ConWatch: Week 1,794
Does Germany have a constitution yet?
It is difficult to say which major annual Munich event is the bigger performative letdown: Oktoberfest or the Munich Security Conference. They can be easy to mix up. You expend a lot of effort to take part, just to end up stuck in a big tent for most of it, engulfed by a gaggle of verbiage and tradition, asking yourself Is that it? Notions of some kind of higher-minded European culture scoffing at hoedown American state fairs full of butter sculptures and corn mazes are revealed to be largely imaginary. The reality of the Bayerischer Hof is much more provincial.
Still, European political elites scoff away, while simultaneously reminiscing about that one high school exchange semester they did in Plain, WI, 35 years ago, which forevermore made them the America-experts they now are. Tragically, that expertise did not prepare them for the painful realization that America is its own sovereign country, not an NGO, which seems to be the big takeaway of MSC 2025.
Somehow, copious amounts of evidence pointing to this unfortunate possibility have gone largely unnoticed for years.
Now the vice president of that country has set the record straight — confronting these European political elites not only with a flurry of doublespeak, double standards, and non-sequiturs, but also a reasonable question: If your democracies “can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,” maybe your democracies were not as strong to begin with?
The implicit question therein is even more deeply troubling. If rouble-paid TikTokers can trigger this level of panic, what chance do you have when your guarantor of security, with its some 3,700 freedom warheads, goes rogue?
It’s against this backdrop that Germany’s George Costanza understudy1 and still technically chancellor took to the MSC stage. This was his moment to defend the robustness of European democracy, one based on rule of law, fact-based reality, and clear-eyed consistency. So, the opposite of the VanceWorld that the polite company attending Munich find so distasteful.
Poor Olaf. If only he and his government — along with the Brussels consensus — didn’t spend the last few years brandishing their deportation credentials, making fossil fuel deals with autocrats, criminalizing Palestinian solidarity, backing Israel’s ethnonational despotism, weakening international law and norms, and holding to the economically futile policies of European austerity, he could have stood a chance.
Keeping the AfD out of power, even as you give it more standing than it could have ever achieved on its own, is enough to win the never-again game.
The message in Munich was clear: “We will not accept outsiders interfering in our democracy.” You tell ‘em, Olaf. We are doing just fine undermining our democracy on our own.
If anyone’s gonna undermine our “values,” it’s gonna be us. And without an actual constitution to abide by, yes we can.
For fun, The Bupkes asked ChatGPT for its thoughts on which Seinfeld character, including minor ones, Olaf Scholz most resembled.