Welcome to the Far Right
On Sunday, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (“AfD”) won a landslide victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, taking roughly 44 percent of the vote and more than doubling the total of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats.
Or, as readers of the American press learned, the “far right” had won a major victory.
AP News declared, “Germany shocked by far-right election triumph.” The Reuters headline: “Far-right win leaves Germany’s Merz shaken.” NBC News: “Far-right Alternative for Germany party wins big in regional election but falls short of majority.” And of course, NPR: “Germany’s far-right achieves an electoral breakthrough.”
Well, this is certainly troubling, isn’t it? A far-right (in one description, “Nazi-affiliated”) party surging in German elections… we’ve seen this before! So what exactly are these radicals proposing, I wondered. Race laws? Jewish oppression? The Fourth Reich?
It’s almost as if you can’t trust the mainstream media to report fairly on political issues.
As it turns out, opinion polls show the issues that drove the AfD’s victory were peace in Europe, economic security, and restoring a Germany for Germans by ending mass immigration, especially from Islamic countries. Certainly not a left-wing platform, but pretty far from the far right. It’s almost as if you can’t trust the mainstream media to report fairly on political issues.
But maybe I’m not being cynical enough. Perhaps it was simply the media’s click-hungry weakness for sensationalism, exaggerating any break with the status quo as “far”-something.
I decided to perform a little experiment. I asked Google to search the New York Times website for the phrase “far right.” It returned roughly 79,000 results. Then I searched for “far left” and got 14,000 hits. (Even that comparison exaggerates the Times’s enthusiasm for the latter expression. Scan the results for “far left” and one repeatedly encounters the phrase not in the Times‘s own voice but inside quotation marks, attributed to Donald Trump or someone in his administration.) If the mainstream media is to be believed, then America and Europe are suffering from a remarkable political asymmetry. The far right is everywhere, while the far left is mostly something Republicans claim exists.
There was some pushback against the “far right” characterization in nominally right-wing forums. Elon Musk, who has thankfully seized the means of production formerly known as Twitter, replied to the Wall Street Journal’s own “far right” article, “They’re not far-right, you knuckleheads!”
Musk’s objection raises an interesting question, one our newspapers almost never bother to answer: How far is “far”? The word describes a distance, but from what? The politics of the Democrat Party perhaps? Or the kinds of proposals AOC and Greta Thunberg would approve of?
This becomes particularly interesting when we consider how much political geography has shifted within living memory. Opposition to mass immigration, the belief that nations ought to preserve a distinctive national culture, even the quaint notion that there are two sexes were all centrist positions no more than a decade ago.
This mysterious disappearance of the “far left” is revealing. If the mildest opposition to the prevailing liberal consensus can carry a politician off to the “far right,” presumably an equivalent departure in the other direction should eventually carry someone from left to “far left.” Somewhere out there must be a progressive sufficiently progressive enough to earn that label, yet they remain remarkably scarce. Even groups like Antifa and the communist-affiliated “social democrats” are seldom described this way.
Obviously, this is not because radical ideas have disappeared from the American left. In recent years we have seen victories by candidates advocating the abolition of police departments and prisons, the elimination of ICE, confiscatory taxation, and fundamental changes to institutions ranging from the Supreme Court to private health insurance. One need not be a member of the “far right” to notice that they represent substantial departures from the American political tradition. (RELATED: After We Laugh, We Must Treat DSA Program As Deadly Serious)
Yet their advocates possess a remarkable resistance to geographical extremes. They are “progressives” or “activists” or “democratic socialists.” Sometimes they are simply “Democrats.” They are never “far left.”
The right, meanwhile, while not actually having changed much, has become exiled to the country of extremism in the media’s political geography. It reminds me of the story Reagan used to tell about the old couple driving along in their pickup truck, and the wife says, “Why don’t you sit close to me anymore?” From behind the steering wheel, the man says, “I haven’t moved.”
The question is why the most inflammatory description has become the favored one, and why the same linguistic enthusiasm so rarely travels leftward. Despite lengthy historical precedent, one never hears the Democrat party referred to as “KKK-affiliated.”
There is a simple way for journalism to escape this problem. Just tell us the truth. Readers are perfectly capable of deciding whether a party’s positions are conservative, reactionary, radical, extremist — or simply crazy.
But “far-right” saves everyone the trouble. It is one of those curious journalistic adjectives that tells us not only where the journalist stands, but where we should stand as well.
And after Sunday’s election, the terminology has produced an especially peculiar political map. Nearly 44 percent of Saxony-Anhalt’s voters have apparently wandered off to the distant reaches of the political spectrum.
I will give our friends in media credit for something, though. The AfD, like my MAGA brethren, while not very often “far right,” are radicals in the older sense of the word. They insist on saying things that are true and that a large portion of the establishment, especially in the media, simply do not want to hear.
Germany may be beginning a revolution now, just as America has seen a conservative renaissance under Trump. And it started with telling the truth, because, as a quote often attributed to George Orwell says, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Thus, to all truth-tellers, in whatever country they may reside, I say, “Welcome to the Far Right.” You’ll find yourself in increasingly good company.
READ MORE from Chris Jansen:
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The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Revisited
Chris Jansen is a translator, essayist and poet. His books include Hamlet Decoded, We Can Be Heroes: A Rehab Memoir, The Last Mayan, and The Lost Poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez. He lives in Athens, Georgia.