The following commentary is based on a text that appeared originally in German in Junge Freiheit. An English translation of the interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen in Die Weltwoche has been posted separately today in TelosScope, here.
The interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen documents his reactions toward the charge of anti-Semitism against him by several German media outlets in the last few weeks since he announced his candidacy for the German Bundestag. The controversy has revealed more about the deterioration of the German media landscape than about Maaßen’s own views and character. Spurred on by a charge against him of racism and anti-Semitism by climate activist Luisa Neubauer on ARD’s political talk show Anna Will, media outlets scoured Maaßen’s writings with the hope of giving their accusations some substance. The dearth of the evidence against him led them in the end to an article that he published with Johannes Eisleben in English in TelosScope. But rather than engaging with the specific arguments of the article, the commentators have engaged in a kind of witch hunt. A recent taz article recruited two academics, Volker Weiß and Matthias Quent, to conduct an analysis. They argue that the text is an example of right-wing extremism because it uses phrases such as “globalists,” “a small elite,” and “the concentration of global property and profits in the hands of a few thousand families preparing to own everything,” which function as “dog whistle” signals, in which hidden messages are sent out to anti-Semites or right-wing extremists. As an article in Die Welt points out, however, such phrases have also been used by left-wing critics of globalization, particularly during the Occupy movement, and no one has disputed the idea that the world has recently seen a growing concentration of global wealth.
The attempt to brand Maaßen and Eisleben as anti-Semitic and extremist in fact carries out precisely the kind of move toward a policing of the public sphere that was the main point of their TelosScope essay. Maaßen and Eisleben defend “open democratic societies and the rule of law” against a set of strategies for censoring public discourse that are familiar from totalitarian regimes. Rather than addressing opposing arguments with facts and counterarguments, commentators have attempted to limit public debate by demonizing as racist or anti-Semitic those perspectives that do not conform to an identity-political and anti-nationalist agenda. Yet Maaßen’s opposition to identity politics and his affirmation of the importance of a common culture for the stability of a democratic society are in fact very compatible with a perspective that promotes diversity and equality, opposes racism, and supports human rights. The common culture that Maaßen and Eisleben imagine is not some kind of white supremacist league. Rather, they state clearly that their goal is to promote “a stable public sphere, democratic participation and representation, decent, non-dichotomic ownership structures, and international trade.” Rather than vilify them, those who disagree should recognize that they share common goals and discuss the wisdom of different strategies for achieving those goals. The unwillingness to engage in this type of discussion is a sign of the very deterioration of public debate that Maaßen and Eisleben lament. When Neubauer uses the charge of anti-Semitism as a way of excluding Maaßen from participation in the public sphere, she demonstrates how identity politics are directly responsible for a creeping suppression of dissent. Once the population is split up into separate groups that are defined by their belonging to racial, ethnic, or religious affiliations, the charge of racist, anti-Semite, and Islamophobe suffices to shut down debate and relegate the alleged offender to the margins of an “alt-right” underworld.
Unfortunately, Telos has been caught up in this attempt at vilification, with the taz referring to Telos as a journal of the “alt-right,” even as Die Welt links the journal to the New Left, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung describes its engagement with a variety of intellectual positions including both the neo-Marxist positions represented by the Frankfurt School and conservative ideas developed by Carl Schmitt. Telos has always pursued an argument-oriented editorial policy that Maaßen sums up well in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “For me it is the arguments that count, not the person. Even the most evil person can have good arguments.” This stance allows Maaßen and Eisleben to maintain their commitment to a common culture that would include a diversity of perspectives and mutual respect, and they defend the right of all citizens to participate equally in public debate without fear of reprisal or social exclusion. In light of their solid defense of liberal norms, the current attempts to “cancel” Maaßen, not with arguments but by alleging personal relationships with suspicious figures or media outlets, should alert us to the stakes of the current controversy.
Commentators have been particularly disturbed by Maaßen and Eisleben’s argument that “judges, college teachers, politicians, media editors, and managers of big corporations” have been complicit in allowing the decline of free speech, while the defense of the rule of law against repression depends on the maintenance of “family and local cohesion” as well as “traditions and national cultures.” Yet these ideas should not be controversial, as they echo Hannah Arendt’s arguments in Origins of Totalitarianism that “highly cultured people were particularly attracted to mass movements” (316) and that the totalitarian movements depended on “the specific conditions of an atomized and individualistic mass” (318). Like Maaßen and Eisleben, Arendt argues that the nation-state “always had represented and been based upon the rule of law as against the rule of arbitrary administration and despotism” (275), and she clearly defends the stabilizing structures of the nation-state against the dangers of pan-German and pan-Slavic “tribal nationalism,” which was arguably the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical precedent for today’s transnational identity politics. Neither Arendt nor Maaßen and Eisleben have the last word on the origins of totalitarianism, but their arguments must certainly be taken seriously, rather than dismissed as outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.
Maaßen has articulated a legitimate conservative argument about the importance of both family structures and national culture as crucial for the preservation of the rule of law and democratic structures. To push his views into a shadowy right-wing extremist underworld would only further confuse issues in a situation in which it has become more and more important to achieve clarity about the current threats to liberal democratic values.
Work Cited
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd enl. ed. (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1958).
