Risk More Dictatorship

This essay was published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on February 9, 2021, and appears here in translation with permission of the author. Footnotes have been added for clarification. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here. The author intends the title as an ironic reference to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s 1969 statement that Germany “must risk more democracy.”

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The corona crisis remains an experience of helplessness, even though infection rates are falling. Despite all the limitations on everyday life and despite the start of the vaccinations, an end to the restrictions is nowhere in sight—even though a few countries have succeeded in stopping the virus. The feeling of helplessness in the face of corona is due to the fact that we have had to surmount the corona crisis with the tools of democracy.

Sigmund Freud spoke of “three blows to humanity”:^[1] first, the Copernican worldview that pushed us out of the center of the universe; second, Darwinism, according to which we did not descend from God but from monkeys; and third, psychoanalysis, which teaches that we are not self-determined but only act due to hidden, unconscious, and instinctual motivations. Now we can speak of three blows to democracy, although it was only thirty years ago when liberal self-consciousness stood at its high point. According to the popular thesis of an “end of history,” market economies and democracy had achieved such an indisputable victory that nothing would stop their spread around the world.

This conviction was shaken first by the Chinese economic miracle that disproved the common claim that democracy and market economy go together naturally. Market economy in the one-party-state has achieved excellent growth rates, prosperity, and outstanding technological accomplishments, whether in architecture, space travel, or AI. The second blow to democracy involves Trump and Brexit; the experiences of 2016–2020 revealed a vulnerability to demagoguery. The problem with Trump was not only that someone like him could win elections but also how little resistance he faced as that embarrassing president trampled through the office, without being thrown out of the White House or blocked by the so widely praised “checks and balances.” Even his electoral defeat was no glory hour of democracy—it was a long cliffhanger. Brexit in contrast turned democracy into a caricature: after a plebiscite with about a fifty-fifty result, the representatives of the smarter half knuckled under to the dumber, only negligibly larger half, turning their timidity euphemistically into “respect for the democratic decision.” The third wound for democrats has become apparent during the corona crisis, in the inability of democracy to open the toolbox needed for a successful response to the pandemic.

To be sure, there are some democracies that have mastered the pandemic—for example, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and South Korea, but these are states that are islands or nearly so, which from the standpoint of the spread of the disease distorts any comparisons. And unfortunately there is an example of another country—China, again—with an authoritarian character that dispensed with the virus rapidly, promptly ending the second wave.

Is this “impotence of democracy” an endemic flaw, or can democracy too use the full toolkit to do battle against the pandemic? Of course, any effective response to the pandemic must draw on the best research. But a democratic response to the pandemic has to rely on a majority, establish a consensus, and find compromises. All that is foreign to science. In the early days of relativity theory, when Albert Einstein was confronted with a book One Hundred Authors against Einstein, he is reported to have responded: “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”

How to respond to corona belongs to science and only to science. Consider a thought experiment: assume there is a virus that is as extraordinarily infectious as the coronavirus but as fatal as rabies. An infection would mean certain death. In that case, it would be pure suicide to subordinate the recommendations of science to majorities, compromises, and consensus formations. Such is the experiment, and now back to reality in which the coronavirus is not killing everyone who is infected but only about one out of thirty. This situation suggests that we have some latitude. However: at what threshold should science take over? If every second patient dies? Or one out of ten? The answer: as soon as the situation becomes serious. And if each day people are dying in numbers comparable to an airplane crash, then the situation is serious indeed.^[2]

The weak spot in our system is evident in the lack of agility and the inability to adopt the necessary measures. Political debate is decoupled from science; all too often politicians ask “what” they can impose on the people or “how long one can expect people to accept it.” As if that were what is at stake. A virus is out of control, a virus that is open neither to negotiations nor to persuasion, nor even to intimidation. If we want to get rid of the virus, we are forced to take certain measures. Thanks to science, we know which measures are necessary; we even know what price we will have to pay if we fail to take them. Of course one can polemicize against them and protest them, as prognoses can be arbitrarily exaggerated or minimized. But the events are dominated by one actor alone, to whom none of that matters.

“Risk more dictatorship!” should be the order of the day. The fact that it is precisely the corona-deniers who project a “corona-dictatorship” should be reason enough to pursue one. The deniers are incapable of gauging the danger of the virus, but they do have a sense of how we might overcome it. If the virus is banished (how quickly that can happen has been made clear by South Korea and Singapore), we can return to our beloved normalcy. That the pandemic has placed us in an abnormal situation^[3] should be taken literally. The normal situation remains democracy, with its freedoms and basic rights.

In their understandable eagerness to construct a bulwark against any repetition of the Nazi dictatorship, the “fathers of our Basic Law”^[4] forgot that the exercise of basic rights during a plague can pose a threat for the whole population. Of course, the protection of life must be given priority—what else? The proportionality of the measures depends on the question of their effectiveness: ineffective measures should be neither adopted nor implemented. That sounds banal, and it is—but a glance at reality shows that ineffective measures (such as the prohibition of fireworks^[5] or the 15-kilometer rule for counties at the 200 incidence rate^[6]) have been implemented, while in contrast the very valuable focusing of the Corona app is playing no role in the political debate. While a mandatory use of the app is openly discussed and even demanded by scientists and society at large, no elected representatives want to touch the sensitive topic of data privacy. Even Karl Lauterbach, otherwise inclined to support any punitive measure, would rather support banning fireworks rather than an app unfettered from the restrictions of data protection laws.^[7]

COVID-19 is sufficiently dramatic to dominate the news for months—but not dramatic enough for us to abandon convictions that stand in the way of the steps that should be taken. If we could do that, COVID-19 would already be behind us. The recipes are known.

For the sake of its own legitimacy, democracy should not take its own rituals and tediousness so seriously. Nothing will damage it more than the suspicion that it is only concerned with itself rather with finding solutions for today’s problems better than other forms of government. Corona is electrifying everyone; the virus has unleashed a learning process and a willingness to rethink supposed certainties. It would be fatal if the lesson turned out to be the third wound to democracy: that democracies can’t get it right.

German novelist Thomas Brussig, born in 1964, grew up in East Germany. His Helden wie Wir (1995) appeared in English as Heroes Like Us. The title of this article echoes a famous phrase from a speech of October 28, 1969, by the then new Chancellor Willy Brandt, “Risk more democracy,” here at 4:21.

Notes

1. In “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis” (1917); see also Simon Glendinning, “The End of the World Designed with Men in Mind,” TelosScope, January 7, 2013.

2. The Minister President of Bavaria, Markus Söder, reportedly stated at a meeting with Chancellor Merkel and the other sixteen Minister Presidents of Germany’s state governments, “We have no time to lose. The fatality numbers are now as high as if we had an airplane crash everyday.”

3. In the German original, Brussig uses the term Ausnahmezustand, normally translated as “state of exception,” a term with specific legal and political-theoretical implications. The issue approaches what in American usage is termed a “state of emergency.” Yet while in the United States a declaration of a state of emergency is typically associated with responses to natural disasters, an Ausnahmezustand or state of exception in the German context brings up the history of the Weimar Republic where Article 48 of the constitution allowed the president to suspend the regular legal order in order to take necessary measures to restore public security. Usage of Article 48 is seen as having undermined Weimar democracy, paving the way for Hitler. “State of Exception” also figures prominently in the work of political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Yet in a communication with this translator, Brussig indicated that he did not intend to invoke the political connotations of the term but only to describe the current situation as abnormal and therefore exceptional. The matter is worth addressing because in the online publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a “teaser” sentence foregrounds the term Ausnahmezustand, which then steered the public reception. For Brussig, there is a difference between his descriptive designation of extraordinary conditions—the pandemic—and any formal legal or constitutional-theoretical meaning of a “state of exception.”

4. The “Basic Law,” the Grundgesetz, is the German equivalent of a constitution, the foundational document of the Federal Republic of Germany, approved on May 8, 1949.

5. German New Year’s celebrations often include fireworks, launched by private households (in contrast for example to large municipal fireworks displays). This year the sale of fireworks was prohibited, with some differences among the various states, in order to discourage group celebration gatherings as a preventive measure against the spread of the virus.

6. At stake is the regulation that when a county determines that the “incidence rate,” i.e., new infections per 100,000 over a seven-day period, exceeds 200, residents are prohibited from traveling further than 15 kilometers outside the county for the purposes of sport or other recreation. Travel for many other purposes (shopping, medical, family visits) is allowed. Travel into such areas is not formally restricted but discouraged, and separate regulations have limited private visits to one person at a time not belonging to the immediate household.

7. Karl Lauterbach, a German scientist with a focus on epidemiology and public health, has served as a Social-Democratic Member of the Bundestag since 2005.