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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   2131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Foreign Nationals are allowed to vote? Something feels quite wrong to lose the ability to control the destiny of your people in such a short time period.

It’s amazing how far many of us have gone since only 20 years ago and believing we could Democratize the world to now I would not consider myself a believer of Democracy in Germany because of the simply fact that ethnic Germans in half a generation lost the ability to control their own politics.

Correct me if I’m wrong but these migration background voters are mostly German citizens. That may be a bad idea but the law probably says ‘citizen of Germany’ not ‘person with light enough skin’.

That’s nice, but they didn’t lose that ability.

Ethnic Germans still have majorities (almost?) everywhere. They are choosing not to vote as a bloc. I think this is a good thing; coalition governments are more accountable than one-party states. Note that naturalized citizens apparently aren’t voting as a bloc either. They’re just much less likely to go AfD.

We will disagree on it being “a good thing”. But what is significant is it’s not a mean reverting situation with this level of migration. Ethnic German vote share could surge to 80% AFD in a decade or two but the non-German population would vote anything but AFD and block any reform. As the share of ethnic German vote shares shrinks it becomes harder to correct policy. There is not corrective measure outside of basically a military dictatorship.

Sir, the goalposts are back there.

quite wrong to lose the ability to control the destiny of your people

They have not lost it. They are choosing—of their own free will!—policies which might give it up. Why do you think that is?

More importantly, why do you think they need to “correct” it? If you’re trying to give them “control of their destiny,” maybe a military dictatorship is a complete nonstarter.

Why do you think that is?

Civilizational guilt, mostly.

And the strange, grossly arrogant way Western "liberals" think that their culture is water and they no longer need to defend anything they care about.

I’m lost to your point.

Obviously it is harder to have anti-immigration policies in a Democracy when you have a large foreign ethnic block. They will vote against you.

I do agree it’s largely an own goal at this point. But policy errors do happen and my point is when you change who votes it now becomes harder to correct a policy mistake.

I’m lost to your point.

Many Germans are happy to vote for replacement.

Naturalized citizens and their citizen descendants can vote, including those who still hold citizenship in their home countries. As those numbers increase, the AfD will have a harder and harder time gaining traction. Not that it really matters in Berlin. The city is so left-wing, they passed a non-binding referendum five years ago to seize thousands of apartment buildings from their corporate owners, compensate them at less than market rates, and then convert the buildings to social housing projects. Now that the CDU is out, there’s a good chance the new government will try to pass a binding referendum to the same effect.

Foreign Nationals are allowed to vote?

No they aren't? Although Germany's state-funded propaganda outlet wrote an article last year about how hopelessly unfair it is that almost 60% of immigrants are not allowed to vote (because they aren't citizens of Germany), even they conclude that that's unlikely to change any time soon.

One exception is that EU citizens who live in Berlin can vote in city council elections, per https://voteberlin.eu/en/who-is-eligible-to-vote-in-the-bvv-elections/

Berlin is a city-state, so "Berlin city council" has the powers of a state government - this is a case where EU law (which allows EU citizens to vote in "municipal" elections wherever in the EU they live even if they are not a citizen of the relevant country) gives non-German EU citizens more power than the EU intended.

I don't actually know much about the German government, so "city council" might have been the wrong term. On the website I linked it's called a "BVV", which Wikipedia describes as an "assembly of borough representatives". Each BVV administers one of the twelve districts in Berlin, and it seems to be a separate thing from the Berlin House of Representatives that acts as the state government.

It’s amazing how far many of us have gone since only 20 years ago and believing we could Democratize the world to now I would not consider myself a believer of Democracy in Germany because of the simply fact that ethnic Germans in half a generation lost the ability to control their own politics.

My thoughts as well. Sweden is also in this situation and several others are rushing headlong into it.

I've been trying for a while to think of any mistakes nations have made of the same magnitude, throughout history. Vortigern hiring the Saxons might be an instructive one.

It's so weird to me, though fitting in retrospect, that sanctimonious grundyism is what's finally killing Europe. Old ladies tutting reproachfully at anyone who makes non-socially-approved arguments turns out to be an existential threat. Or perhaps it's just that the men have forgotten God and their own right place in the world.

I can think of a couple from Germany.

Old ladies tutting reproachfully at anyone who makes non-socially-approved arguments turns out to be an existential threat.

I am also often stunned by the power of consensus in a variety of fields but don't they also just arrest you for wrongspeech over there? It's not like it's a fair playing field.

I've been trying for a while to think of any mistakes nations have made of the same magnitude, throughout history.

The Soviets walking out of the UN and this allowing the West to fight the Korean War.

All time great.

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