How the European "far"-Right is More Socialistic Than Zohran Mamdani

To what side of our fatuous and entirely worn-out American political spectrum do the following reactionary positions fall: anti-European Union, anti-Deep State (neé National Security State), anti-globalization, anti-Nato? The fortunes of this piece bank themselves on the bet that American reflexes work and the medical hammer produces the involuntary jerk of the knee: “Right wing.” Very good, all is in working order.

But it would be tiresomely derelict not to acknowledge that these stances were actually first conceived and nurtured by the far-Left of the mid- and late-20th century against Right-wing opposition, and I shan’t let another piece pass through my hands without doing just that. Progressives such as Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky literally wrote the books on the illegalities of the National Security State, domestic and abroad. Chomsky was so opposed to globalization that he nearly brought himself to defend the genocidal Serbian Milosevic regime as the socialist victims of global neoliberalism. The EU and Nato were not always gazed upon with bended Left-wing knee as they are today but once critiqued as creations of Cold-War imperial hegemony designed to keep the West in constant conflict with Russia, our secret military budgets astronomical, and Europe a vassal state to the American empire. It is only the lobotomizing force of what Gore Vidal termed “American amnesia” that has brought us to a contemptible present where the Right-wing lays claim to these positions as their intellectual property and most of the Left assails them as Trumpian, autocratic and, most farcically, Right-wing.

This autumn has been pregnant with just such political incoherence, only with a new European spin: On 29 October Naomi Seibt, an anti-immigration journalist and supporter of German political party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), announced her application for political asylum in the United States due to death threats from German Antifa and surveillance by the German government, both confirmed to me. (Labelled an “extremist” organization by the German government, surveillance of AfD and its affiliates is legal and oft-practiced in Germany. The US also spies on its own political parties, but imagine a willful public disclosure of this – President Richard Nixon resigned for less). In the midst of a national Right-wing tantrum about the “Communist” policies of New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, US Representative Anna Paulina Luna personally saw to Seibt’s asylum application, declaring that so too was Seibt under attack in her homeland by “Communists.” Here commences nomenclatorial inanity: the AfD and its welfare sister parties of the European “far-Right” are as far left or further to the left economically than the supposed “Communist” boogeymen of America.

It would be cloying to say that the AfD, zealously supported by American Right-wing figures like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, is a controversial party in Europe. They’ve been likened to “Nazis” by the international media for their extreme positions on the remigration of non-German born residents of their state (and even some German-born), as well as their openness to removing Germany from the EU if it can’t be restructured to weaken its centralization. But it would also be a solecism of the highest insult to language to describe, say, AfD’s economic platform as anything approaching “far-Right,” as far as it is defined in American terms of re-privatizing healthcare and dissolving an already weak welfare system. To borrow the hyperbolics of American patois, one might even describe AfD economics as “communist,” or dare I coin it, “Mamdanian.”

I admit, this will only work if we employ the archaic practice of defining socialism as socialism. That is, defining it solely on material outcomes afforded citizens via economic redistribution. This requires leaving aside modern cultural-economic attitudes toward climate change (which Bill Gates is now pumping the breaks on) and open borders (recently decried by Bernie Sanders in the correct measure), two phenomena that have been conflated into socialism by groups like the DSA despite being anachronistic and arbitrary to its definition. But how else besides socialist do we define a political party such as the AfD which supports free education through college; universal non-profit healthcare with strict regulations on prices and out of pocket expenses rendering it more effective at half the cost of the American system; heavily subsidized childcare, child-rearing wages, cash allowances and generous tax breaks for families, stay at home parents and caretakers of relatives; unemployment insurance up to two years and basic income support which grants a monthly allowance in perpetuity to adults whose income falls below a certain threshold? Does any of this sound remotely American, let alone kin to a Trump Administration that tried to repeal the unaffordable Affordable Care Act from the right, and is kneecapping America’s comparatively woeful welfare programs of Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP and EBT as we speak?

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In comparison to AfD’s socialist economics, newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposals to freeze rent hikes on already rent-stabilized apartments and create a handful of city-owned co-op supermarkets look downright paltry. His version of “Communism” is pat ball and pastiche. Things get even more socialistic if one were to incorporate the economic platform of AfD’s Dutch sister party FvD (Forum for Democracy), with its housing subsidies, wealth taxes and even stronger, wider social safety nets. The Dutch “far-right” are so inherently redistributive that their platform offers to pay immigrants 50,000 EURO to leave the Netherlands and renounce their citizenship. For in Europe, true democratic-socialism is so longstanding and successful that it has become a conservative position held even by opposition parties. If instituted in America, AfD or FVD’s economics would usher in a revolution the likes of which we’ve never seen. And you can guarantee it would be fought tooth and nail by the same conservatives who support AfD by day and have Mamdani meltdowns on Twitter by night.

The American mind is imperial and solipsistic. It is wont to see the rest of the world through the lens of its own culture war and political definitions. For instance, Left-wing colleges brandish sophomoric seniors who can see foreign human rights struggles only through the prism of politics that do not exist in the countries they stand in solidarity with; hence “Queers for Palestine” march alongside Hamas flags and the whole worthy cause flounders in not undeserved ridicule. Whereas the Right boasts blinkered figures like Alex Jones who, a day after bringing Seibt on to his show to champion the AfD and advocate for her as asylee, hosted high priest of ignoramuses Gavin McInnes to warn against Mamdani’s incoming “Communist Caliphate” without detecting the slightest economic consonance. The economic similarities between an AfD and an AOC are, to the bipartisan American tunnel vision, undetectable. Yet both AOC and AfD believe in universal healthcare, free higher education and vocational training, minimum income guarantees, free childcare, and state regulations of the economy.

It is true that the Trump Administration and the AfD and her sister parties in Europe are in lockstep on closed borders and disdain of multiculturalism – which has emerged with the subtlety of an Overton Window as the new dividing line between the left and the right. However, even here they are out of step with one another. Unlike America, European countries were not founded on mass immigration and its de facto multiculturalism. Germans, for instance, are indigenous to their land, unlike all non-Native American Americans. The recent massive influx of immigrant refugees have come from, in no small part, the destabilizing wars of America’s National Security State, and immigrants’ presence and entitlement to democratic-socialist benefits has put a profound strain on many of vassal Europe’s welfare systems, fostering a class war between young native-born citizens being passed over by non-citizens for priority subsidy, housing and other types of anti-American Euro perks. (This is why Bernie Sanders has been unequivocal in his criticism of Joe Biden’s open border policy, and the capitalistic exploitation of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages, weaken worker benefits and promote class war.) “Because asylum seekers receive benefits, free healthcare and free housing, the costs of immigration are enormous, estimated to be 27 billion a year,” Massimo Etalle tells me, FVD International Affairs Coordinator and City Council Member of The Hague. As a vassal state of America, Europe is obliged to take these immigrants in. But as conservative socialists, the removal of non-citizens from entitlements is, in the strict economic sense, socialistically protective of the welfare and pension benefits of Europe’s labourers. “Protecting workers, one-hundred percent that’s the idea behind it,” Seibt told me of AfD’s stance on immigration.

In ignoring this, the modern Leftist relinquishes the coherent socialistic economic critique to “the Right.” Things get worse when one considers attitudes toward free speech. Bernie Sanders referred to AfD last year as “authoritarians,” but neglected to critique Germany’s own authoritarian defamation laws targeting political dissent. Specifically Section 188 of the German legal code which renders anything the government classifies as “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life” subject to fine and imprisonment. (I want the American left to imagine here what someone like Trump would do with such a power in the United States.) This anti-democratic law was recently visited upon editor-in-chief of AfD-affiliated Deutschland Kurier David Bendels, sentenced by the German government to seven-months probation for posting a meme of a German politician holding a sign that read, “I hate freedom of opinion.”

I asked Heidi Reichinnek, Leader of the Die Linke (the Left) party in the lower house of the German parliament, about this speech law, and whether the German left would pursue free speech protections equivalent to America’s First Amendment after a talk she co-hosted on November 14^th in Manhattan. “Of course if you propagate hate speech or you insight violence or you call to arms or call for violence against people, then of course the law will persecute you,” she told me. I recalled to her attention that Bendels’ meme had not incited violence, and mentioned the case of Aron Pielka, who was sentenced to a year in prison for making a video of himself burning a piece of bacon on top of a Koran. A tall mustachioed German man in a crushed velvet suit, whom I presumed to be Reichinnek’s handler, informed me that the protection Germans don’t provide for speech is denying the Holocaust. (As an American, I am by nature perturbed by mustachioed Germans in chic suits, but relied on my journalistic mettle to carry me through.) I reiterated that neither of these cases made any mention or adjacent association with the Holocaust, nor incitements to violence. The two assured me that free speech and censorship were not problems in Germany, and the unidentified German man intervened to cut the interview short.

“The first thing that needs to be done is to completely eliminate Section 188 where politicians get special protection, and Verfassungsschutz,” Seibt tells me. Verfassungsschutz, which Reichinnek insisted she was not aware of, is the policy that allows German intelligence to surveil and intercept private communications of citizens it classifies as “extremist” or affiliated with extremist groups, which Seibt has been a confirmed victim of and is why she’s applying for asylym. With AfD polling at 30% approval in Germany and growing, that’s potentially a lot of citizens. This has left the only vocal parties in Europe calling for First Amendment equivalent legal protections and the abolition of surveillance those labeled as “Nazis” by American leftists who already enjoy the amendment’s protection. And defamed by their own compatriots: in Reichinnek’s talk at the Verso offices, she quipped that the Germans voting for the AfD are all “literally Nazis.”

Is this where the left wants to be? Not just on the wrong side of free speech, but gifting the sole and justified advocacy for it in the hands of “Nazis?” The criminalization of free speech is not just bad in principle but is bad as political stratagem: not only does one add weight to the rod being fashioned for one’s own back, but one also grants the allure of apostasy to the censored and penalized, and the apostate begins to be identified by a democratic public with the purity of the democratic principle, no matter how anti-democratic their political intentions may be.

But this is the physics of reactionary politics, when a politic does not define itself from stationary principle but from reactionary inversions of an opponent’s platform. Soon all political definition is lost, amnesia sets in to cover the attenuation of political identity, and people begin to think it’s left wing to criminalize free speech and right wing to protect welfare benefits, all the while Trump fawns over “Communist” Mamdani in the White House. “Left” and “right” do not make sense anymore. Our “political spectrum” is not but a geological boundary line marking the dramaturgy of a now extinct political age, and the continued use of these binary categories only impedes reasonable discussion and clear thought. At any rate it’s a bad state of affairs, or perhaps simply the end state of affairs, when Bernie Sanders and Alex Jones can’t recognize socialism anymore – not that Jones was ever particularly good at it to begin with.