We Live In A Political World: #16 / Consider The Alternatives

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Angela Merkel, who is pictured above, served as the Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021, the only woman ever to have held that office. Merkel has recently written a book about her years of service, and as you can see from the picture, which shows the book sitting on a table in front of her, Merkel's book is a not a small one. A book review in The Wall Street Journal characterizes the book as "a 736-page memoir to secure her crumbling legacy."

That Merkel's legacy is "crumbling," and deservedly so, is the main theme of The Journal's review. The review was written by Bojan Pancevski, and is unrelenting in its message that Merkel's policies have had bad consequences for the nation. The title of Pancevski's review is as follows: "Angela Merkel Wants Her Memoir to Save Her Legacy. It’s Backfiring."

I am not personally familiar with very many of the things that Merkel did while in office, but I am always suspicious of the political tilt of any statement I read in The Wall Street Journal. Maybe Merkel's time as Chancellor wasn't as bad as this review in The Journal indicates. I don't really know. However, presuming that one of the statements in Pancevski's review is accurate, I do question Merkel's good judgment on what the review presents as a fundamental feature of how Merkel ran Germany:

The former physicist’s sober and consensual approach to politics was a hallmark of her long years in office. As Germany’s first female chancellor, Merkel seemed free of the vanity of alpha-male politicians. But in her memoir and the interviews surrounding it, she has shown a different, more defensive side, doubling down on even her most divisive decisions and swatting away criticism. It does not, she told CNN, “make a whole lot of sense” to question her judgments with the benefit of hindsight: “We always have to look at matters under the conditions we were in then.”

In that context, Merkel insists in the book, her policies had “no alternative”—a phrase she often used to justify them while in office. This response was the inspiration for the name of a once-tiny anti-Merkel party, Alternative for Germany, whose aggressively nationalist and anti-immigrant views have now helped it become Germany’s second-largest political force (emphasis added).

The title of Merkel's book is Freedom, which is certainly ironic if the book, in fact, insists that there was "no alternative" to everything she did as Chancellor. It is disturbing that a neo-Nazi political party, "Alternative for Germany," has benefitted from the public's rejection of Merkel's policies - and perhaps more accurately, of a repudiation of what is claimed to be Merkel's former and continuing assertions that there was "no alternative" to the policies she advocated, and carried out.

Claims by any government official that there is "no alternative" to any policy proposal is simply to elevate power against possibility. There is always an "alternative." A fundamental feature of our human life is our freedom to act. This is the great treasure that is found within the political realm, our opportunity, always, to do something unexpected and new, something never even thought about before.

Anyone who regularly reads my blog postings knows that this truth about our human situation - which is described, and advanced, and insisted upon by political theorist Hannah Arendt - is what I believe is the most important thing to understand about politics and government. American government, as created by the United States Constitution, has been designed to maximize the possibility of "alternatives," promoting, as it does, dissent, debate, and compromise.

If we believe in what we have professed, we must, in other words, always "consider the alternatives."

And.... we had better get right to the job of doing that, too, because it is increasingly obvious that if we continue to pursue the policies of the past, with respect to war, global warming, and income inequality, to name three critical issues, the likely result will be the end of human civilization, or (worst case) the end of all human life, or the end of all life on this planet.

Do you think I might be overstating things? Well, consider these alternatives: