I've written about the wannabe-intellectual Götz Kubitschek before, but over the weekend he made headlines in Germany when he appeared – along with other right-wing extremists – at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Kubitschek was ostensibly there representing his publishing group Antaios Verlag , but his true mission was to disrupt the Buchmesse and make a mockery of the Book Fair's tradition of supporting the global exchange of culture and ideas through books.
Kubitschek and his followers have zero interest in an exchange of ideas. Rather, his primary goal is to bring down the liberal democratic institutions that have made Germany the most successful and prosperous nation in Europe.
The journalist James Angelos of the New York Times Magazine recently spent three days with Kubitschek at his compound in Schnellroda and wrote an excellent profile of the man and his redical "movement". What is interesting is that at first Kubitschek was able to couch his profoundly anti-democratic views in seemingly reasonable, innocuous rhetoric:
Kubitschek does not hesitate to provoke in the service of his New Right cause, but he also has a talent for couching his illiberal ideology in innocuous-seeming, even liberal-sounding precepts that keep him within the bounds of acceptable discourse even as he expands them. The idea, for instance, that no one should be forced to abide by a strict ideology sounds wholly unobjectionable. But for Kubitschek and his fellow New Right thinkers, the roster of strict ideologies includes liberalism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism and feminism, all of which are “social experiments” (as Kubitschek puts it) imposed by the political elite on the unwilling Volk.
Angelos notes that Kubitschek and his movement has been successful in attracting followers (and voters) from the Left Party (Die LINKE), which has always been strong in the eastern states. This has resulted in a new Querfront – a union of the far-left and far-right – united in a hatred of America and western institutions such as NATO as well as an admiration for Putin's Russia.
New Right thinkers often entertain the idea of establishing a querfront, or a “cross front” that would unite opponents of liberalism on both extremes of the political spectrum. During my talks with Kubitschek, I often found myself detecting what at first seemed to me a perplexing leftist bent, an aversion to American-style materialism. You had only to go the shopping center on a Saturday morning, he once told me, and observe people in their “consumption temple” to see how there is “nothing at all there, spiritually.” For Kubitschek and other New Right thinkers, American liberalism — with its emphasis on individual rights and the individual pursuit of happiness — is perhaps the most corrosive force eating away at the identity of the Volk, replacing a sense of “we” with individualism and profit-seeking self-interest.
By the third day, Kubitschek was much more at ease with James Angelos and let his guard down. He was much more open in expressing his total contempt for democracy – channeling Carl Schmitt, one of his intellectual heroes:
Kubitschek casually mentioned that he would not mind at all if a strongman came to replace Merkel, if that was the only way to correct her decision to allow the migrants to enter Germany. In a time of great peril, he noted soberly, a leader must act beyond the law. He cited Carl Schmitt, the conservative political theorist who criticized parliamentary democracy and aligned with the Nazis after they took power: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Merkel herself had acted outside the law by opening the border, Kubitschek said, and that proved she was sovereign. And yet, he continued, “I’d have absolutely nothing against it if someone came along and with the same sovereignty did the opposite. Someone who would say: ‘The experiment is over. The Parliament won’t be consulted. I will prop up with my power the administration, the organs of the state, the police’ — who would in any case be supportive — ‘the border patrol, the military, and we will end this experiment.’ That means: borders shut. Test to see who can be assimilated; they can stay. Those who can’t be assimilated, they’ve got to go.”
Kubitschek's disruptive appearance at the Franfurter Buchmesse represents just a minor skirmish in the much bigger battles to come.
