The question of whether you can discuss conservatism for hours or not at all remains unanswered even after this broadcast – which apparently is mainly due to the fact that you have to look for a long time for people who can fill the term with content and unfortunately you couldn’t find them this time . Not in the editorial team of “Hart aber fair” and not among the guests either.
Sahra Wagenknecht, who all in all played the role of an Aiwanger with a bookcase, quoted Edmund Burke, the founder of conservatism, as saying that it was about wisdom in tradition. And praised hard work and discipline as conservative virtues, of which a German person can still have so much today; It’s still not enough for a good life. Conservatism in the sense of Sahra Wagenknecht would be the demand to rethink our economic system.
Our country, our rules
Mario Voigt, CDU chairman in Thuringia, a man who would certainly not be offended if he was called a conservative, did not dare to define it. However, he tried to explain his ideas using the concept of the dominant culture, which always resulted in general talk about our values (which does he mean: freedom or security?), about binding standards, about “our country, our rules”. The only thing that was more specific was that for him the Thuringian culture was materialized in the bratwurst. Which corresponded very nicely with Markus Söder. Who, in a kind of preliminary interview for the discussion, said about Islam that it somehow also belongs to Bavaria. But it is not constitutive of Bavarian identity, in contrast to white sausage, for example. Markus Söder said in a kind of preliminary interview about the discussion about Islam that it somehow also belongs to Bavaria.WDR/Oliver Ziebe
Furthermore, as Voigt returned to again and again, knowledge of German poems was a nice acknowledgment of the dominant German culture. Which is a demand on which Thilo Sarrazin said the penultimate word years ago. Namely when he demanded that immigrants should be able to recite “Wandrer’s Night Song,” but then couldn’t recite the 140 characters (the entire poem fits in a tweet).
But the young artist Enissa Amani had the last word on this, now on the show. She pointed out that while older gentlemen pointed their fingers at Muslims and other migrants who should finally orient themselves to German dominant culture, their own, completely non-migrant children had no idea about Goethe, Nietzsche and Hegel. Not to mention a beautiful Hölderlin poem memorized.
Everything has to change
Anyone who could probably have described and defined conservatism – in the area of tension between the preservation of what he fought when it was new and Tomasi di Lampedusa’s demand that everything must change so that everything stays as it is – quite well, That was Robin Alexander, the deputy editor-in-chief of “Welt”, who impressed with his calm competence even after five hundred talk show appearances.
But Alexander had enough to do with countering all the other half-truths, for example Mario Voigt’s outrage that so many Muslims put the Koran above the Basic Law. Which Alexander countered with the remark that believing Catholics felt the same way about the Bible. He could have added that “love your neighbor” is not in the constitution. Or that the conservative law professor Volker Rieble wrote a few years ago that if there are sports courts, school punishments and excommunications, there is nothing wrong with Islamic justices of the peace. As long as everyone obeys the law.
And then Alexander also shamed the left-wing despisers such as the more conservative but argumentatively weak advocates of the dominant culture by reminding them that it was not Friedrich Merz, but the rather left-wing Syrian-German political scientist Bassam Tibi who invented the term. This was because he no longer wanted to define belonging in terms of ethnicity and blood and soil. But also with immigrants taking part in the culture. Why, people asked themselves, don’t people like Voigt or Friedrich Merz get such an explanation? Is it really just their inability – or is it the intention to let the undertone of bullying that always resonates continue to resonate?
“Move to the right or move towards the center: Should Germany become more conservative?”: If the program had lived up to its slightly confusing title, one would probably have had to answer: please don’t. With the exception of the AfD, which wants to overthrow and destroy everything, all parties are conservative, except that some protect nature, others protect the welfare state, and third and fourth protect the right to further exploit the planet from the demands of the future want. And even Sahra Wagenknecht promises to protect the so-called normal citizen from any change. Is it really enough for us to just save what can be saved? Or could there be a little more in terms of political goals and visions? That would be a question to which one would like to hear the conservatives’ answers. And those of the progressives, if they still exist, too.