What Germany Needs

Many of my fellow Germans blame “stupid voters” for the current political situation. If these voters only educated themselves, the argument goes, they would not believe the lies told by those in power, and the country would be faring better. 

I’ve always taken issue with this line of thinking (which, in my experience, also exists in Catholic circles, where attaining salvation ought to be more important than politics). I take issue with it because I do not think that it is a citizen’s duty to have exhaustive political insight. That is not to say that I consider ignorance or self-deception a virtue. Far from it. Nor do I wish to contradict the poet Gottfried Benn’s imperative to “recognize the situation.” But I do think it is important to protect the demos from excessive political and moral demands—a danger that goes back to the French Revolution and the levée en masse.

Even in a democracy, it is not the people who are responsible for being well-governed. Good governance is the task of those in government. This conditio humana establishes the great responsibility of the people’s representatives. If they unexpectedly fail or do evil, it is not the fault of their constituents.

As it happens, German politicians have failed as representatives, such that how one votes has less bearing on the political outcome than one would think. This is because parties inevitably develop oligarchic leadership structures. These oligarchies, driven by their own dynamics, fail to democratically represent the people, as Robert Michels pointed out in 1911 in Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy.

The conservatives secured the most votes in the February federal election. Yet the elites—the party oligarchs—do not respect the election results and right-wing parties. Vice President JD Vance addressed this failure very clearly at the Munich Security Conference. This foreign criticism was not well-received, but Germans can find a similar message closer to home. 

In his 2011 speech to the German Bundestag, Pope Benedict XVI, quoting St. Augustine, outlined the task of the politician, which is to serve the law and resist the rule of injustice: “Without justice—what else is the State but a great band of robbers?” For Benedict, King Solomon’s request to God for a “listening heart” was “the decisive question that politicians also face today.” In order to recognize “what is right,” subjective and objective reason must be grounded in the creative reason of God. Legal and scientific positivism alone are not capable of building a “bridge to ethics and law.” Unfortunately, however, the classical sources of knowledge that served as the foundation of ethics and justice—conscience, natural law, and the “ecology of man”—have been dethroned. 

In the same address, four years before Angela Merkel opened the borders for mass Muslim immigration in 2015, the pope denounced the “state of culturelessness” in Europe. European elites had betrayed the European identity, which is rooted in Israel’s belief in God, Greek philosophy, and Roman law. The triad of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, according to Benedict, is the basis of our duty toward God, the inviolable dignity of man, and the standards of justice, which “we are called to defend at this moment in our history.”

These remarks still hold true today. European elites are openly anti-Christian and ignore or suppress natural law. They declare the protection of national borders to be impossible, burdening future generations with gigantic debts and driving more and more people into dependence on a welfare state that they are simultaneously ruining with their climate, economic, and migration policies. They declare producers of CO₂ to be the enemy of creation, and gamble with the dangerous possibility of World War III. Although the people of Western Europe are not being physically driven out, their home countries are being transformed beyond recognition.

Benedict recognized many of the dangers facing modern Europe; his speech reads like the founding document of today’s European resistance. His appeal to politicians to seek a “listening heart” with God’s help remains a relevant admonishment. They would do well to recall and heed his words. Until then, I imagine the cycle of misplaced blame will persist.