Germany's Stronger Democracy

There have been crucial junctures in recent history – the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, to name a few – during which the vanity of “American exceptionalism” was temporarily punctured. But that myth has amazing staying power. Like a whack-o-mole or a Stehaufmensch, it keeps resurrecting no matter what the gravity of the challenge. Even progressives, at least when they run national campaigns, embrace some version of it, probably because failing to do so seems unpatriotic. Apparently, we can only love a perfect country, or one whose sins are at most peccadillos rather than crimes against humanity.

You Germans have not had this luxury, have not enjoyed this prohibition on judging the adequacy of your political judgments and your fitness for democracy. Quite the opposite. Since World War II, others (and above all, we Americans) have been probing and monitoring your sentiments, openly and regularly taking the measure of your capacity for liberal democracy. We literally sat in judgement on you at Nuremberg, and have continued to do so metaphorically for much of the post-war period. It was even considered our duty – and more yours – to take “the German pulse” at regular intervals to reassure ourselves that the taint of antisemitism and authoritarianism do not again gain the upper hand. But that alertness to your democratic health rarely, if ever, transferred back to us.

Though many Germans have over the years confided to me that they envy Americans’ easy-going relationship to patriotism – its uncomplicated and open expression – I can’t help wondering now if there is something deeply flawed in this indiscriminate love.

There is perhaps one last taboo actually observed in American politics: thou shalt not call voters stupid (at least not to their face). It is not that the right doesn’t do everything in its power to ensure voter ignorance – ranging from systematic underfunding of public education to blanketing the airwaves with disinformation. But as soon as you openly call out voters’ vacuousness or intellectual laziness you become living proof of “left-wing” snobbery, corroboration of the claim that you really do look down on Trump voters after all.

It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black: we know from rally after rally that Trump voters openly deem themselves far and away better people and more genuinely American than anyone else. Unwelcome migrants are “vermin” and deserve mass deportation, possibly worse. The rest of us who oppose the MAGA-movement are “radical left-wing Marxists” who merit investigation, harassment, prosecution and, when relevant, to be driven out of the government.

On the left, the taboo functions a bit differently. Instead of ever seriously questioning whether voters have taken the opportunity to inform themselves adequately and weigh their options carefully, we reflexively blame ourselves. At least this is the public-facing gesture I’m familiar with; I frankly doubt how many really believe this privately. Yet precisely this ritual of breast-beating dominated almost every conversation I had with friends and colleagues after 5 November 2024. Over and over again I heard a litany of Democratic errors. We failed to take seriously the economic plight of workers (bacon really was more expensive!); Biden stepped out too late; Harris never submitted herself to a proper primary; all the good economic news – and there was a lot of it – just hadn’t become “real” for enough people, etc., etc.

OK, all true, more or less. Yet even if you grant the validity of each and every one of these criticisms, do we actually condone a vote for Trump given the options we had? Do we actually say to ourselves: OK, now I get it; you voted for an authoritarian because the soaring stock market did not yet benefit you directly? Like a permissive parent – and no less condescending, by the way – we smother Trump voters with our “understanding,” but fail to hold them to account. Because the point here has nothing to do with inherent inability. On the contrary: “this immaturity,” as Kant famously put it, “is self-imposed … when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it …”

When we overlook or condone the indisputably irrational, ill-informed and unsubstantiated views of voters we only advance a culture of low expectations for our democracy. And far from generous or broad-minded, this is hypocritical. Because we know better and say as much privately. We just don’t want to publicly acknowledge the widespread phenomenon of voter laziness, or, what Kant perhaps somewhat more diplomatically would call “immaturity.”

We don’t want to admit that blaming foreigners and wallowing in ignorance (assuming, for example, that foreign aid constitutes 25 percent of the US budget rather than the actual 1 percent) is just far simpler than informing ourselves. We are flattered to think that long-standing resentments now count as “political views” and that hateful bigotries amount to “perspectives” that need to be taken seriously. Voting “pro-life” (where the more accurate slogan would be “forced birth”) apparently provides a degree of moral self-assurance sufficient to look away from the slew of truly difficult ethical and political choices that a socially just society might actually require.

Countering Trump's authoritarian overreach – and those of his often Ivy-league-educated lackeys – requires little more than grade school civics and a high school “contemporary affairs” class. It is not rocket science. Why do we hold back?

And let us make no mistake: we did this to ourselves. In 1987 we permitted the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to abandon the “fairness doctrine” in broadcasting that is the very cornerstone of German public media. (Not coincidentally, that rule was first promulgated in 1949, the same year that American advisors worked closely with Germans on the formulation of the West German Grundgesetz.) That suspension of the fairness principle made possible, less than a decade later, the rise of Murdoch’s influential Fox News, which of course is not “news” in the sense that any serious journalist uses the term.

That is why, despite everything, I have more hope for Germany as you head into elections this Sunday. I understand your anxiety. Nothing sells like fear, and the AfD party stands to gain substantially from the spate of unrepresentative acts of violence committed by foreigners. Merz may be unscrupulous and opportunistic, but he is no fool: his de facto collaboration with the AfD is a cold-blooded calculation meant to beat them at their own game. And the AfD wins just by playing the game. Despite all the well-intentioned Demos, petitions, and editorials we’ve seen recently, Merz’s cynical gambit may well pan out for the CDU. You have every reason to worry that the AfD is at the very least being normalised.

But when the dust settles, you will still have a healthier, more stable democracy and the AfD, no matter what its gains, will not run the government, as its counterpart currently does in the United States. This may be little consolation to you, but from a distance, the difference is momentous.

Your fundamentals are still firmly in place. Whereas we in the US have a sharp partisan divide when it comes to news sources and trust in media outlets (Republicans love Fox and Democrats favour MSNBC), Germans – according to the Pew Research Center – trust the ARD by a vast majority (80 percent), and both those on the ideological left and right still cite it as their main source of reliable information. Your ’Tagesschau’ may in its sobriety and succinctness invite the clever mocking of a Saturday Night Live sketch, but that sombre ritual still matters to a significant number of Germans across the ideological spectrum.

Just last Monday, ARD assembled all four candidates to face an array of citizens’ questions. Weidel’s very participation is anathema to many, but to an outsider the genius of the system shines through all the controversy: she couldn’t choose her own ideological broadcaster, but was compelled to speak in a public forum not of her own making. You have not ghettoised your news. In all the coverage of the candidates’ debate from the evening before, there was plenty of criticism for the vehemence and tone of the rhetoric. But no one, to my knowledge, denounced the “bias” of RTL. Though a private broadcaster, it is governed by public interest law that is lacking for such stations in the US. The fact that so many Americans mistake the violent January 6th insurrection for a kind of “love parade” has not only to do with Trump’s lies, but with our warped media landscape in which it is possible to entirely inhabit a single, ideological broadcaster and still feel “mainstream.”

Your multiple Rundfunkanstalten together with ZDF, Deutschlandradio and Deutsche Welle comprise a rich web of public media with significant market share, unlike in the US, where public radio and television are statistically marginal. If you doubt that, try finding a public radio station while driving through the Midwest. You will come across 20 fundamentalist / evangelical broadcasters before you find a single public station, and then only if you happen to be near a college town or a decent size city. Fake news is no stranger to Germans, to be sure; but it is not as widespread and as deeply entrenched as in the US. Not yet, anyway.

There is a reason for all this: history. You lost your first democracy and have set up guardrails to prevent that from happening again. We, on the other hand, have been so arrogant about “American exceptionalism” that we think we can’t lose ours. We have a number of world-class museums and memorials, but “confronting the past” in the United States (whether that be slavery, “Jim Crow” apartheid, or the murder, removal and dispossession of Native Peoples) has always been more a private, discretionary, and optional undertaking. We never constructed the elaborate network of public-facing, state-sponsored “historical reckoning” that, despite all its distortions and lacunae, distinguishes Germany among all the state perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

Racing around your capital city yesterday to take in the ‘Berlinale’, I waited at a bus stop that recounted the basic facts of Adolf Eichmann’s Nazi career and his infamous “Judenreferat” at what today is a seedy-looking post-war hotel. I wasn’t asking to be “enlightened,” informed, or reminded – I just wanted to get to my next film on time. But I could hardly avoid it.

That rarely happens in the US. Far from reminding ourselves of all those excluded by our prior, very limited notions of democracy, we are actively removing precisely those items (books from libraries and curricula from red state public schools and universities) that hold the potential to make Americans “uncomfortable” with our past. It is magical thinking raised to the level of national policy: if we don’t see it, it is not there.

None of this is meant to make excuses for what some political scientists – too generously, I think – refer to as “the low information voter.” Despite all those efforts to shrink our already rather meagre “memory culture,” Americans still possess sufficient means to fulfil Thomas Jefferson’s mandate of a “well-informed citizenry.” Making allowances for the handicapped and the truly impoverished, we should never lose sight of the fact that our educational deficits are largely of our own making. We could have chosen – and could still choose – a social market economy, as you have done. We could make investments in public education and health care for all. But even Democrats, with the happy exception of Bernie Sanders and his followers, are too afraid to use a word that apparently comes too close to the dreaded “socialist,” lest it be used against us. Never mind that it is being hurled against us anyway.

You may think that I am a naive outsider looking in on German democracy with rose-coloured glasses, perhaps one so desperate for good news about democracy at home that he will find it even in Germany. Surely most Germans do not appreciate the symbolic significance of the Rundfunkgebühr – namely that it enjoys a certain constitutional priority and distinction over and above quotidian tax policies normally agreed to by politicians. Admittedly, most can’t know – or perhaps don’t care – that your founding fathers had Goebbels’s rantings still ringing in their ears when they set up a system of multiple regional broadcasters meant to foil easy centralisation, government control, and Gleichschaltung. And you may wish to educate me on the high cost and redundant programming across public outlets, all of which has indisputably led to recent plans for consolidation and streamlining. And we could go on: like us, you have steadily lost significant circulation numbers of daily regional newspapers over the last twenty years. And what about all those turning to social media in lieu even of your estimable “legacy media”? I get all that.

But you still have something remarkably precious here. I am not recommending that you sit on your laurels and count your blessings. On the contrary: dig in your heels and hold on stubbornly to the relatively healthy media landscape you still possess. You may have habituated to it and therefore take it for granted. As an outsider, I have not.

And you have public financing of campaigns – not water-tight, as Kohl’s downfall memorably illustrated – but still pretty good. In the very country that once proudly touted the egalitarian principle of “one man, one vote” we now have a Supreme Court ruling (Citizens United) that declares corporate donors protected by First Amendment freedom of speech, giving corporations and people like Musk vastly disproportionate influence on elections.

These measures distinguish you from the United States and comprise your true fire wall; they are the bedrock for that much broader “culture of democracy” that John Dewey insisted must undergird the more specific expressions of democracy like voter turn-out (which by the way is consistently higher – 10 to 15 percent –in Germany than the US).

You might even take some justifiable pride in your extensive memory culture, flawed as it sometimes is. Taking some measure of public satisfaction – which is not the same as hubris – in your numerous achievements in this important area, precisely as they relate to democracy stabilisation, may help in depriving the far right of one of its favourite whipping boys. Own your accomplishments – even as you relentlessly monitor and improve them. Don’t run from them.

And please don’t envy us our “uncomplicated patriotism,” for it comes at the price of self-imposed historical and political ignorance. I know you don’t feel quite entitled to an open “love of country” – at least not outside the bounds of soccer games. But who today would give up their German passport?

I may be naive in my estimation of your democratic culture. Yet, to modify Chateaubriand only slightly, I prefer naivety in this case to cynicism and endless self-deprecation, because the former at least presupposes the very democratic ideals which the latter effectively forswears.