German Politics Thread

[Travis B.]

So obviously in your mind the only people who aren't fascists are overt socialists, and everyone else really are only pretending not to be fascists. Nice way to effectively exclude the possibility of allying with anyone against the fascists, for the sake of preserving your left-wing purity. You must be against the ideas of the Popular Front and of the firewall against the far-right, as those require allying with people who aren't as purely socialist as yourself.

Have you ever spoken to these people? These "liberals" communicate in helicopter memes. If repressing the poor is explicitly what they want to do, what's the point of allying with them? If the alternative to stopping Putin is a Pinochet regime, I'm against both outcomes. I honestly don't understand why one is better than the other.

You obviously have set up a false dichotomy that everyone who isn't a socialist is someone who would have supported the Pinochet regime. For starters, this isn't true. Second, people who actually would have supported Pinochet are not supporters of liberal democracy in the first place.

[rotting bones]

You obviously have set up a false dichotomy that everyone who isn't a socialist is someone who would have supported the Pinochet regime. For starters, this isn't true. Second, people who actually would have supported Pinochet are not supporters of liberal democracy in the first place.

Conservatives who support Pinochet-like regimes are very numerous, and call themselves defenders of liberal democracy. The post I'm responding to says:

The mistake everyone's making (including myself) is in believing the debate is about socialism vs. capitalism or conservatism vs. liberalism. I really thought so myself until recently. But I've come to realize this is entirely unimportant. The only political question right now is whether we still want liberal democracy or not.

This is the argument Pinochet-like regimes use to justify their crimes against humanity. They will even say it's a temporary thing like the dictatorship in South Korea.

The commonness of this phenomenon is enough to argue against the text I quoted since it's not "entirely unimportant" whether we are dealing with "socialism vs. capitalism or conservatism vs. liberalism". However, I have later clarified that there are other conservative groups that it's a good idea to ally with:

If they will allow workers to protest and force employers to submit to their demands, then they are not talking about repressing the poor as I understand it. I'm ok with an alliance with such people, even if it's temporary.

If we have to give up the right to protest to "resist fascism", then a "liberal democratic" regime like that doesn't give me anything I want. I see no reason to ally with it.

[Travis B.]

You obviously have set up a false dichotomy that everyone who isn't a socialist is someone who would have supported the Pinochet regime. For starters, this isn't true. Second, people who actually would have supported Pinochet are not supporters of liberal democracy in the first place.

Conservatives who support Pinochet-like regimes are very numerous, and call themselves defenders of liberal democracy. The post I'm responding to says:

The mistake everyone's making (including myself) is in believing the debate is about socialism vs. capitalism or conservatism vs. liberalism. I really thought so myself until recently. But I've come to realize this is entirely unimportant. The only political question right now is whether we still want liberal democracy or not.

This is the argument Pinochet-like regimes use to justify their crimes against humanity. They will even say it's a temporary thing like the dictatorship in South Korea.

The commonness of this phenomenon is enough to argue against the text I quoted since it's not "entirely unimportant" whether we are dealing with "socialism vs. capitalism or conservatism vs. liberalism". However, I have later clarified that there are other conservative groups that it's a good idea to ally with:

If they will allow workers to protest and force employers to submit to their demands, then they are not talking about repressing the poor as I understand it. I'm ok with an alliance with such people, even if it's temporary.

If we have to give up the right to protest to "resist fascism", then a "liberal democratic" regime like that doesn't give me anything I want. I see no reason to ally with it.

While there have been plenty of "conservatives" who supported Pinochet back in they day, you are extending this to a blanket "if you're not a socialist you must be a Pinochet supporter". I should note that you were painting liberals, for instance, as all being closet supporters of Pinochet. And you have not substantiated your claim that true conservatives (i.e. not closet fascists) are necessarily secretly seeking to bring about a neo-Pinochet regime. In the end you are just doubling down on your refusal to seek the defeat of the fascists first (for the sake of bringing about democratic socialism second, as under fascism there will be no chance to bring about democratic socialism) with your claims that everyone who isn't a socialist really secretly wants to bring about a right-wing dictatorship anyways, which you haven't actually provided support for.

[rotting bones]

While there have been plenty of "conservatives" who supported Pinochet back in they day, you are extending this to a blanket "if you're not a socialist you must be a Pinochet supporter". I should note that you were painting liberals, for instance, as all being closet supporters of Pinochet. And you have not substantiated your claim that true conservatives (i.e. not closet fascists) are necessarily secretly seeking to bring about a neo-Pinochet regime. In the end you are just doubling down on your refusal to seek the defeat of the fascists first (for the sake of bringing about democratic socialism second, as under fascism there will be no chance to bring about democratic socialism) with your claims that everyone who isn't a socialist really secretly wants to bring about a right-wing dictatorship anyways, which you haven't actually provided support for.

These sentences bear no relation to reality. Thank you for once again exposing the true nature of humanity, blind, uncaring and unutterably false.

[Travis B.]

While there have been plenty of "conservatives" who supported Pinochet back in they day, you are extending this to a blanket "if you're not a socialist you must be a Pinochet supporter". I should note that you were painting liberals, for instance, as all being closet supporters of Pinochet. And you have not substantiated your claim that true conservatives (i.e. not closet fascists) are necessarily secretly seeking to bring about a neo-Pinochet regime. In the end you are just doubling down on your refusal to seek the defeat of the fascists first (for the sake of bringing about democratic socialism second, as under fascism there will be no chance to bring about democratic socialism) with your claims that everyone who isn't a socialist really secretly wants to bring about a right-wing dictatorship anyways, which you haven't actually provided support for.

These sentences bear no relation to reality. Thank you for once again exposing the true nature of humanity, blind, uncaring and unutterably false.

You're the one positing that a large portion of liberals are really secretly plotting to bring about a Pinochet-style dictatorship.

[WeepingElf]

While there have been plenty of "conservatives" who supported Pinochet back in they day, you are extending this to a blanket "if you're not a socialist you must be a Pinochet supporter". I should note that you were painting liberals, for instance, as all being closet supporters of Pinochet. And you have not substantiated your claim that true conservatives (i.e. not closet fascists) are necessarily secretly seeking to bring about a neo-Pinochet regime. In the end you are just doubling down on your refusal to seek the defeat of the fascists first (for the sake of bringing about democratic socialism second, as under fascism there will be no chance to bring about democratic socialism) with your claims that everyone who isn't a socialist really secretly wants to bring about a right-wing dictatorship anyways, which you haven't actually provided support for.

These sentences bear no relation to reality. Thank you for once again exposing the true nature of humanity, blind, uncaring and unutterably false.

You're the one positing that a large portion of liberals are really secretly plotting to bring about a Pinochet-style dictatorship.

Yep. It should have become abundantly clear at this point that saving democracy is an essential and indispensable part of any attempt at saving the world. That said, I think we can return to discussing German politics now.

[Ares Land]

This point of view is not shared by the poor. Liberal democracy alone doesn't raise the living standards of the poor. Living standards are what the poor are most concerned about since it's the bottleneck preventing them from living a fulfilling life. Freedom only becomes a concern for people whose essentials are taken care of.

Ares Land can speak for himself, but I think you're misreading him. He is not saying socialism should be repressed. He's saying that unless we beat the fascists trying to destroy democracy, we're not going to get anything better than fascism.

Yes, my point exactly.

There's no great incompatibility with helping the poor anyway -- the other side just wants to deport them or drop them in the Mediterranean or maybe use some of them as slaves.

I really, really wish elections were about socialism vs. capitalism and that economics would dictate election and coalition building. But with the far right getting 20% to 50% of the votes, that's just not possible. That also means we'll have to make do with coalitions that are pretty unsatisying -- such as CDU-SPD coalitions -- and that socialists have to talk with (depending on country) conservatives or liberal or neoliberals.
On the plus side, this means neoliberals won't get everything they want, either.

[WeepingElf]

Yes, the situation is appalling. A CDU/CSU+SPD coalition is always a bad compromise, and results what effectively is a caretaker government which does "business as usual" because the parties can't agree on any change. In some eastern German states, it is much worse still: there is a numerical majority of AfD+BSW, which means that any coalition government needs to include one of these two parties - the centrist parties chose the BSW as the lesser of two evils.

And I don't know whether the much-discussed ban of the AfD, which would be very difficult because the hurdles are very high, would help much: there are other far-right parties such as Die Heimat (formerly NPD) who would quickly fill the gap. (This happened, for instance, in the Bremen state/municipal election in 2023, where the AfD was disqualified for formal reasons: another far-right party took their votes.) More effective would be to govern such that people feel less inclined to vote for such parties. But this requires a positive vision of a better future, which is hard to find for a coalition like CDU/CSU+SPD, and requires better communication - dwell on the solutioms, not the problems. People vote far-right parties because they want to bring back a seemingly better past - because they fear that the future will be worse than the present.

[rotting bones]

You're the one positing that a large portion of liberals are really secretly plotting to bring about a Pinochet-style dictatorship.

Dude, my Musk-loving roommate, an Indian immigrant, is one of them. He introduced me to whole worlds of people who think like him. They consume smart-sounding independent media you've never heard of. There are entire hour-long debate vlogs with millions of views and scientific outlets like Jaimungal.

Humanity doesn't agree with your fanciful notion that liberal democracy doesn't entail dictatorship.

[Travis B.]

You're the one positing that a large portion of liberals are really secretly plotting to bring about a Pinochet-style dictatorship.

Dude, my Musk-loving roommate, an Indian immigrant, is one of them. He introduced me to whole worlds of people who think like him. They consume smart-sounding independent media you've never heard of. There are entire hour-long debate vlogs with millions of views and scientific outlets like Jaimungal.

Humanity doesn't agree with your fanciful notion that liberal democracy doesn't entail dictatorship.

Most people I know IRL are liberals and I haven't heard any of them even once suggest support for dictatorship. Anyways, 'Musk-loving' by itself should be one major red flag.

[rotting bones]

Most people I know IRL are liberals and I haven't heard any of them even once suggest support for dictatorship.

I never said all liberals support dictatorship. In fact, I said the exact opposite. I only said it's not utterly irrelevant which liberal democrats we ally with because there's a large fascist contingent of liberal democrats that wants to oppress the poor.

Anyways, 'Musk-loving' by itself should be one major red flag.

He owns several Teslas and he's heavily invested in Tesla himself.

[Travis B.]

Most people I know IRL are liberals and I haven't heard any of them even once suggest support for dictatorship.

I never said all liberals support dictatorship. In fact, I said the exact opposite. I only said it's not utterly irrelevant which liberal democrats we ally with because there's a large fascist contingent of liberal democrats that wants to oppress the poor.

You pretty much said as much as that you thought I was in denial of reality by not agreeing with your assertion that a large portion of people who are in favor of liberal democracy are really in favor of dictatorship. My response to that is that anyone who is in favor of dictatorship is obviously not in favor of liberal democracy!

Anyways, 'Musk-loving' by itself should be one major red flag.

He owns several Teslas and he's heavily invested in Tesla himself.

At this point anyone who still loves Musk with everything he has done, first at Twitter^WX and now at the head of DOGE, obviously is not a friend of liberal democracy.

[rotting bones]

Most people I know IRL are liberals and I haven't heard any of them even once suggest support for dictatorship.

I never said all liberals support dictatorship. In fact, I said the exact opposite. I only said it's not utterly irrelevant which liberal democrats we ally with because there's a large fascist contingent of liberal democrats that wants to oppress the poor.

You pretty much said as much as that you thought I was in denial of reality by not agreeing with your assertion that a large portion of people who are in favor of liberal democracy are really in favor of dictatorship. My response to that is that anyone who is in favor of dictatorship is obviously not in favor of liberal democracy!

Anyways, 'Musk-loving' by itself should be one major red flag.

He owns several Teslas and he's heavily invested in Tesla himself.

At this point anyone who still loves Musk with everything he has done, first at Twitter^WX and now at the head of DOGE, obviously is not a friend of liberal democracy.

But they don't agree with you. Fascist liberal democrats don't agree that liberal democracy is incompatible with a Pinochet-style regime. Humanity disagrees with logic. Not half-heartedly. Vociferously.

There will be a titanic battle. In the end, only one side will remain standing: either mankind, or its bitterest foe, the law of the excluded middle.

If you take the side of logic, you must turn your back on mankind. An arch-traitor to your species, you must use your own judgment before taking those who claim to be liberal democrats at face value.

I have said what my condition is: protests must be allowed.

[Ares Land]

To be completely honest, you have lost me

To the extent I understand what you're saying... yeah, fascist will usually claim to be the good guys. They'll either have convinced themselves they're on the side of democracy. Even if they haven't and are persuaded humankind will best be ruled by the divine right of Elon Musk's many, many descendants, they'll still pretend to be democrats, because they haven't pushed the Overton window that far right yet.

All of that is entirely to be expected. It doesn't mean liberal democracy is meaningless. Or, you know, 'liberal' is too loaded an adjective. Let's just say 'human rights and democracy.'

[WeepingElf]

To be completely honest, you have lost me

And me too. Get out of this thread, rotting bones; you are trolling, and this is the German Politics Thread, where your posts are off topic.

[rotting bones]

To be completely honest, you have lost me

To the extent I understand what you're saying... yeah, fascist will usually claim to be the good guys. They'll either have convinced themselves they're on the side of democracy. Even if they haven't and are persuaded humankind will best be ruled by the divine right of Elon Musk's many, many descendants, they'll still pretend to be democrats, because they haven't pushed the Overton window that far right yet.

All of that is entirely to be expected. It doesn't mean liberal democracy is meaningless. Or, you know, 'liberal' is too loaded an adjective. Let's just say 'human rights and democracy.'

I'm saying there are millions of people who claim very loudly to be liberal democrats that leftists should not ally with. Namely, anyone who is in favor of squashing protests. Not even if they come to you with footnotes about why a little bit of authoritarianism is necessary like in the dictatorial period of South Korean history. Not even if they accuse you of being a leftist fanatic.

You have to use your own judgment about who is a liberal democrat no matter how large or loud the fascists are.

[MacAnDàil]

The mistake everyone's making (including myself) is in believing the debate is about socialism vs. capitalism or conservatism vs. liberalism. I really thought so myself until recently. But I've come to realize this is entirely unimportant. The only political question right now is whether we still want liberal democracy or not.

Yes. It is about liberal democracy or authoritarianism - and about sustainability or plundering the planet until civilization collapses. These two issues are intimately connected to each other: you cannot have sustainability without democracy (sure, China heavily invests in renewable energy - but they also heavily invest in coal and nuclear, it's all about the energy hunger of the booming Chinese economy), nor can democracy survive when civilization collapse, so you can't have democracy without sustainability. The problem is that many conservatives haven't realized yet, and think they can carry on doing business as usual.

My first problem with Green types is because fundamentally Green-ness is a pet issue, and being a pet issue Greens are willing to put it over liberal democracy versus authoritarianism, and when the authoritarians win the Greens fundamentally will be defeated anyways, making all of their environmental principles all for naught.

(My second problem with Green types is that Green positions often don't make sense, e.g. their opposition to nuclear -- when you judge power by the actual rational criterion of deaths per terawatt-hour, nuclear is much better than what has served to replace it in places like Germany, and nuclear is better environmentally* than some other nominally relatively-low deaths per terawatt-hour sources of power like hydroelectric power, which can actually cause massive amounts of damage to the environment, and which when it does go bad can actually cause massive death tolls amongst human populations far outstripping Chernobyl and Fukushima, cf. the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure.)

* And even things like solar power -- think of what turning desert ecosystems into seas of solar panels can do.

1° How do get the idea that Green-ness would be a pet issue?

2° OK, this indicates that nuclear is second to solar on the reasonable metric you propose. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deat ... on-per-twh. it may be relevant that Green opposition to nuclear started with opposition to nuclear weapons. WeepingElf provides further relvant arguments.

[Travis B.]

1° How do get the idea that Green-ness would be a pet issue?

By "pet issue" I mean any issue which one is willing to sacrifice the greater collective good over. Take Gaza for instance -- while what the Israeli gov't has been doing there is horrific, being willing to risk getting Trump elected despite it being no secret what he stood for just to stick it to the Dems over the issue is what made it a pet issue.

In the case of Green-ness in the case of Germany, Greens' opposition to nuclear power is a pet issue because by pushing for its phase-out they managed to get it replaced with increased reliance on more harmful fossil fuels such as brown coal even though it was obvious that this would happen. Sure, German Greens profess opposition to fossil fuels, but their views on the subject are irrelevant here -- only the consequences, which they should have known ahead of time, of their favored policies matter.

(In the case of Green parties in countries with a first-past-the-post voting system such as the US, their very contesting elections outside local elections in places that right-wing parties never win can be considered to have a "pet nature" because all they manage to do is to help throw elections and suck away supporters and energy which could otherwise pull the more left-wing of the two major parties which can practically win elections further to the left.)

[MacAnDàil]

1° How do get the idea that Green-ness would be a pet issue?

By "pet issue" I mean any issue which one is willing to sacrifice the greater collective good over. Take Gaza for instance -- while what the Israeli gov't has been doing there is horrific, being willing to risk getting Trump elected despite it being no secret what he stood for just to stick it to the Dems over the issue is what made it a pet issue.

In the case of Green-ness in the case of Germany, Greens' opposition to nuclear power is a pet issue because by pushing for its phase-out they managed to get it replaced with increased reliance on more harmful fossil fuels such as brown coal even though it was obvious that this would happen. Sure, German Greens profess opposition to fossil fuels, but their views on the subject are irrelevant here -- only the consequences, which they should have known ahead of time, of their favored policies matter.

(In the case of Green parties in countries with a first-past-the-post voting system such as the US, their very contesting elections outside local elections in places that right-wing parties never win can be considered to have a "pet nature" because all they manage to do is to help throw elections and suck away supporters and energy which could otherwise pull the more left-wing of the two major parties which can practically win elections further to the left.)

1° Life on a liveable planet is essential to the greater good.

2° The idea that coal replaced nuclear in Germany has often been repeated but the data (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factshe ... mix-charts) disproves it. As one may see from the graph between 2002 and 2024, the main changes, even bigger than the nuclear phase-out, are the increases of solar and wind, while both lignite and hard coal have dropped. The only fossil fuel increasing - at less than the decrease in nuclear - is gas, the least dangerous.

[Travis B.]

1° Life on a liveable planet is essential to the greater good.

A common thread with pet issues is that the people who believe in them think that their issue is the most important issue, and furthermore that it is most important now.

Globally, if we don't defeat fascism we will not have a liveable planet or economic democracy one way or another, so those who think that achieving Green or socialist goals now rather than uniting to defeat fascism are misguided, because if the fascists win those goals won't be achieved anyways.

2° The idea that coal replaced nuclear in Germany has often been repeated but the data (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factshe ... mix-charts) disproves it. As one may see from the graph between 2002 and 2024, the main changes, even bigger than the nuclear phase-out, are the increases of solar and wind, while both lignite and hard coal have dropped. The only fossil fuel increasing - at less than the decrease in nuclear - is gas, the least dangerous.

Still, when it comes to priorities, would it not have made sense for the first priority be to phase out coal, and as coal goes brown coal first, as coal and especially brown coal causes the most harm? And after phasing out coal, phasing out burning fuels derived from oil and natural gas next, as those still contribute to global warming. It only makes sense to phase out nuclear once burning fossil fuels has been phased out as far as possible.