Meditations on the AfD and the Youth

Franz Pokorny

Britain’s youth marches with unity of purpose. From the grimy watering holes of Substack to the New Statesman’s marble halls, a broad front has assembled behind the idea that things cannot carry on as they are. Lockdown and Boriswave have stretched the cordon sanitaire to the breaking point. For the zoomers, who grew up under the sign of Trump and Brexit, the „far right“ is a fixed star in the political firmament; not some mindless sludge simmering behind the red wall but someone you know. For the foreseeable future, Anglo-American political culture is converging on something like France: a hurly-burly of 68er fossils battling it out with RP-speaking Millwall fans amidst the ruins of the Britpopper lifeworld. The dark prophecies of liberals and remoaners ten years ago have been borne out: the far right has become normalised.

Not so in Germany. To paraphrase Carlyle: here, as in so many other cases, Germany, retrograde, indefatigable, philistine Germany comes to Woke’s aid. It could but easily have been otherwise. The exhilarating scenes of last summer — well-heeled youth partying to right-wing terrace chants beneath the low-hanging sun of the North Sea — evoked the first stirrings of 19th century nationalism; the descent of the children of the bourgeoisie into the lifeworld of the common folk to bring forth the forms of a new high culture (TikTok makes of us all narodniks). The AfD’s breathtaking advances in the string of elections from the Europarliament to the federal ballot last February, in which they cleaned up the youth vote (although narrowly coming second to a revitalised Left Party at the latter), portended soaring days to come. If the polls are anything to go by, the underlying attitudes have only hardened, yet this summer has so far been one of quietude. Gigi D’Agostino has slowed to an adagio; the spritz has lost its bubbles.

The feuilletonists have puzzled their heads to figure out the deep sources behind the AfD’s strength amongst the youth. Explanations I have heard include everything from „rural alienation“, the local unemployment rate 20 years ago, and the legacy of Prussian administration (as if transposing historical borders onto contemporary electoral maps were a sensible exercise on a territory subject to intermittent episodes of extreme internal migration). Those less circumspect will simply chalk it down to Evil. Yet the meme that the zoomers are more bewitched by the AfD’s black populist magic than other generations is not borne out by the data. At February’s federal election the party took 21% of voters below 24’s votes, if we are to believe exit polls conducted by Germany’s public broadcaster — exactly the same as its overall result. That this should be considered a puzzling anomaly is only by contrast to the image of youth in the imagination of the Berlin bubble’s professional opinion-shapers, which since 1968 has written the young off as latte-sipping, graun-reading Islington liberals: a notion of youth which they have even begrudgingly come to feel at home with. The age brackets with which the AfD in fact does best are the Nicholases between 25 and 34 and 35 and 44, amongst whom it surpassed all other parties. At that age, one is no longer a radical cultural vanguard, but a pillar of society.

The notion of a youth-led „vibe shift“ is everywhere dubious. Data from exit polls suggests that Trump lost the youngest cohort in each of his three electoral sallies (in most publicly available surveys this bafflingly stitches together the entire span from 21-29; that is to say a large swathe of the population which is no longer in any meaningful sense „young“); in the EU referendum, the „youth vote“ provided an even robuster vote of confidence in globalist tyranny. The remnants of Wokeness still defending their lost cause twitter frequently flaunt so-called „polling data“ implying „Nicholas, 30 years“ would robustly affirm Starmerism in the event of a snap general election, although this may very well be all smoke and no fire. Yet other than an effervescent „millennial socialism“ that dissipated under lockdown, these weary plebiscitary acclamations of the Party of Woke failed to trickle down into the social or even cultural movement that their magnitudes would suggest. There is good form for this; Nixon won the young people of America in 72 by a clean 52-48, yet it was the ideas of McGovern that mcgoverned America’s soul until that fateful day when Trump descended the escalator. Roland Ratesque divisions of the world into an „elite“ and everyone else are a needlessly conspiratorial gloss on a basic truth — some do, and some do not. The mass of youth may have stood by the left throughout the long populist decade, but the youthful energy lay elsewhere.

This creative intellectual energy is dormant on the German Right. The younger generation lacks a generational self-understanding; a folk-sociology; a conceptual lexicon through which the „German condition“ may be crystallised in a set of formulae and mirrored back into the public consciousness. „If the instructions aren’t clear and the names don’t fit, you can’t conduct business properly“ wrote Ezra Pound. Niklas, 30 Jahre, cannot conduct business at all; he is an intellectual nonentity. 1968, whatever else it was, meant renaming all things so as to establish a completely new kind of being-in-the-world in which every older form of experience was incoherent and ignorable. Trumpism, which brooked no compromise with Obama’s maze of deceit, shed the brittle skin of „America“ for anime and symbolically replaced the retrograde notion of „politics“ with the fresh, 21st century concept of „arrests and executions“. The Britpopper meme observed, for the very first time, the old order from an Archimedean point, and in doing so degraded it from an all-immersive lifeworld to a mere frame of reference. In this way, in each of these cases, the battle was half won for the young movement; the laurels carried away in the realm of spirit, and the material conditions left with no choice but to adjust themselves.

Contemporary Germany offers to the sociologist untold riches hitherto untouched by his profession. The Bundesrepublik is a dizzying gothic structure in which the ideological detritus of centuries has been compressed into a geometric constitution designed to provide a set of crisp axioms for all contingencies. It is a product of the Catholic romanticism of the Adenauer Republic and the heritage of the bourgeois Rechtsstaat transvalued with post-68er morality and ancient norms of deference. An illustrative example is Paragraph §185 of the criminal code, the legal basis for the state to prosecute citizens for insulting politicians. §185 is a relic of medieval prohibitions against „injury to honour“ that originally only applied to „bearers of honour“ in proportion to the degree of honour borne; over the centuries these very specific restrictions were consolidated into more general rules applying to ever-broader groups and increasingly abstract in content until eventually the norm was subsumed into a human rights-based order in which every man is held to possess some inborn and inalienable „honour“ by virtue of birth. While a modern society can allow these antiquated eccentricities — powerful weapons in the hands of schoolmarms and village tyrants! — to persist around the fringes without undermining its structural integrity; their elevation under Scholz and Merz to instruments of state is a Metternichean absurdity. The entire legitimacy of modernity rests on the wager that these antiquated practices, regimes of deference based on hereditary privilege, will of their own inefficiencies wither under the assault of more advanced forms of social organisation grounded in individual merit. The time is ripe for an inner Hausmannian restoration knocking down these medieval slums of the mind and building atop their ruins the sunlit esplanades of reason.