I have now written many pieces about the escalating efforts of the German government to protect democracy from itself by abolishing a wide range of traditionally democratic freedoms. We are seeing here the glimmerings of a new, Post-Liberal Political Order (PLPO). Like other major political shifts, this one has deep roots, but it matured during the pandemic. The lockdowns and the mass vaccination hysteria soon faded, but the PLPO endured, blooming anew as establishment failures deepened the unpopularity of the political class.

This malignancy regards ordinary people and their political preferences not only as an enemy, but – much worse – as a problem to be solved. As we all know, intractable problems and schemes to solve them are the lifeblood of modern technocracies. They have tried to solve a wide range of insoluble problems, from the weather to poverty to viruses, and now they will attempt to solve us. Facts the Historians L... John S. Tilley Best Price: $5.00 Buy New $4.87 (as of 07:05 UTC - Details)

Despite its post-liberal nature, the PLPO still operates within a world of liberal assumptions and terminology. Thus it constructs its repressions either as regrettable measures necessary to save our free and open society from ideological threats like fascism, or even as a higher and truer manifestation of democracy itself. To maintain the democratic facade and cast itself on the side of “the people,” the PLPO eagerly conflates foreign enemies like Russia with domestic opposition, while sponsoring sham pro-regime protests through party apron organisations. In this way the opinions of actual voters may disregarded as the agitations of fifth-columnists or foreign agents, and replaced with a new pseudopopulist facade that appears not only to support but even to demand all the antidemocratic measures that the PLPO has prepared in its cabinet of horrors.

As your comments and emails illustrate, these are international developments, but they have specific regional flavours. In Germany, the architects of the PLPO have demonstrated increasing sophistication. Consider the sham protests: During Covid, the hygiene regime was a convenient means of marginalising the populist opposition, but in its place there reigned a cavernous silence. Those most in favour of lockdowns and mass vaccination cowered at home behind masks, leaving nobody to support the pandemicists but a dangerously exposed cadre of collaborators in the press, the technocracy and the managerial class. Our rulers have since sought to repair this lapse. Following the Americans and their Summer of Floyd tactics, they have used the press to instrumentalise some random event (the “secret meeting” of alleged “neo-Nazis” in Potsdam), before enlisting leftist organisations to orchestrate street actions as a means of shaping public opinion ahead of decisive elections.

These exercises in opinion engineering target not committed ideologues and dissidents, but rather what our domestic intelligence chief has called the “silent majority” – a euphemism for less politicised voters who are unhappy with the present way of things but who, it is hoped, can be persuaded by the illusion that they are alone and deviant in their dissatisfaction. The silent majority are not attacked as political enemies, but rather flattered and courted as regime collaborators. Their wavering loyalty is generously overlooked, and they are asked only to “wake up” and reject the opposition parties they are tempted to vote for. Then they can pretend that they were on the side of all that is right and good all along.

I think it’s important to state very clearly the nature of the PLPO and to draw appropriate comparisons with the illiberal systems of the past. Democratic procedures lend political legitimacy to Western leaders, which is why the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) is so committed to pursuing those “delegitimisers of the state” who criticise regime tactics as illiberal and authoritarian. History, however, never quite repeats itself; in Germany, the PLPO indeed appears to draw some inspiration from the DDR, but strictly speaking it is a wholly new political animal that must be understood on its own terms. Healing Naturally: Red... Jeffreys, Katrina Buy New $7.99 (as of 02:44 UTC - Details)

Many American readers report that the United States is on the same path as the Federal Republic, if just a few steps behind. Others suggest that conditions in America may be even worse than those in Germany. In fact, while we see a convergence of tactics across the world, the PLPO in Europe and the PLPO in the United States appear to be subtly different systems. Comparing them is useful, for it highlights the distinctive properties of each.

There are three important barriers to overt government repression in the United States: 1) The US Constitution, which outlines individual rights in highly absolutist terms and is surrounded by an old and venerable body of liberal jurisprudence; 2) American federalism, which the pandemic revealed to be a much more potent force than German federalism, and which attenuates the reach of the central government in important ways; and 3) the status of the United States as an imperial power and its coordinating role in the postwar international liberal order. This latter point means that the globalists have less direct influence over domestic politics in America than they do in Europe. I can hear the protests of my American friends already: Yes, federalism in the United States has decayed substantially; yes, your rights have been subverted in various ways; and yes, the globalists are anything but a negligible force in the US. All that is true, but it is also true that in Europe these protections have not merely been eroded; they hardly exist at all.

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