Spengler: A National Suicide

David P. Goldman, aka ‘Spengler,’ is a contrarian’s contrarian. His latest PJ Media column looks at recent state elections in Bavaria and concludes the results are a symptom of ... wait for it ... national suicide. He writes:

After staging a high-profile fight over immigration against Chancellor Merkel, the Bavarian Christian Social Union got crushed in Sunday's state elections. It got 37% of the vote, the lowest in his history. The biggest winner wasn't the Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), the right-wing populist party, but the ultra-left Greens, who won 17% of the vote vs. 10% for AfD. The Greens are now the second biggest party, surpassing the Social Democrats. The Greens are also the most pro-immigration party in Germany.

Just because we don't like national suicide, we assume that other people don't like it. The triumph of the Green Party in the Bavarian elections suggests that suicide is a popular option in Germany.

Civilizations choose to die when they realize that they have past their used-by dates. Our European cousins are resigned to their demise, like the Norse gods in Valhalla at the end of Wagner's Ring Cycle, waiting for the end. We can't change their minds about this. The best we can do is to manage the consequences of their decline in a way that harms us the least.

Maybe losing two world wars was enough disconfirmation of German nationalism to make national suicide thinkable. It doesn’t explain why the slomo process has taken nearly seventy years to become obvious.