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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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So... big win for AfD last night: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4zejgz3z9o. How important is this?

Since I'm not one to closely follow European politics, at first I thought this meant that they had won control of the entire national parliament. But then I noticed that, no, it's just one state election, and they're still short of a majority. In every other state, they have far less support, and every other party is still maintaining a rule to never work with them, so the AfD is still effectively shut out of power everywhere.

I suppose it's another sign of their trajectory, though. They seem to win more and more votes in every election. I remember when, not long ago, they were an extreme minority fringe party. Now they get enough votes that it's difficult for the other parties to form a coalition without them.

Is this a sign that the people of Germany are secretly longing to Nazi again? I doubt it. They seem to still be, on the whole, an extremely leftist-liberal nation. Pro-immigration, pro-welfare, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, and anti-nuke. So I wonder how much this surge in support for AfD is driven by immigration, or how much of it is just them being the only real conservative party that gives voters an alternative to the status quo?

I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves, since for now they're still just a protest vote. Not to mention how they'd have to figure out their policy on every single other policy issue. It's easy to make big promises when you have no actual power to deliver on them.

But I don't know! Maybe I'm wrong. I really don't know much about German politics, I just saw this and I thought it was interesting. Anyone else have thoughts?

I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves

Trump has made me very fatalistic about this. The two options seem to be the following:

  1. Elect politicians who are competent at pushing forward political changes, but then they tend to be liberals at heart or at least very concerned about getting re-elected, so they do nothingburger changes.
  2. Elect politicians who are aggressively anti-immigration, but these are almost always scoundrels who put the optics of satisfying their base over actual productive changes, like Trump sending ICE goon squads to Minnesota where the story quickly became that they were gunning down random civilians. Then the national mood swings against aggressive immigration enforcement as the anti-immigration side pisses away their political capital.

Some of the issues with the right never doing anything I think comes down to the US believing in Adam Smiths invisible hand and not state power.

The US administration has lowered foreign born population by a few million people for the first time in I believe a century we have had a decline.

For a system that believes in the private sector this is still impressive. It’s much easier for an activists to go to let’s say George Soros and raise a few billion dollars to start a ngo that operates in Central America to abuse immigration loopholes to get people in than it is for the federal government to deport millions. You can’t go to the Koch Brothers and raise a few billion to deport people privately for various reasons. Even ardent anti-immigrationists would see giving the Feds the power to check papers and deport on site as an evil infringement on their own rights though potentially a necessary evil.

I seriously doubt how much the private sector could enforce immigration restrictions. Many of the loopholes that get abused when D's are in power are explicitly written into the legal code as statutes. The solution is to overwrite them!

It’s really tough to write legislation that can’t be interpreted in a way that creates loopholes. I feel like you need something else to keep things like asylum from being abused. Especially since you kind of want asylum law to be broad enough to be useful in an emergency.

It’s really tough to write legislation that can’t be interpreted in a way that creates loopholes.

I would just not allow asylum except from select European countries.

It's meant to help friends, not enemies.

Only allowing asylum from countries we're friends with doesn't really make much sense. How could we be a European country's friends if, at the same time, we were recognizing that they were persecuting their own citizens, and taking the persecuted citizens' side? I agree that asylum should generally not be applied to people who are themselves our enemies individually, but the obvious use-case is defectors from enemy nations - it's Muslim apostates, it's politically-dissident Chinese. Granting asylum to the denizens of an ally only makes sense in the case of a Ukraine-style war and I don't think that's the central case for an asylum-seeker, those are black-swan events.

Granting asylum to the denizens of an ally only makes sense in the case of a Ukraine-style war and I don't think that's the central case for an asylum-seeker, those are black-swan events.

You have successfully divined the point. I don't want to help the vast majority of current asylum claimants. A tyrannical dictator or a massive catastrophe are rare, valid events that I want to help. Living standards in Pashtun being shit (because of all the Pashtuns) or interminable ethnoreligious sand wars (a product of the backwards people and religions there) are not.

I do not want to help Africans or Arabs or Bomalians or Gomalians. Not in any way that involves bringing them here, at least.

You have successfully divined the point

By "the central case for an asylum-seeker" I didn't mean "the median person seeking asylum today" - who, to be clear, I agree should not be claiming asylum - I meant "the central case for the platonic ideal of asylum". That is, I think asylum should typically apply to individuals, not broad demographics. A catastrophe or war that leaves tens of thousands of people needing help, I think that's very abnormal, and specific decrees can be made when the situation arises. The archetypal asylum-seeker should be some anti-establishment journalist facing purging or assassination in Russia or China; some prominent Muslim-born thinker who gets a fatwa declared against him; etc. People, in other words, whose personal commitment to western-style values puts them at risk in hostile illiberal nations.

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