On one side there are moderate members, for whom the AfD is basically a protest vote; on the other is what he called a “dark core” of true believers—people like Björn Höcke, a former history teacher who has said that the “reproductive strategies” of Africans are diluting the ethnic-German population. Petry had been a link between the two wings, Funke said, but now she was vulnerable, because the dark core had succeeded in moving the AfD even further to the right. “The Party is in the hands of radicals now,” he said.
That’s shocking to notice that different races have different reproductive strategies. Wow, just wow. That sounds like Phil Rushton’s R/K hypothesis.
He was disgusted that so many of his countrymen were immune to the tug of patriotism, and called Merkel “the Germany abolisher”—a newly popular term derived from a right-wing tract titled “Germany Abolishes Itself,” by Thilo Sarrazin, a member of the executive board of the German Bundesbank. The book, which appeared in 2010 and sold more than a million and a half copies, argues that everything from high immigrant crime rates to low test scores among Muslims could be partly traced to genetic factors.
Of course we know now that genes don’t account for anything. They have no predictive value, that’s why smart people are so careless in selecting who they make babies with.
The success of Sarrazin’s book revealed an important shift in public opinion. For decades, Germany was proud of not being proud—of confronting its past openly and of accepting the principle of collective guilt. It developed a political identity based on allegiance to the laws and norms of the state, rather than on any cultural or ethnic sense of Germanness. As a result, patriotic displays that would be uncontroversial in other countries, such as flying the national flag or saying that you love your country, were taboo in Germany. But, as the memory of the Third Reich recedes and the last generation of perpetrators and victims dies out, the nation has begun to see itself differently. The AfD is attracting voters, like Kucharicky, who want Germany to become a normal country again, with an unashamed sense of nationalism.
A political identity based on allegiances to the laws and norms of the state is a weak political identity compared to the ties of blood and soil.
On the other hand, as I discovered, there is no truly typical AfD supporter, because the Party attracts voters who have a wide range of concerns and grievances. At town-hall meetings, conferences, white-sausage breakfasts, dinners, and late-night carouses, I encountered many types. I met a doctor from Kiel who had come back to Saxony to reclaim ancestral land confiscated by the Communists; I met a middle manager for Mercedes who had had to seek medical attention for his heart when he learned of Merkel’s bailout of Greece; I met a Vietnamese-German man who joined the AfD because it was the only party that talked about the global influence of the C.I.A.; I met a trainee pilot for United Airlines who admired Trump and had decided that the AfD was the closest German equivalent; I met a quiet architect who thought that most of the Party was unhinged but still joined, because it was right about the economy. I met very few women. (The membership is eighty-five per cent male.)
Women are conformist. They are rarely trailblazers. They do what they think their peers will admire.
The discussion escalated when Petry accused Mazyek of wanting to impose Sharia law on Germany, a popular but unfounded claim.
Every group wants to impose its norms to the extent that it can.
Afterward, in her office, we talked about the AfD’s connections to other populist movements. She has established close ties with Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, and has also met with Geert Wilders, the star of the Dutch far right. She told me that a colleague had recently met with Marine Le Pen, of France’s Front National, and that over the summer she had spoken to various American Republicans, including the Iowa congressman Steve King, who has compared immigrants to dogs and suggested building an electric fence on the U.S. border with Mexico. When I asked her what she thought of Donald Trump, she said, “My impression is that Trump may become the American President, because the alternative to him, Hillary Clinton, is just so unconvincing. She is almost like a copy of someone like Merkel—someone who just keeps on with the same policies that led to the trouble in the first place.” She admired the American willingness to take risks: “It might not be better under Trump, but at least with him there is the chance to change.”
She thought that German politics was more weighed down by liberal pieties. “It’s so moral to allow these attacks to happen,” she said sarcastically. “It’s so moral to promise to people around the world that they can come to Germany and find paradise.” She found this outlook anti-democratic, disdainful of the views of ordinary Germans. “I myself am not morally good,” she said. “I’m just a human being. I try to stick to the rules. And I think there is a majority of Germans who agree with me. So, reducing the entire Enlightenment and all of the successes of European history down to this need to be morally good: I find that extremely dangerous. There’s this saying of Nietzsche”—she took out her phone and pulled up the quote almost instantly. “Here it is, in ‘Zarathustra’: ‘The good have always been the beginning of the end.’ ”
Israel does not worry about being so good that it puts its existence in danger. That would be insane. I once heard a rabbi say, “If Israel were 25% better, it would be dead.”
