify Edmund Burke as the founder of the modern conservative tradition, there are those who also claim Burke--who had been a Whig and not a Tory--for the liberal camp.) However, whatever one thinks of that claim conservative liberalism is what people have long had in mind when they spoke of conservatism in the modern world, differentiating it from that side of the liberal tradition that placed more stress on equality and less on absolutist notions of the right of property ownership. It would also seem that in American history such conservative liberalism has generally constituted the range of mainstream politics, from the framing of the Constitution forward, with challenge to it, if more present than the "consensus historians" and their contemporaries cared to acknowledge, still tending to be an effectual force only for short periods, and if extracting important concessions in the process, still consistently neutralized and marginalized over the longer run. So does it remain today, especially in the wake of the "neoliberal" turn of American politics, and the embrace of neoliberalism by the Democratic Party that represented the "left" option put before the voter.
Considering those politics it seems to me that one term that merits wider understanding and usage is "conservative liberalism." One may speak of this as an ideology which is conservative in the fundamentals of its political philosophy, but (in its particular way) accommodated to and defensive of a liberal societal structure. Those conservative fundamentals are to be found in their pessimism about "human nature," and the potential of reason to be of use in understanding or managing human beings and their affairs, and going with it an inclination to a view of society as an "organic," naturally hierarchical entity, and respect for traditional institutions and values--against the liberal's confidence in human rationality, egalitarianism and skepticism toward tradition and readiness to change existing arrangements in line with their values. However, they accept the societal arrangements classical liberalism is credited with producing, with their stress on individual right assured by the "rule of law" and representative institutions.
In this combination of conservative theorizing with liberal institutions the former has a shaping effect on the design and operation of the latter. The adherent of conservative liberalism is likely to be in earnest that liberal rights and institutions should not upset a social order that is anything but equal. They are thus likely to stress some rights over others--rating the right of the property holder more highly than other human rights (a tendency at its extreme in the defense of slavery on the grounds of respect for the property rights of a slave's owner in pre-Civil War America). The conservative liberal is also likely to desire a limitation of representative government as a necessity for preserving (acceptable) representative government, as by limiting the franchise to exclude those who might be thought likely to vote "irresponsibly," and also limiting the consequences to votes that would appear to them "irresponsible" when and where they do happen, most obviously procedurally, but also by attempting to put the most important areas of life "outside politics" so as to make them untouchable by such "irresponsible" action. Thus do they support qualifications for the franchise that will exclude the most threatening elements in the population (e.g. with a property qualification that excludes the propertyless), support checks on the actions of elected politicians (for instance, checking a popularly elected legislative body with a more senior legislative body not directly elected by the public, and the legislature as a whole with judicial review by an unelected judiciary), and favor limits on government's sphere of competence altogether (for instance, via legislation or interpretation of the law so as to constrain rather than enable government, particularly with respect to its authority over property holders), thus sharply reducing the chances of the kinds of change that would be threatening to the social order--most obviously keeping the poor from using their votes to challenge the elite's power and privileges. As this preference for "liberty" over "fraternity" and "equality" implies, the conservative liberal is apt to be more attached to liberal capitalism than to liberal democracy, and to see the market as the domain of freedom as against a state in which, should it go beyond their view of its legitimate functions (above all, the protection of property), they are quick to see tyranny--by comparison with the "less conservative" liberal, who will often see it as necessary for the state to regulate property in order to preserve liberty.
In understanding the conservatism of this form of liberalism some will argue that liberalism has been conservative from the start--that liberalism has always been just an ideology of property owners pursuing their interests, speaking of "the rights of man" when this was an effective weapon against absolutism, feudalism and the princes of the Church who stood above them in the Old Regime, while even then ready to preempt any challenge from the peasants and proletarians and others below them. (Indeed, it seem relevant that while just about every scholar of the matter seems to identify Edmund Burke as the founder of the modern conservative tradition, there are those who also claim Burke--who had been a Whig and not a Tory--for the liberal camp.) However, whatever one thinks of that claim conservative liberalism is what people have long had in mind when they spoke of conservatism in the modern world, differentiating it from that side of the liberal tradition that placed more stress on equality and less on absolutist notions of the right of property ownership. It would also seem that in American history such conservative liberalism has generally constituted the range of mainstream politics, from the framing of the Constitution forward, with challenge to it, if more present than the "consensus historians" and their contemporaries cared to acknowledge, still tending to be an effectual force only for short periods, and if extracting important concessions in the process, still consistently neutralized and marginalized over the longer run. So does it remain today, especially in the wake of the "neoliberal" turn of American politics, and the embrace of neoliberalism by the Democratic Party that represented the "left" option put before the voter.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Revisiting German Rearmament in 2025
When in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I addressed the discussion of German--and Japanese--"rearmament," I argued that some seemed to have an exaggerated sense of the significance of those countries' governments' announced increases in defense spending and other policy changes, for a number of reasons. One was the fact that the remilitarization of both countries began even before they regained sovereignty from their occupiers after the Second World War, and traveled most of the way to being not just relatively large military powers (as the Federal Republic of Germany had become no later than the mid-1960s), but "normal" ones disposing of their forces in the same manner as other nations, with Germany's allies' relaxation of their earlier treaty-imposed restrictions on the country's rearmament, and the German courts' reinterpretation of the constitution, long since giving Germany a pretty free hand to send its forces around the world on combat assignment (as seen in the fact of German soldiers fighting from Mali to Afghanistan). Another reason was that given the state of the German armed forces in 2022, the sums of money then being talked about, and how very, very good militaries and defense ministries can be at making a very, very large sum of money go absolutely no way at all, the boosts to German defense spending would plausibly not translate to great changes in the size or capabilities of German forces relative to what they had been before.
Three years on I see no reason to change that assessment--and indeed every reason to stand by it, because the publicly available information shows just how little change there has been in Germany's position these past three years, with this reaffirmed by how German policymakers in the grip of aspirations to weltpolitik are demanding way, way bigger changes. Instead of talking about working toward boosting defense spending to 2 percent of GDP with a "one-off" supplement helping the process along the way Olaf Scholz did in February 2022, now, amid much talk of "Whatever it takes!" the minimum figure they have in mind is 3 percent, while they discuss exempting defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the Holy Debt Brake, and talk of a €500 billion "special fund" (five times the supplement of 2022) for "infrastructure" (perhaps a redress of genuine need bolstering higher defense spending through its enabling of industry and stimulus to the economy, but easily imagined as a vehicle for more direct funding of military objectives). They also make explicit calls for conscription to enable the mobilization of a vastly enlarged force. (Germany's military reserve, like that of pretty much every European country, dwindled to nothing after the Cold War, so that even fully mobilized it does not raise the size of German forces amount to much more than 200,000. But the document published by the now parliament-dominating CDU/CSU calls for Germany to, with reserves mobilized, have over 500,000 at Berlin's disposal.)
Meanwhile, German European Commission President Ursula von Leyden is calling for a broader European effort on such lines, her ReArm Europe plan not only calling for a 1.5 percent of GDP boost in European defense spending by the member states (which would see Germany going well above the 3 percent of GDP mark as a spender), but also proposing a new "instrument" for defense investment capable of loaning €150 billion and the use of the EU's own budget, the previously proposed Savings and Investment Bank, and the existing EU member-stated owned European Investment Bank (EIB) to support such efforts. (Indeed, the EIB has already sent a letter to those member state governments proposing policy changes "allow[ing] investments into non-lethal defence products, provid[ing] unlimited loans to the defence industry . . . and measures to motivate commercial banks to follow suit in lending cash to the defence industry.")
Considering the implications of that German policymakers could expect not only to benefit from the direct policy alterations that have EU institutions providing direct support for its defense investments, cooperation with other countries better able to contribute to joint efforts because of the greater sums on the table, and other synergies that might follow from such a situation. Showing every sign of (once more) fancying themselves the "taskmasters of Europe" (Herfried Münkler only said what they were thinking, and how they behaved toward nations like Greece) they evidently expect to lead the combination--to which degree may be indicated by how the German army has worked to "integrate" five brigades from Romania, Czechia and the Netherlands (in the last case, three brigades amounting to pretty much the whole Dutch army's fighting strength) into its army's divisions.
In contrast with the proposals of three years ago all this looks much, much more significant--if it is actually acted upon. Still, if with these proposals Europe's political elite certainly make clear their extreme enthusiasm for remilitarizing and rearming, I see no evidence whatsoever of comparable enthusiasm on the part of the European public for the project. Quite the contrary, that public has been increasingly hostile to their governments' dragging them into one increasingly costly "forever" war after another, just as they have been enraged by those governments' refusing to do much about their economic problems, the environment, and much, much else affecting their daily lives, and indeed going into reverse on anything that could be deemed a solution. (Indeed, the idea of repurposing unused funds for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic's disruptions for rearmament seems entirely symbolic of how the elites think here--and discomfort with the idea a hint of how the public actually feels.)
Of course, as the policy record shows governments have pressed ahead with their preferences in complete contempt of voters' opinions, and often complete contempt of their constitutions as well. (Such is their version of the "democracy" and "rule of law" for which they claim to stand.) However, as governments raise taxes and cut services and inflict added inflation on publics already battered by decades of neoliberalism (all of that borrowing and government demand seems likely to have unpleasant consequences in a context of profound deindustrialization, structurally higher energy prices, lingering and painful inflationary shocks, and governments ferocious in their enmity toward social protections)--and gets rougher with labor and with dissent (and it's pretty damn rough now)--and sends draft cards to its young people as it demands their "sacrifice" of freedom, self and even life itself for the sake of objects they do not support and against which they indeed protested--those elites may find the going less smooth than they imagined in this way, as it may in so many others.
Three years on I see no reason to change that assessment--and indeed every reason to stand by it, because the publicly available information shows just how little change there has been in Germany's position these past three years, with this reaffirmed by how German policymakers in the grip of aspirations to weltpolitik are demanding way, way bigger changes. Instead of talking about working toward boosting defense spending to 2 percent of GDP with a "one-off" supplement helping the process along the way Olaf Scholz did in February 2022, now, amid much talk of "Whatever it takes!" the minimum figure they have in mind is 3 percent, while they discuss exempting defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the Holy Debt Brake, and talk of a €500 billion "special fund" (five times the supplement of 2022) for "infrastructure" (perhaps a redress of genuine need bolstering higher defense spending through its enabling of industry and stimulus to the economy, but easily imagined as a vehicle for more direct funding of military objectives). They also make explicit calls for conscription to enable the mobilization of a vastly enlarged force. (Germany's military reserve, like that of pretty much every European country, dwindled to nothing after the Cold War, so that even fully mobilized it does not raise the size of German forces amount to much more than 200,000. But the document published by the now parliament-dominating CDU/CSU calls for Germany to, with reserves mobilized, have over 500,000 at Berlin's disposal.)
Meanwhile, German European Commission President Ursula von Leyden is calling for a broader European effort on such lines, her ReArm Europe plan not only calling for a 1.5 percent of GDP boost in European defense spending by the member states (which would see Germany going well above the 3 percent of GDP mark as a spender), but also proposing a new "instrument" for defense investment capable of loaning €150 billion and the use of the EU's own budget, the previously proposed Savings and Investment Bank, and the existing EU member-stated owned European Investment Bank (EIB) to support such efforts. (Indeed, the EIB has already sent a letter to those member state governments proposing policy changes "allow[ing] investments into non-lethal defence products, provid[ing] unlimited loans to the defence industry . . . and measures to motivate commercial banks to follow suit in lending cash to the defence industry.")
Considering the implications of that German policymakers could expect not only to benefit from the direct policy alterations that have EU institutions providing direct support for its defense investments, cooperation with other countries better able to contribute to joint efforts because of the greater sums on the table, and other synergies that might follow from such a situation. Showing every sign of (once more) fancying themselves the "taskmasters of Europe" (Herfried Münkler only said what they were thinking, and how they behaved toward nations like Greece) they evidently expect to lead the combination--to which degree may be indicated by how the German army has worked to "integrate" five brigades from Romania, Czechia and the Netherlands (in the last case, three brigades amounting to pretty much the whole Dutch army's fighting strength) into its army's divisions.
In contrast with the proposals of three years ago all this looks much, much more significant--if it is actually acted upon. Still, if with these proposals Europe's political elite certainly make clear their extreme enthusiasm for remilitarizing and rearming, I see no evidence whatsoever of comparable enthusiasm on the part of the European public for the project. Quite the contrary, that public has been increasingly hostile to their governments' dragging them into one increasingly costly "forever" war after another, just as they have been enraged by those governments' refusing to do much about their economic problems, the environment, and much, much else affecting their daily lives, and indeed going into reverse on anything that could be deemed a solution. (Indeed, the idea of repurposing unused funds for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic's disruptions for rearmament seems entirely symbolic of how the elites think here--and discomfort with the idea a hint of how the public actually feels.)
Of course, as the policy record shows governments have pressed ahead with their preferences in complete contempt of voters' opinions, and often complete contempt of their constitutions as well. (Such is their version of the "democracy" and "rule of law" for which they claim to stand.) However, as governments raise taxes and cut services and inflict added inflation on publics already battered by decades of neoliberalism (all of that borrowing and government demand seems likely to have unpleasant consequences in a context of profound deindustrialization, structurally higher energy prices, lingering and painful inflationary shocks, and governments ferocious in their enmity toward social protections)--and gets rougher with labor and with dissent (and it's pretty damn rough now)--and sends draft cards to its young people as it demands their "sacrifice" of freedom, self and even life itself for the sake of objects they do not support and against which they indeed protested--those elites may find the going less smooth than they imagined in this way, as it may in so many others.
Reflections on the German Federal Election of 2025
The early election in Germany this year seems to me to warrant comment as reflective of the broader trend of electoral politics across the Western world, namely the collapse of support for the traditional parties, with the far right the principal beneficiary. (This may most obviously be the case in how as has already been seen in Italy and France, where the party system has long been more fragmented and mutable, but also to a lesser degree in more concentrated and stable British politics, where the vote for the Conservatives collapsed in 2024, and Reform UK surged.)
In discussion of the matter I have seen the historical background was almost always less than sketchy, partly I think because there is less in the way of handy comprehensive tabulations of historical election results for the Federal Republic (anything like the House of Commons Library’s excellent research briefing UK Election Statistics unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, while it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data the two parties that have dominated the Federal Republic's elections (the Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union combination, and the Social Democrats) together claimed 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953 and 81 percent in 1957, at which point one can regard these dynamics as having established the norm for the next several decades. In the nine Federal elections held over the 1957-1987 period the two parties together claimed a consistent 81 to 91 percent (on average, 86 percent) of the vote--a formidable share indeed, leaving less than a fifth, often much less, to all the third-parties combined (like the Free Democrats, or from 1980 forward, the Greens).
However, the near-two party duopoly was eroding by the 1990s, with the two big parties claiming just 77 percent of the vote in the four elections of the 1990-2002 period, and the figure trending more sharply downward from 2005 on. Seeing the two big parties claim 69 percent of the vote in 2005 (their lowest since that first election in 1949), and 57 percent in 2009 (the lowest ever since the Republic's founding), after a limited resurgence in 2013 (to a still relatively low 67 percent), that downward trend continued to new lows in the three elections since, with the figure 53 percent in 2017, just under 50 percent (49.8 percent) in 2021, and finally, under 45 percent (44.9 percent) in 2025, scarcely half the norm for the 1957-1987 period. That last election saw the Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union, even as the "number one" party, with a near-record low share of the vote (28.5 percent, second only to their share in 2021, as against the 41-50 percent they managed in every election in 1953-1998, the 38 percent they at least averaged in 2002-2013, and the 33 percent they got in 2017), while the Social Democrats had their absolute worst performance since the Republic's start. Getting a mere 16 percent of the vote, this compares badly even with their second-worst vote of 20 percent in 2017, their 23 percent average in 2009-2021, and before that their share of 32-45 percent and average of 38 percent, in 1957-2005--as well as, of course, the 21 percent that has seen the far-right party the Alternative for Germany replace them in the number two spot.
As the numbers presented here imply the decline of the two leading parties was a decades-long matter. It would seem that the reunification of Germany played its part here by shifting the electoral landscape (whether due to legacies of the German Democratic Republic, the combination of shock capitalism and swaggering right-wing nationalism that left many former East Germans traumatized for decades, or some mix of both), paving the way for and in respects (the relative poverty and general feeling of "second class"-citizenship in eastern Germany) intensifying those factors that have so much shaken party systems elsewhere--reaction against the commitment of all the major parties to neoliberalism, which worsened significantly with the onset of the Great Recession and all that has come after it; and opposition to war. This points to the extent to one of the most significant features of that collapse, namely the way in which opposition to neoliberalism and war, consistently translates to votes for parties which deliver more neoliberalism and more war, not least by way of those far-right parties that members of the "Fourth Estate" euphemistically call "populist."
Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' real range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf the weight in electoral politics that elites would like it to have with the voters, Alternative for Germany's being led by a politician who resides outside the country where she is an office-holder with her Sri Lankan (female) partner as leader of a German far-right party makes a mockery of the pretensions of those who take a conventional view of the culture war. By contrast those who know full well that identity politics has been hugely advantageous to the right in its diverting public attention away from class toward "culture," and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative on the more material issues, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but also the geopolitical-military arena; and indeed, that the anti-universalistic, nationalist tendency of such politics has enabled identity politics to be pressed into the explicit service in highly pointed fashion, as seen in the phenomena of "femonationalism" and "homonationalism," in which respect for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ is openly presented as a justification for racist hostility or religious discrimination toward selected minorities, immigrants and foreign countries, a game that Ms. Weidel has, of course, personally played; are not confused at all. For these the possibility, and actuality, of such accommodation is a reminder of the right's real priorities--and the fact that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and of reaction, in the end with elites, even more than with working people "It's the Economy, stupid," first, last and always (after all, what else makes them elites in today's world?), with the vehement denials of their courtiers only ever underlining the matter.
In discussion of the matter I have seen the historical background was almost always less than sketchy, partly I think because there is less in the way of handy comprehensive tabulations of historical election results for the Federal Republic (anything like the House of Commons Library’s excellent research briefing UK Election Statistics unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, while it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data the two parties that have dominated the Federal Republic's elections (the Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union combination, and the Social Democrats) together claimed 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953 and 81 percent in 1957, at which point one can regard these dynamics as having established the norm for the next several decades. In the nine Federal elections held over the 1957-1987 period the two parties together claimed a consistent 81 to 91 percent (on average, 86 percent) of the vote--a formidable share indeed, leaving less than a fifth, often much less, to all the third-parties combined (like the Free Democrats, or from 1980 forward, the Greens).
However, the near-two party duopoly was eroding by the 1990s, with the two big parties claiming just 77 percent of the vote in the four elections of the 1990-2002 period, and the figure trending more sharply downward from 2005 on. Seeing the two big parties claim 69 percent of the vote in 2005 (their lowest since that first election in 1949), and 57 percent in 2009 (the lowest ever since the Republic's founding), after a limited resurgence in 2013 (to a still relatively low 67 percent), that downward trend continued to new lows in the three elections since, with the figure 53 percent in 2017, just under 50 percent (49.8 percent) in 2021, and finally, under 45 percent (44.9 percent) in 2025, scarcely half the norm for the 1957-1987 period. That last election saw the Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union, even as the "number one" party, with a near-record low share of the vote (28.5 percent, second only to their share in 2021, as against the 41-50 percent they managed in every election in 1953-1998, the 38 percent they at least averaged in 2002-2013, and the 33 percent they got in 2017), while the Social Democrats had their absolute worst performance since the Republic's start. Getting a mere 16 percent of the vote, this compares badly even with their second-worst vote of 20 percent in 2017, their 23 percent average in 2009-2021, and before that their share of 32-45 percent and average of 38 percent, in 1957-2005--as well as, of course, the 21 percent that has seen the far-right party the Alternative for Germany replace them in the number two spot.
As the numbers presented here imply the decline of the two leading parties was a decades-long matter. It would seem that the reunification of Germany played its part here by shifting the electoral landscape (whether due to legacies of the German Democratic Republic, the combination of shock capitalism and swaggering right-wing nationalism that left many former East Germans traumatized for decades, or some mix of both), paving the way for and in respects (the relative poverty and general feeling of "second class"-citizenship in eastern Germany) intensifying those factors that have so much shaken party systems elsewhere--reaction against the commitment of all the major parties to neoliberalism, which worsened significantly with the onset of the Great Recession and all that has come after it; and opposition to war. This points to the extent to one of the most significant features of that collapse, namely the way in which opposition to neoliberalism and war, consistently translates to votes for parties which deliver more neoliberalism and more war, not least by way of those far-right parties that members of the "Fourth Estate" euphemistically call "populist."
Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' real range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf the weight in electoral politics that elites would like it to have with the voters, Alternative for Germany's being led by a politician who resides outside the country where she is an office-holder with her Sri Lankan (female) partner as leader of a German far-right party makes a mockery of the pretensions of those who take a conventional view of the culture war. By contrast those who know full well that identity politics has been hugely advantageous to the right in its diverting public attention away from class toward "culture," and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative on the more material issues, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but also the geopolitical-military arena; and indeed, that the anti-universalistic, nationalist tendency of such politics has enabled identity politics to be pressed into the explicit service in highly pointed fashion, as seen in the phenomena of "femonationalism" and "homonationalism," in which respect for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ is openly presented as a justification for racist hostility or religious discrimination toward selected minorities, immigrants and foreign countries, a game that Ms. Weidel has, of course, personally played; are not confused at all. For these the possibility, and actuality, of such accommodation is a reminder of the right's real priorities--and the fact that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and of reaction, in the end with elites, even more than with working people "It's the Economy, stupid," first, last and always (after all, what else makes them elites in today's world?), with the vehement denials of their courtiers only ever underlining the matter.
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