Disintegration of the Social Democratic Party in Germany

Coalition talks are still underway in Germany. Judging from a story in The Guardian by Philip Oltermann, "German parties hope to reach coalition deal this week," Social Democratic Party leader Martin Schulz is pushing hard for the type of policies it is hard to imagine Merkel's CDU can accept:

The SPD leader, Martin Schulz, announced on Monday that the two sides had also reached an agreement on the European chapter of the coalition agreement that amounted to “an urgently needed signal for a fresh start for Europe”.

The agreement would commit the next German government to “more investments, an investment budget for the eurozone, and an end to the austerity mantra”, as well as “fair taxation” of internet giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, Schulz said via an information service for SPD party members.

Schulz has to push hard because the SPD is in real trouble. Alternative for Germany (AfD) is only a few points shy of overtaking the SPD as the second-largest party in Germany behind CDU. Katrin Bennhold explores the abandonment of the SPD for AfD by rank'n'file union members in traditional industrial strongholds.

Bennhold's story, "Workers of Germany, Unite: The New Siren Call of the Far Right," is worth reading for the insight it provides into the sway of Trump among the U.S. white working class.

Elites throughout the West are loyally wedded to neoliberalism. A particularly acute articulation of this commitment could be found over the weekend in Anna Sauerbrey's "How Millennials Are Changing German Politics":

Real politics always consists of bullet points. You want to lift up the lower middle classes? You have to pass tax relief, restructure social security contributions, bolster the education budget — which is what the next grand coalition will vow to do, if the negotiations are successful.

The challenge for German politicians, moving forward, will be to come up with a narrative big enough to create a sense of direction, of being based on values more fundamental than raising the gross domestic product a few percentage points, but avoiding the sort of utopian visions that German voters rightly distrust.

If they succeed, they could set free a new era of political energy. If they fail, we could see a dark turn toward the sort of fractured, incoherent politics haunting the rest of the world, full of holes that the far right can move through. There’s a trap, however. In raging against the slow and boring politics of compromise, the members of the new generation are joining the very populist chant they are setting out to defeat.

In other words, more compromise, cuts to social programs, no utopias -- more of the same. That's the mantra of the neoliberals. And by doing more of the same we will magically "set free a new era of political energy." This is derangement, plain and simple.

The safest bet in any book is the bet that the traditional parties of the mainstream left in the West will continue to disintegrate.

Growing German Anti-Americanism

There is an interesting opinion piece written by Anna Sauerbrey that appears in today's paper. Sauerbrey, a German newspaper editor, asks, "Is the Trans-Atlantic Relationship Dead?"

Two camps have emerged in German politics -- those, usually conservative, who believe that American hegemony can pick up where it left off with Obama once Trump exits the stage, and those, notably Social Democrats, who think Germany should steer its own hegemonic course. Sauerbrey concludes with an expression of futility:

As a world player, Germany can act only through Europe, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash writes. But as it does so, it is inhibited by the inertia of masses in movement, the other 26 European Union states. Germany must fill the post-American vacuum; Germany cannot fill the vacuum. Talk of a strategic shift is a reverie — a way to escape the limitations to real action.

What's encouraging about the piece is its articulation of a growing anti-Americanism in Germany:

Today, though, there is a new current of anti-Americanism rising as well, different from the usual continental grumblings. It believes that America has overstayed its welcome on the world stage, that it still insists on dominating both culturally and politically. It believes that American culture is superficial and phony, that Americans are hypocritical and uneducated. “What good has ever come from the United States of America?” a reader in Berlin wrote to me recently in response to an editorial.

The roots of this new anti-Americanism go deeper than Mr. Trump. Germans point to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and war on terrorism, and to Barack Obama’s tendency to overpromise American action on foreign policy while furthering many of his predecessor’s worst policies. But finally, in Donald Trump, we have a cartoon bad guy, the essence of every anti-American prejudice: a rude, uneducated bully who drinks giant amounts of Diet Coke.

Note the inclusion of the sainted Obama in the rogues gallery, a telling clue that there will be no successful reboot of the trans-Atlantic relationship post-Trump.

For the last couple decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. global leadership has been used to destroy sovereign states. The unstated but official policy of the United States is permanent warfare, which creates blow back to Europe, to give one example, in the form of refugees (not to mention jihadists).

There is no going forward on this path. The problem for Germany is that its deep state is tied by an umbilical cord to the U.S. So the parting of ways is going to be truly traumatic.