Hamburg
It’s worth noting that a day before President Biden gives a speech on the fragile state of American democracy, Der Spiegel‘s Washington bureau chief has published a book arguing that the U.S. is a net exporter of ideologies that threaten other democracies across the Western world.
In his new book, whose title translates to One Wrong Word: How a New Leftist Ideology from America threatens Our Freedom of Expression, journalist René Pfister warns that ignoring the seductive dogmatism of identity politics could be a “fatal mistake” for nations like Germany.
Why? Because it “absolutizes” all argument and kills the kind of open dialogue and compromise that democracy requires. It turns intellectuals into scared sheep, promotes a vision of society as being a war between the righteous (and victimized) few versus the cruel “deplorable” many, which invariably depresses support for the political center and sends those who feel vilified into the arms of populist demagogues like Donald Trump.
None of these arguments is particularly new. What’s significant here, however, is that it’s being leveled from abroad against the United States, which likes to see itself as the world’s defender of democracy. It’s also noteworthy that this manifesto has been published by a popular left-of-center newsweekly of an allied nation, one that still lives in the shadow of its terrible 20th-century experience with authoritarianism.
In a magazine essay that teases the book, Pfister bemoans that “something is being lost “ in an America in which 55% of respondents told a New York Times poll that they had kept their mouths shut in the past year for fear of saying the wrong thing. What Pfister sees sweeping the U.S.—and creeping across the Atlantic—is nothing more than a new wave of intolerance that justifies itself by claiming to be rooting out past intolerance. He doesn’t buy it. What he sees is the creation of more acronyms and a growing climate of fear. Just like you can’t bomb Iraq into becoming a liberal democracy, I guess you can’t create a more tolerant world through intimidation and censorship. To trivialize this trend or to pretend it hasn’t leapt beyond the universities where it’s incubated, he argues, is not just a cop out, it’s dangerous.
