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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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EDIT: my club HOR linked turned out to be fake. How embarrassing. This protest movement probably does not have hipster appeal.

In Germany, it's illegal to sing songs that can be considered hate speech or aligned with Nazi ideology.

Several days ago, at a beach club in Northern Germany, a video went viral of a bunch of drunken Germans singing along to dance music track with lyrics that say "Germans for Germany, Foreigners Out" https://youtube.com/watch?v=xZZztdyd0PQ

Authorities have announced criminal investigations in response, though this does not appear to be silencing the hipster youth of Germany from enjoying the song. More recently, this popped up in an "underground" techno broadcast at Club HÖR https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1794390427388588274

Is this an actual hipster event? Yes. They have their origins in illegal parties being done in basements or warehouses where everyone is hurrying to get their dance on before the authorities shut it down. Though they're much more popular now, they have kept the subversive raw industrial space motif.

Isn't this scene aligned with gay and otherwise leftist social mores? Yes. Typically, German techno is LGBTQ-coded and events can feature anything-goes public displays of sexual activity.

Are they just dropping the track because its beat is sick? Absolutely not. The song was originally produced by an incredibly cheesy Italian producer-DJ as a club anthem. In the hipster spaces this is as cringe as it comes. You would have to kill yourself if you dropped this as a place like HÖR. Perhaps the sickening cheesiness of the song is having its sign flipped because the insipid romancey lyrics were replaced with illegal German nationalism?

Hot anti-immigration thoughtcrime breaking out into the subversive mainstream but still fashioning-itself-as-underground techno scene in Germany is an unexpected development, though it did not come without foreshadowing. The "far right" Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), is apparently now the most popular party among 14-29 year olds.

https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/04/jugendstudie-2024-jugend-in-deutschland-pessimismus-zukunftsangst.html

via Google Translate:

According to a study, adolescents and young adults are more dissatisfied and are turning more towards the AfD than in previous comparative studies. 22 percent of the 14- to 29-year-olds surveyed would vote for the AfD if there were a federal election now. That is more than twice as many as two years ago, according to a representative survey presented on Tuesday for the study "Youth in Germany 2024". In 2022, nine percent voted for the AfD, compared to twelve percent last year.

For most of its life, the AfD party was previously associated with square, middle-aged, clearly uncool xenophobes.

The parallels between this and the alt-right in the US around the early Trump era are noticeable. It appeared that the youth of America was so tired of cringe progressivism that their parents were into that the alt-right acted as a kind of new punk, though in the US the alt-right evaporated fairly quickly after Trump was elected.

In Germany in 2024, aligning with nationalism may be analogous to a kind of new punk that will definitely freak out your parents and set you apart from the older lamer generations. Can this translate into a revolution? As above, being the most popular party among young people in Germany doesn't say much because young people are not the biggest voting bloc, and unlike in the US there are many more political parties.

Still, this is probably going to stump historians of techno for years to come. (Or not! Since my hipster club link is fake. The other one with the preppies is probably real though)

For the PMC-leftist commentariat on Twitter this has been a wonderful event, because they could finally demonstrate that, yes, rich and pampered kids are right-wing. When in reality, in Europe, the most important predictor for left-wing vote is wealth, the richer you are, the more on the left you are.

When in reality, in Europe, the most important predictor for left-wing vote is wealth, the richer you are, the more on the left you are.

Doesn't seem so according to this, for Germany. AfD voters tend to be low-income, but so are Linke and SPD voters.

Urban vs suburban/rural is the major predictor in Europe. This accounts, in real terms, for many sub-factors like ethnic background, religion or lack thereof, age, wealth, student status, political signalling etc.

Yes, I live in a generic left wing European city, but a few miles outside are villages where politics tends to vary from the Christian Democrats to the far right.

Some places like Poland are different, in that rural areas tend to be both more right wing and poorer, which is reflected in how Polish politics is divided more on social than economic grounds.