It's
easy to dismiss Herschel Walker as
the hapless face of the far right.
Yes, he
lost. But he lost by less than 1 percent of
the vote. Wildly unsuitable far-right
politicians lost by similarly close margins
elsewhere in the United States (I'm looking
at you, Kari Lake). And some of them, of
course, even won.
These
politicians are, of course, fodder for
late-night comics and political cartoonists.
They spice up bland politics like a dash of
hot sauce. But the news out of Germany is a
start reminder that the far-right clowns are
not content to just ride around in their
clown cars.
German
police this week arrested members a domestic
terrorist organization determined to
overthrow the German government because it
had already been taken over by a "deep
state." Members of the group included
someone from Germany's far right Alternativ
fur Deutschland party as well as quite a few
with military training. There was a Russian
citizen in the mix as well.
There are
echoes of January 6 in all of this. But
Germans tend to be more organized than
Americans, and the far right even more so.
The foiling
of this German plot is a stark reminder that
the far right is not conservative but deeply
radical in its determination to undermine
and, if necessary, overthrow democracy. The
far right in the United States is
potentially just one election and one
declared "state of emergency" away from
dismantling the "deep state" and subverting
democracy from within.
