I’ve only lived in Germany for a year and a half so if some more experienced Germans could tell me what I’m missing and explain why things aren’t so bad that would be nice, but it seems like this country is shifting in a negative direction politically from this polling data and it scares me.
If AfD ends up being the second biggest party in the Bundestag next federal election I’ll be quite upset but that’s how it goes I guess.
Slightly off-topic, but watch the interview of President Obama by Hasan Minhaj :)
Obama describes the power of the presidency like the Captain of a large ocean liner or aircraft carrier, who can really f things up by running into an iceberg, but at most set a good course for the future by correcting it by a few degrees. (very paraphrased)
Hasan had a different analogy that it’s like parenting: You can f up a kid’s future majorly as a parent, but no amount of parenting will make your kid LeBron James.
So things can always get significantly worse but never meaningfully improve? What a great system we have here! /s ~Nai
Yeah, it’s a medium great system ;)
Just to say it for the record here is my interpretation: The country can still do great things, it’s just that the captain can’t just make it happen on their own.
I mean considering how corrupt the Supreme Court is right now, how corrupt Congress has been for ages (corporate lobbying is a nightmare), how are we supposed to get things to significantly improve? Specifically how? People have been trying to vote better people into power for years, hasn’t worked. The massive BLM protests barely caused any systemic change, let alone on a national level, UBI is still constantly in limbo despite clear, and undisputable evidence that it helps alleviate poverty (though Universal Basic Services would be better), net neutrality is dead despite the protests about that, an unprecedented number of anti-trans bills are being passed despite a lack of popular support (not that such basic human rights should even be contingent on popular support in the first place), and just… A whole bunch of other bullshit that’s been going on despite efforts to try and make things better which only end up sort of temporarily treating the symptoms of the root problems at best. What are we supposed to do? How do we get enough people on board for it to work out any time soon? How do we know if it has a reasonable chance of working out? I don’t know what to do. ~Nai