Hate and Incitement

What this has to do with Post-Democracy and Erotic Resentment

By conjuring up a dark drama, it might be that the slogan adopted by the Washington Post when Donald Trump took office (»Democracy Dies in Darkness«) misses the real tragedy: that a democracy can die even in the brightest daylight, right before everyone's eyes—a slow decline that political scientists have been describing for years as Post-Democracy. While we might see a story of decline where institutions appear untouched on the outside but are increasingly being hollowed out on the inside, what is so surprising is that defenders of Democracy have grown in numbers at an alarming rate and are speaking out loudly everywhere. Upon closer inspection, however, doubts arise about whether this is a positive sign. As the saying goes, ›if you have friends like these, who needs enemies?‹ It is no coincidence that the grandiose slogans are nothing more than declarations of intent to defend Democracy from its enemies, but when examining the tools used for this purpose, you can't help but shudder. Not to mention that, in political discussion, behind the people's friend always lurks a devilish enemy of the people. Seen in this light, the ›uprising of the decent‹ could be interpreted as a form of political hooliganism, an eroticism of resentment that collapses in the blink of an eye as soon as the despised enemy disappears. In any case, this line of defense bears an uncanny resemblance to the projection logic that led Hitler to a rare insight: »If the Jews did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.« Following this logic, people never tire of invoking the threat to democratic and pluralistic social order—resulting in the metaphysical Nazi becoming a permanent fixture, a thought figure that is now an integral part of political discourse.^¹ However, if we accept this figure for what it represents—the fading of a once-vibrant spirit—a new perspective emerges. When the battle against hatred and incitement occupies people's minds, the broader conflict narrows down to present-day idiosyncrasies, to what is now called dissing in the Internet age. And when you're interacting with other social media users – and communication that no longer happens face to face – it's easy to label someone else's opinion as racist, nationalistic, or misanthropic, depending on your perspective. And because the other side responds in kind, this could be seen as a symbolic civil war—a conflict that, precisely because it takes place behind digital masks, follows the logic of unleashing forces that Carl von Clausewitz observed long ago. Yet the use of physical violence, whose only goal is to defeat the opponent, is not even the most striking feature of this conflict. Because:

»Force arms itself with the inventions of the arts and sciences to counter force.« (Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege [On War]²)

What’s truly disturbing, however, is that government agencies are now also getting involved in this battle zone. A few years ago, the Hessian Ministry of the Interior established a department (Hessen gegen Hetze) whose sole purpose is to hunt down and prosecute social media users, or more specifically, those foolish citizens who have made themselves liable to prosecution by retweeting something stupid or engaging in a similar thought crime. While what was once dismissed as »barroom banter« in the past, the Internet’s memory now means the perpetrator delivers the corpus delicti to law enforcement on a silver platter—without anyone leaving their desk. This raises two questions: a) whether such thoughtlessness amounts to a criminal offense, and b) whether it is appropriate for a public authority to pursue its own citizens in this way. The fact that the department of the Hessian Ministry of the Interior boasts on its website about the number of reports filed is a clear sign that State officials have lost sight of how inappropriate such inquisitorial zeal is for such an office. For, as the Constitutional Court ruled on January 15, 1958: Fundamental rights are primarily defensive rights of the citizen against the state.

Expressions of opinion that fall below the threshold of criminal liability but are classified as threatening to the State’s welfare on the grounds of hate speech can lead to severe repression. This is demonstrated by the recent deployment of an armada of police officers against citizens who were flagged by various reporting centers and public prosecutors' offices because of posts they had made (the »Idiot Affair« surrounding Robert Habeck comes to mind). The fact that all of this is justified by vague terms such as Hate Speech or the Delegitimization of the State being deemed relevant to protecting the constitution only proves that citizens’ right to defend themselves has been sacrificed to a free-floating Statism, if not outright authoritarianism. Ironically, this authoritarianism is spreading right at a time when no-go zones and acts of violence are undermining public order. Looking back to when this calamity first entered the realm of justice, the Network Enforcement Act comes to mind, which was created under the leadership of former Justice Minister Heiko Maas, supported by a compliant intelligentsia (and the intellectual patronage of Carl Schmitt), and which has actually created a legal gray area unworthy of a Constitutional State. From then on, courts were no longer responsible for defamation or law violations; instead, providers were held liable for their users' posts – in other words, they effectively became de facto deputized law enforcement agents. Structurally, this decision has led from a general widespread uncertainty (primarily as an expansion of the combat zone)—to social media platforms, in their rush to comply (and avoid fines in the millions), taking it upon themselves to censor free speech. However, this is precisely what dispenses with a crucial element of the Rule of Law. While it is indisputable that crimes committed by the State must be punished, the outsourcing of sovereign duties should be prohibited as a matter of course. The fact that autocratic Russia immediately copied this law highlights how deeply illiberal ideas have infiltrated legislation. The effects of this legal ambiguity can also be observed in this country. If you examine the partners working with the Hessian reporting center (HateAid, Ich-bin-hier, Körber Foundation, State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Stark-Im-Amt, Media Authority of Hesse, or similar organizations), it becomes clear that here we are dealing with the institutionalization of a gray area—an effort that has much more to do with a popular education welfare committee than a constitutional State. Politically, the advantages of this unholy alliance are obvious. When an organization such as Hate Aid receives €600,000 in State funding from the Ministry of Justice (without which it would not exist), the advantage for State authorities is that private organizations can act with the ideological fervor that State Representatives (who are bound by the principle of neutrality) are prohibited from exercising for good reasons. In this sense, it is a win-win situation in which the State and NGOs are working together.

There's no doubt that this is the dark, post-democratic side of civil society, where State power is outsourced to private entities. Not only does this form of outsourcing allow State institutions to shirk their responsibilities, but it also creates obvious incentives that promise material gain to self-appointed gatekeepers. Worse still, because this establishes a »moral economy« that thrives on what it fights against, there is a constant incentive to promote and perpetuate this business model through continuous scandalization; leading to a situation where, when reality fails to meet such wishful thinking, the concerned welfare committees quickly turn to confabulation, weaving the results of this pseudologia phantastica together like a string of pearls. While anyone may now feel called upon to act as a censor, the consequences for State institutions are even more concerning. Just as officials in the Hessian Ministry of the Interior appear to have abandoned their standards, an illiberal mindset has taken hold of the authorities. The fact that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was able to target its own president is just one extreme exemplar of the inquisitorial zeal with which unpopular individuals are persecuted these days; even more decisive is the fact that private individuals can now also be prosecuted as enemies of the constitution. This is the novelty that sets current practice apart from those of recent decades. While it was once believed that only larger associations posed a real threat to the community, it is now understood that anyone guilty of a thought crime may become the focus of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. I have already discussed the bizarre consequences of this elsewhere. What requires discussion here is the underlying attitude, specifically the paradox revealed by these measures. It is quite puzzling that the highly praised civil society, always with its eyes fixed on social networks, has been able to adopt such a blockwarden attitude [Blockwartverhalten], especially since digitalisation has given everyone a voice. If the SPD of the 1990s, which for the first time allowed its members to elect Rudolf Scharping as their chairman by popular vote, was able to celebrate this as a shining moment for grassroots democracy, and if the Greens also positioned themselves as a grassroots democratic movement, it is remarkable how the very beneficiaries of grassroots democracy have been able to experience such a sudden change of heart. Or to put it another way: how was it possible that the voice of the people, when in the blink of an eye it suddenly became audible through social media, could fall so completely into disrepute?

When the informer – or the trusted flagger³ acting as a digital block warden – adopts a form of social conformity, and even more so when associations, foundations, and authorities collaborate in these activities, the understanding of Democracy among the actors themselves seems to have been compromised. You only need to recall Hoffman von Fallersleben's lament, which actually originated within the political circle of the 1880s Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), to realize the social danger posed by such informants.

»The biggest scoundrel in the whole country is and always will be the informer.«⁴

The fact that those involved are seemingly unaware of how establishing such reporting requirements poisons the community and restricts the fundamental ›freedom of rights‹ expression raises concerns that the self-appointed defenders of Democracy might be inadvertently paving their own way to ruin. One reason for this failure is that what we take for granted as Democracy is overshadowed by a deep darkness. Interestingly, this problem was already evident during the Pentecontaetia (when Athenian Democracy was at its height). The historian Herodotus insists that the concept of Democracy (= rule by the people) actually misses the point, and that the outstanding feature of the Athenian polis lies in isonomia, which is equality before the Law. Bearing in mind that even a tyrant like Draco subordinated himself to the Law by establishing his tablets of law, makes clear the key difference between Democracy and Tyranny: that even the ruler is subject to and must obey the Law. This, in turn, implies that a population naturally assumes the dominance of Writing. In this sense, accepting a higher, symbolic order (»Sacred Writing« or scripture if you will) is the fundamental condition necessary for a democratic community. Precisely this is the meaning of Böckenförde's famous dictum, which reads:

»The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself.«

If the prerequisites, namely the acceptance of an all-encompassing symbolic order, are no longer met— then isonomia itself is at risk, and we’ve embarked on a highly dangerous path. This is precisely what makes the current situation so unsettling. For the self-appointed defenders of Democracy do not hesitate to deny other citizens their civil rights (We are more!). The establishment of Paragraph 188—which revives the crime of lèse-majesté in a civil form, with the political class as the sole beneficiary—is a fine exemplum of how the noble goals of Democracy defenders are in deep conflict with isonomia. It is with astonished eyes that we’re witnessing a contemporary encounter with a postmodern reincarnation of George Orwell's Animal Farm:

»ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS«⁵

While Orwell's main driving forces are the pigs Snowball and Napoleon, aided by a third pig named Squealer (the squealing informer tattletale), the ingenious naming makes it clear to us that this whole event is about getting rid of isonomia. If Napoleon represents a Caesar-like logic of self-empowerment, it’s clear that Snowball refers to the snowball effect, that is, depending on one’s point of view, moral panic or politics of resentment – and the squealing informer, in turn, plays into the two of them. Gerhard Schröder once demonstrated that populism can be practiced not only from below, but also from above, with his rebellion of the decent.⁶ But if Democracy is associated solely with the majority principle (We are more!), it is easy to forget that even a democracy isn't immune to self-destruction (remember Hitler's »seizure of power«). The only thing that prevents this is that a universal law is established over all of it, which belongs to no one and to which everyone willingly submits—Isonomy.

If we analyze the reasons that have led democracies into a state of Post-Democracy, the common explanation of populism falls short. It is also questionable to attribute it to any specific national characteristics: German Nazism, British colonialism, or Jim Crow racism in the United States, or the like. Comparable developments can be observed throughout the Western world, each with different ›National‹ justifications. Whether it's Justin Trudeau's Canada, which has whipped itself into a moral panic over imagined mass killings (the Kamloops genocide), or Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who claimed that „Swedish roots are nothing but barbaric. The rest of the development has come from the outside,“ everywhere we’re always dealing with the paradox of performative self-flagellation—where political actors, like medieval flagellants, work themselves up into spheres of moral superiority. What philosopher Roger Scruton called oikophobia (the fear of one's own home) can be understood psychologically as inverted narcissism: a bizarre megalomania that seeks to gain moral superiority through self-accusation. In the end, the enemy you try to distinguish yourself from is interchangeable — nothing more than a scapegoat. So if you throw the baby out with the bathwater and violate isonomia, which is the very foundation of a democratic society, there must be other reasons for doing so. The answer is clear if you avoid being distracted by intellectual smoke screens or rhetorical cannon fire, and instead see it as the result of a deep social upheaval. There is no doubt that the rise of the Digital Psychotope, insofar as it transcends the traditional boundaries of community, role models, and social practices, signifies a significant upheaval. In this way, the move toward post-democratic authoritarianism is ultimately a sign of powerlessness. As Freud already observed, we’re no longer the masters of our own house. In fact, this upheaval in our presence-of-mind is even more profound than the major traumas usually mentioned: the Copernican Revolution, Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and the Discovery of the Unconscious. While these epistemic rifts primarily impacted the educational elite, with the masses largely going about their business undisturbed, everyone is now, in some way or another, forced to navigate a radically changed world and intellectual landscape. With this in mind, it’s easy to see that the fight against hate and incitement is a proxy war, mainly about using the pretense of digital sovereignty (which was the key argument behind the Network Enforcement Act) to conceal the state of affairs, namely that, in some sense, we are still Digital Illiterates. When you really think about it, the whole idea of data sovereignty is just a big misunderstanding, even a form of self-deception. No one would ever consider the absurd idea of trying to limit the letters of the Alphabet – and the intellectual movements they have sparked (Natural Philosophy, Metaphysics, Law, Logic, and Utopian Thinking) – through a legal act. The fact that a depotentiated classe politique nevertheless attempts to do so, and in doing so undermines the fundamental foundations of the social order, is worse than a crime; it is stupidity.

Postscriptum

Why the return of the Inquisition is by no means unlikely

Studying history can be quite helpful at times. The Middle Ages, in the form of the Universal Machine, which took on forms such as mill technology, mechanical clocks, interest, and division of labor, but also moral introspection, tact, and punctuality, had to face an affront of humiliation similar to what we are experiencing now. When the Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomat] struck like a comet in the intellectual sky of the Middle Ages, people were mainly focused on removing the impositions associated with this foreign body. The Church attempted to contain proto-Capitalism by claiming a treasure trove of grace for itself – a tactic that served to soothe phantom pain on one hand, while enabling the sale of indulgences and the concept of purgatory on the other. While this was initially a very successful business model, the psychological accounting involved revealed the cognitive dissonance of the Church Fathers—and this is precisely what Luther used to fuel the arguments that ultimately led to the schism. It might be assumed that as the Middle Ages became more familiar with mechanization practices, society was able to accept it. However, the opposite is true. As medievalist Arno Borst has written, the first witch hunts did not begin until the end of the 14^th century – and the inquisitorial zeal gained momentum precisely at the time we celebrate as the Renaissance, which became the pretext for our Enlightenment. Girolamo Savonarola, who terrorized late 15^th century Florence with his child soldiers and his Sweeping Bonfire of the Vanities, may serve as proof that erotic resentment only reaches its peak when a return to the past (a Great Again!) is ultimately impossible. That the Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer, known as the Hammer of the Witches [Hexenhammer], published his Malleus Maleficarum around the same time Botticelli painted his Birth of Venus (in 1486) sums up the historical paradox: that the Renaissance and the Inquisition are two sides of the same coin. But all this lies far in the past, tempi passati. And because no one wants to remember, our contemporaries, who tirelessly defend Democracy against hatred, incitement, fake news, and the intoxication of the digital psychotope, might one day succeed in creating something like an ultimate Nazi hammer.

1. Annalena Baerbock demonstrated the bizarre fruits born of the relentless search for a scapegoat when, during her farewell speech to the Bundestag, she added a burst of inspiration to her greatest hits of verbal gaffes that could be called a somersault—or, more accurately, a triple Baerbock. »The AfD is not only a danger to this parliament, but also to Germany ever becoming a soccer world champion again.« While this short circuit may have pushed Baerbock's absurdity scale to unprecedented new heights, it would be too simple to dismiss it as just a rhetorical flourish or even a form of logorrhea.

2. See Clausewitz, C. – Vom Kriege, Köln, 2010, p. 24.

3. A Trusted Flagger is an entity defined by the EU’s Digital Services Act as having expertise in identifying and reporting illegal/harmful digital content. Germany a certification process in 2024 for implementing this as part of a dangerous overall trend towards »language policing«.

4. The quote is from author Max Kegel, who was also an agitator against Bismarck's Socialist Law. He wrote: A whole country is polluted / Where the informer creeps around. [...] The informer is called the stain on humanity / The vile informer.

5. See Orwell, G. – Animal Farm, New York, 1946, p. 112.

6. In fact, this episode is illuminating insofar as the event that triggered the uprising of the decent—specifically, the 2000 arson attack on the New Synagogue in Düsseldorf—was not caused by the usual suspects—right-wing extremists, xenophobes, and anti-Semites—but rather by a Moroccan and a Palestinian from Jordan. However, the reflexive assignment of blame not only led to candlelight vigils, protests, and action plans but also immediately resulted in the decision to pursue legal action before the Federal Constitutional Court to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD)

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