The Good Column: The right leg forward, that’s the whole trick!

If you ask young people which party is “right” and which is “left” and what that even means, you often see perplexed faces. You can sort of tell Instagram and Tiktok apart and know where to find the nearest power outlet. That has to be enough for life in the 21st century. Nothing more is needed. Well, let’s say: maybe a fake “Givenchy” sweatshirt, a pair of sneakers and a Wehrmacht soldier’s hairstyle, which for some reason is popular among many male adolescents these days.

But “left”, “right”? “Civilization,” “barbarism,” “liberal,” “reactionary,” “libertarian,” “authoritarian”? What should they do with it? These are difficult foreign words. You should read something. Who has time for that, Digger? You’re chilling and Shmooven busy. But can you blame inexperienced young people? No. After all, many of them are victims of capitalism. Reading and thinking are not their greatest strengths: never tried, unlearned, forgotten, missed.

The result is a form of misery management that has become more intensified and radicalized year after year, which doesn’t go nearly far enough for the right-wingers and neo-Nazis, but which they will nevertheless complain about until they can take over the place.

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In addition, politics is concentrated boredom, which is pure poison for a youth filled with hormones and full of energy. And the difference between AfD, CDU, Greens and SPD is roughly the same as that between Primark, Kik, C&A and H&M. Blue/brown, black, green, red. A meaningless colorful dance of colors. As soon as he appears at the edge of the field of vision, he has already disappeared again. It is similar with the politics of the parties: one moment you thought you had identified something like a trace of content, and now it has been lost in an impenetrable mass of endlessly perpetuating, meaningless political nonsense.

But I’m not sure whether, for the sake of a better future, young people in particular would not benefit from a minimum of right-left orientation. But how to explain? The right-wing extremists are homophobic, ethnic and racist, while their leader is a lesbian and married to a Swiss woman from Sri Lanka. The current statements of the “economically liberal-conservative” CDU leader Friedrich Merz sound as if he is the chairman of the xenophobic platform in the AfD. According to the media, Robert Habeck, a “left-wing liberal” Green, speaks as if he were the German employers’ president.

Incidentally, the same media describes people who have to hold on to their right arm with considerable effort when the word “German” is heard as “bourgeois” and “national conservatives”. And the “social democratic” Scholzomat makes his tried and tested Scholzomat face while he implores the German national community: “Especially in these difficult times, our country needs more cohesion and less discord.” Or: “Our country has the strength to overcome this crisis and is stronger to emerge from it.” Or: “Rucki-Zucki, Rucki-Zucki, that’s the latest dance.” (I admit: I put the last quote in his mouth.)

In fact, there is the so-called political landscape “from left to right”, in which the supposed left-green scumbags have been doing the business of the political right with zeal for decades, the right in turn has been doing the business of the right-wing extremists and the right-wing extremists are happy about all of this like Bolle (now everyone Together they claim like a prayer wheel that they are making a “policy for the middle”), a picture that makes you tilt your head so far to the right that the audience thinks you are a contortionist.

The good column

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Thomas Blum fundamentally disagrees with the prevailing so-called reality. He won’t be able to change her for the time being, but he can reprimand her, admonish her or, if necessary, give her a beating. So that the bad begins to retreat. We stand in solidarity with his fight against reality. Therefore, from now on, “The Good Column” will appear here on Mondays. Only the best quality for the best readers! The collected texts can be found at: dasnd.de/diegute

You are dealing with a shift to the right that is taking place in a kind of endless loop: the politics of those who were previously described as “conservative”, i.e. the tie-wearing milieu that was “entrepreneur-friendly”, came and went in and out of the Siemens and VW executive suites (and there “set the course for the economic future of our country,” as the saying goes, haha) is being done today by the Social Democrats and the Greens. The result is a form of misery management that has become more intensified and radicalized year after year, which does not go far enough for the right-wingers and neo-Nazis, but which they will nevertheless complain about until they can take over the place, and finally – accompanied by all sorts of new ones imaginative atrocities that we currently have no idea about – to sell their variant of intensified misery management as “modern bourgeois politics”.

In any case, what is certain is that the entire political culture of the Federal Republic could be easily explained to young people who cannot understand the political terms left and right with Ernst Neger’s 50-year-old song “Rucki-Zucki”: “The left leg in front / And back again / The right leg in front / That’s the whole trick / We dance in a jiffy / And turn around as we go / The game isn’t stupid / In a jiffy / In a jiffy / In a jiffy / That’s it latest dance.«

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