This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: And we’re going to talk about politics in Germany. I think people probably know that the far-right party in Germany just won an election, or won about 40 percent of the vote in an election there. We’re going to talk about what that election on Sunday means, both for German politics, European politics, what this is about the United States, what this is about far-right politics. So Thomas, thanks for joining me. Great to see you again.

Thomas Zimmer: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be talking about far-right extremism on this side of the Atlantic.

Bacon: On this side, yes. You and I met when you were here in the US, and you were one of the earliest and most prescient observers of what was happening in the far right here. And so I guess, first of all, AfD, because we’re talking to an American audience—talk about how is AfD, and how is it unlike kind of the Trumpian Republican Party?

Zimmer: Yeah, if you approach it as the German equivalent to MAGA, that gets you actually pretty close. It gets you very much in the correct direction. It’s make Germany great again. They definitely share the same enemies. They’re similarly fueled by this sort of sense of radicalizing grievance, right? It’s defined by this sort of resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them, right?

In a sense that this is of this desire to restore dominance over those who they deem lesser somehow. And who they deem lesser—that’s very much—or who they deem deserving, right, of a sort of a higher status in society. That’s very much racialized and gendered. It’s the grievance of predominantly white male people who are consumed by this feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top.

So it’s very anti-egalitarian more than anything, anti-pluralistic. And I think it’s also, just like the MAGA movement, not at all conservative, right? In no reasonable sense of the word, in conserving, preserving, is this a conservative movement. They’re all in on radical measures. They talk about revolutionary change. They’re extremists.

And it’s best described, I think, as a kind of radical revisionism or revanchism, right? It’s defined by this idea, we need to wipe away all these developments over the past few decades that have deprived us of our rightful place at the top.

Bacon: OK, so very—and anti-immigration, anti-multicultural, all the—OK, so very similar. All right.

Zimmer: No, it’s fundamentally ethnonationalist, in the sense that they want a Germany only for what they call, quote-unquote, “biological Germans.” So you can already tell that’s where the wind is coming from with these people. There’s no subtlety here. There’s no more dog whistling with them. They’re now more openly, more aggressively embracing that sort of very openly ethnonationalist, anti-gender-egalitarianism, anti anything they call deviant behavior, right? Queer people. That all needs to go. These people need to be pushed out of the public sphere.

Again, I think, if someone wants to figure out, what is the agenda, what would Germany look like if those people actually got to be in power and got to do what they want to do? Think what MAGA wants to do to America, and it gets you pretty close. It’s not a coincidence that the AfD, they’re all big Trump fans, and the Trump government and the MAGA movement also very much AfD fans. That’s not a coincidence. It is because they’re fundamentally engaged in the same project.

Bacon: So now, what I know less about is Saxony-Anhalt. And I’m not a German expert, so you may have to pronounce it better for the audience as well. But there are 16 states in Germany, so give me a sense of that area and what it’s like, with maybe a US comparison as well.

Zimmer: Yeah. So it’s in Eastern Germany, so on the territory of the former GDR. Germany has 16 states. It’s a federal system with a lot of similarities to the American system. This is not a direct comparison, of course. But Saxony-Anhalt is a small state. It has a population of a little over two million. That’s about the ballpark of Nebraska, or New Mexico, or Idaho, right? That sort of thing. It’s also been, for quite some time, a stronghold of the far right in Germany.

So this was a state election for the state parliament, which also is for the control of the state government, because this is a parliamentary system. If you get the majority of seats in the state parliament, you get to be the state government. So they barely missed out on an outright majority of seats. They got about 44 percent of the vote, which is exactly as much as all the democratic, small-D democratic parties together, right?

What you have now in the incoming parliament, state parliament, is a sort of stalemate situation. No one has an outright majority. The AfD is three seats shy of an outright majority. None of the democratic parties—so this is a multi-party system. You have a conservative party, a green party, a social democratic party, a more what you might call a democratic socialist party. And then all of these parties together are exactly as strong as the AfD.

And then there’s a weird sort of kingmaker faction. It’s called the BSW, which is an offshoot of the sort of democratic socialists to an even pretty extreme far left kind of position. But mostly defined by a kind of grievance towards the liberal system, towards the mainstream. And they’re very pro-Russia, which the AfD is also. They’re all Putin fans.

And they have five seats. So the most likely scenario, if the AfD is to manage—if they manage to get a majority of the seats, they probably get it by getting two or three of those far left candidates to actually support them. But that is all very much up in the air. So the immediate sort of political ramifications of this are, it’s a very volatile situation, and honestly, no one knows exactly what’s going to happen there.

Bacon: So this is going to sex me a little bit, just in terms of what it’s like. I guess I’ve read, even though the population is fairly anti-immigrant, it actually has a fairly low immigrant population. It’s working class. Or is it, in terms of, is it like the places in the US that have been drawn to Trump, in terms of being economically struggling, more white, less educated? Does it have some of those same demographic and economic characteristics as the places in the US that have been drawn to Trumpism?

Zimmer: Yeah. So, it’s definitely, you might say, economically struggling, low growth, a relatively high unemployment, relatively old population, and so the population is shrinking. So a lot of young people, especially, are moving away from the state.

That already sounds quite a bit like—and then also, even more so if you look at the characteristics of who actually voted for the AfD in this—this was a very high turnout election, by the way, like almost 80 percent turnout, so this is very high turnout. And the AfD has managed to mobilize among people who have previously been non-voters far more than the democratic parties. Once again, that is sort of what Trump also managed to do, right?

And the social profile is—got to be careful with this, this is mostly still based on exit polls. Exit polls in Germany are a little more reliable than American exit polls, generally speaking. But still, it’s exit polls, which means it’s self-assessments mostly, right? So, careful. But it aligns with what we know from other elections across Germany.

Relatively high support among people who describe themselves as workers, so working class. Significantly higher among non-college educated, stronger among men than women, stronger in rural areas than in urban areas. So yeah, a lot of similarities to the profile of what we think of as the sort of core Trump supporters, or the people who vote Trump. Definitely in this sort of 2024 coalition, yeah.

Bacon: So the next federal elections to decide who runs the government in Germany are not till 2029, correct?

Zimmer: Yeah, if the current coalition holds up until then. Because this current coalition government is a coalition between the conservatives and the social democrats, and the conservatives are in charge. So the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is a conservative from the Conservative Party, so Angela Merkel’s party, right? And the chancellor is remarkably unpopular, right? No one likes him.

Absolutely no one likes him, and he’s been doing an absolutely terrible job. Not just in terms of actual policy—in terms of, he himself has proven remarkably struggling with the job of being chancellor, including the politics of it, right? Just communicating with people. So no one likes him.

And this, of course, is more than anything—the strong result of the AfD is the result of a disastrous result of the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party, compared to four years ago in Saxony-Anhalt, has lost over half of its voters. So it’s shrunk to, I think, 17 or so percent in Saxony-Anhalt. That is a disaster for the Conservative Party.

In the next state election, also in East Germany, that’s coming up 10 days from now, the Conservatives are polling at 6 percent. This is supposed to be Germany’s by far strongest, biggest party, and they’re just being decimated. And mostly decimated because, like I said, the AfD were very successful mobilizing among non-voters, and the other sort of big reservoir of voters that they’ve tapped into is conservative voters moving to the far right.

And so there is a lot of talk right now about maybe the Conservatives just also need a change at the top. And that might mean that—who knows—but that also might mean that this federal government, I would not bet a lot of money on them actually making it through the end of this regular term. But yeah, you’re right. If they go through the end of the term, it wouldn’t be until 2029.

Bacon: This is also a US equivalent, in that some of the people I know who write about European politics, what they argue is that you’re seeing the mainstream Conservative party, like in Britain, lose votes to the far-right party. And in the US, what happened was the sort of Mitch McConnell—since we only have two parties—the Mitch McConnell wing sort of lost votes to the Trump wing. But to say, if we had four parties, you’d probably see a similar kind of pattern.

Zimmer: I think that’s exactly right. This is both a key parallel and a key difference between either side of the Atlantic. So what happened in the United States is basically a far right faction managed to take over the Republican Party from within, right? Move to the center of power within the Republican Party. Whereas in Germany, what you saw was, basically when the AfD was founded in 2013, you had the right wing of the Conservative Party splitting away from the Conservative Party. They founded their own party.

And so it’s as if you had—it’s as if Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015 and had said, “Hey, I’m actually not going to run as the Republican presidential nominee. I’m going to do my own party. We’re calling it the MAGA party,” and that’s what’s happening. Which, of course, in the American system doesn’t make sense, because of the political system. But the German system, because it is a multi-party system, a representative system—so basically it means if you get 10 percent of the vote, you get 10 percent of seats in parliament, right?

So you don’t have to win your district outright. And so in this sort of representative system, smaller parties make sense, or it makes sense for smaller parties to do their own thing, which is why Germany has this sort of multi-party system. And that’s what happened, right? We basically have a separate MAGA party, instead of this faction, this wing or this coalition, attempting to take over the Conservative Party from within.

Bacon: Now, the good thing in Germany has been, up to now, is none of the other parties will work with AfD. So they can’t be part of a coalition, because the center-right party and all the other parties have—and talk about why that’s happened, where the center-right party will not work with them. Which is not—if the McConnell faction had stopped working with Trump, we would never be here. So the Germans did something different than the US did, right?

Zimmer: Yeah. No, absolutely. So far, in Germany, this has been discussed under the term firewall. It’s, we’re holding the firewall against the far right. And so far, you have to say Germany is more or less the only country in Europe where the other parties of the mainstream, broadly speaking, have so far refused to work with and cooperate with the far right.

Everywhere else, this sort of firewall has already fallen. Sometimes it has fallen long ago. France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, wherever, right? Everywhere, basically, usually the mainstream conservative parties have given themselves permission to work with the far-right parties.

That has not happened so far in Germany. The reasons for that are mostly historical. Coming out of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship, it became the sort of foundational national myth, right? The foundational myth of national identity in post-war, first West Germany, and then after reunification in 1990, of this sort of reunified Germany, has been this thing that, OK, we cannot let that happen ever again, right?

We’re going to draw a very strong line here, and we’ll keep those people, we’ll not normalize them, we’ll not make them respectable. And again, this was always more of a sort of elite consensus, elite political, elite sort of published opinion sort of consensus. It was never a broadly shared, everyone, the entire population on board. That’s not the case. But it was, until recently, a fairly clearly shared elite consensus in Germany.

But I think what’s happened here—and this is why what is happening now, and even though this is just a small state, Saxony-Anhalt, you could say, like, in a vacuum, you could say, “Who cares?” This is half the size of Berlin in terms of population. But first of all, the AfD is now strong everywhere. It is still much stronger in the east, in the former GDR, than nationally. But even nationally, it got almost 21 percent in the last federal election a year and a half ago. It is now polling at around 30 percent, as clearly the strongest party, even nationally.

And this is such a fundamental sort of assault on the foundational myth that post-war Germany was building its national identity around, which was precisely this idea that, OK, this will not happen here again, because we have supposedly learned our lessons from Nazism, and by learning our lessons and educating the population, whatever, we have immunized ourselves against right-wing extremism. Clearly that’s not true. Obviously, that is not true.

And so I think, regardless of whether or not the AfD will manage to take over the state government in Saxony-Anhalt, the most immediate implication of what happened here is that the AfD has broken containment, right? It’s now fully normalized. There’s no more shame. There’s no taboo around voting for them in a significant part of the German population. So whatever was still left of a kind of anti-fascist consensus is just out the window.

Bacon: OK. So in other words, you think AfD could eventually win a federal election in Germany?

Zimmer: I do not see them, not in the sort of near or medium term, win an outright majority in a national election. So 50 percent plus, I don’t think that is—again, like I said, they’re currently polling at around 30 percent nationally. So you still have, if you turn this around, you could still say there’s 70 percent of the population opposing them still, right?

But I think—and again, this is something that 10 years ago or so, very few people would have said this, but now it seems very clear, without a question to me, the by far the most likely scenario is that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party nationally in whenever the next national election is. I don’t see any way around this.

It will clearly remain by far the strongest party in all of Eastern Germany, so the five East German states. There’s no question about it, that it is currently polling at around 45 percent in the territory of the former GDR. That is basically wiping away—again, remember, this is not like, when I say they’re currently polling at 45 percent, that doesn’t mean there’s a second party that is polling at around the same kind of number.

Bacon: There’s many parties.

Zimmer: The other half is split up in five, six parties, right? So the second strongest party right now is polling at around below 20 percent, right? And yeah, no, they’re by far the strongest party right now. And the question then becomes, at what point will this sort of firewall thing—it’s already being discussed as, oh, it didn’t work, and not only did it not work, maybe it’s actually making them stronger.

And here, this is precisely the kind of discussion that the United States had after the 2024 election. This general sort of intellectual and political climate that is going all in on accommodating, acquiescing, right? Or, maybe we just need to stop being so mean to them. If the people want us to work with them, we should work with them. So you have all the sort of normalizing, accommodating discourses that are going into overdrive right now.

Bacon: Let me ask maybe something to come back to. First of all, you agree with the firewall. That’s what you think should be the case. Don’t work with AfD is the right approach, and what the US should have done.

Zimmer: I generally very much think, do not normalize far-right extremism. Do not make them respectable. And I 100 percent think—and also, by the way, this is borne out by actual research. We have mountains of research from the past 15 years or so from every, quote-unquote, “Western country,” right? From political scientists and sociologists and whatever, who look at, does it actually work to ostracize far-right extremism, right? Or does it only make them stronger, because it plays into their sort of victim mentality, or it allows them to play the victim, blah, blah, blah, right?

The overwhelming consensus in these empirical studies is, no, it actually does work, right? It is better to ostracize them, keep them contained, do not normalize them, do not make them respectable. Try to uphold these sort of taboos around voting for, supporting far-right extremism. But unfortunately, that is just not what our political leaders on either side of the—

Bacon: Let me just stop you. You kind of paused when I asked, do you support the firewall. Was there some reason? I just want to make sure I understood. Something to do with understanding firewall?

Zimmer: No, you’re right. I only paused because the term itself has become such a—it’s not even clear what people mean by this anymore, right? To me, it always meant, firewall means we are trying to keep far-right extremism from exerting political power, by refusing to go into coalitions with them, right? Because again, like, Germany needs—if you want control of any sort of state or national government, you need a coalition, right? No one gets 50-plus percent of the vote.

The why I would say the firewall actually worked is to say, it kept them from exerting power, right? They have not been able to take over a state government or the national government. So it is about harm prevention, right? It’s about preventing harm, right? So to me, that means it worked.

But the way people are now discussing it is more, oh, but is it about, should we still treat them as, like, extremists, or should we treat them as, like, a normal part of the political spectrum? And again, I just want to say, the problem with the firewall thinking—the biggest problem is that the ideas of the far right, ideas and policies and positions, there was no firewall around those. I wish there had been, right? So I only hesitated because, to some extent, this discussion is long over. We can still pretend we have a firewall, and in terms of narrowly defined cooperating with them, yes. But all their positions, like all the anti-immigration stuff, has been completely adopted by the Conservative Party, even by the Social Democrats.

It is the consensus among most of the sort of center in Germany that, oh yeah, no, immigration is the biggest threat and problem and whatever, and there’s a very strong anti-immigration policy being enacted by this current conservative social democrat coalition already. So the problem is that their positions and their sort of ideology has already been normalized to the point where, does it even make sense to pretend we’re even having a firewall? That’s the problem.

Bacon: Let me ask—I’m going to jump to where you’re headed, but I want to ask the question. Both in the US, in Europe, in Germany, what do you think are the roots of why the far right is growing in popularity? You can start about Germany, you can talk about America. What is the root of why they’re doing better? Why, the last decade, are they growing in support?

Zimmer: So, fundamentally, I think we’re basically having the same struggle or conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a conflict between two fundamentally incompatible ideas of how we should organize society, how we should organize—who should be allowed to be part of our societies? Is it a pluralistic sort of egalitarian democratic society, right, where people should be able to be part of society, and power and status should not be distributed along racial and gender lines and according to wealth and religion? But no, regardless of all that, we’re having a pluralistic, egalitarian kind of thing.

And then on the other side, you have people who refuse this, and not only don’t like it, but think this is the downfall of Western civilization or whatever they call it, and they cling to this sort of ethnonationalist understanding of, no, we have to have these sort of racially defined national communities, and they have to be organized along lines of race, gender, religion, and wealth, with strict hierarchies. Strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, and everything else is, again, the sort of the destruction of Western civilization.

And I think the reason why this conflict has radicalized so much is that, over the past few decades, all our societies, both in North America and in Western Europe specifically, have moved away significantly from this sort of ethnonationalist understanding of white Christian societies and the sort of strict hierarchies of race and gender.

We have become—and I mean we, because it really is on both sides of the Atlantic—we have become significantly less white, significantly less Christian by self-description, by self-assessment. We’ve become, in that sense, more liberal and significantly more pluralistic, mostly for demographic reasons, right? And I think a lot of people find this threatening or dangerous, or they reject it for whatever reason. And I think that is the foundational conflict.

And on top of that, and that is very unfortunate, we’re having right now a significant sort of anti-system resentment building up across the political spectrum. This is not just a right-wing thing, obviously, right? A very strong sense across the political spectrum that the status quo is not working anymore, right? That those who are in charge politically are not finding answers to the challenges that we are facing that in any way commensurate with the problem.

So it’s this strong sort of anti-system, anti-status quo resentment building up. And I think the reason why this is helping those far-right people with their sort of ethnonationalist idea of what we should do and what our society should look like, is that they are offering something that is first and foremost wiping away the status quo, right? They’re not offering just reform, or defend the system, or defend the institutions, none of that, right? It’s not status quo politics. What they are offering is this sort of revolutionary uprising against the status quo.

And I think, unfortunately, that is quite attractive even for people who might not, ideologically speaking, be fully on board with their sort of ethnonationalist vision of what the society should look like in the end, right? But who probably think, “OK, anything is better than just conserving the status quo.” And so I think it opens up a kind of reservoir of voters for them that is just frustrated with the status quo.

And I think that is what happened in 2024 with Trump, right? Half of his voters were all in on sort of the white nationalism and the proper Trumpism, and then the other half was like, This sucks. This system sucks. It’s not working for me. The status quo is not working, and who cares? So that sort of thing. And I think those two things are coming together here.

Bacon: Let me lead with the first one I want to ask about, because I think this is the one that we have so much trouble with in the US. You talked about basically—you didn’t use the words demographic change, but this idea that, both in Europe and in the United States, women are in the workplace, and more Muslims, and that kind of thing. That gets cast as, you’re calling them all racist, and that’s not exactly what you’re saying. But you think the fundamental conflict here is—what you led with is about this sort of, like, the cultural change.

This is the sort of moving from a white Christian male-dominated society to something more egalitarian. You think that’s the sort of conflict that is driving all of this, and the far right has tapped into resentments about that change. That’s what you led with. That’s a very important part of this, you think. This is not just about economics, in other words.

Zimmer: Oh, look, I think we need to be clear. What is the exact question we’re trying to answer, right? If you asked me, “How do we explain a specific election result?” Like, how do we explain the 2024 election?

Bacon: Yeah, I’m asking the broader question, yes.

Zimmer: No, but I know you are getting the different—yeah. But I think those two get often conflated, right? Because if the question is more specifically, how do we explain the 2024 election result in the United States, then we know, beyond sort of any reasonable doubt, that was driven a lot by relatively minor shifts among a relatively small part of the electorate, and that part of the electorate was mostly frustrated with, the prices are too high, and inflation, and that sort of thing. And that then had massive political ramifications.

But you’re not asking—and that’s important, I think—you’re not narrowing it down to just an election result. You’re asking me, what is the fundamental conflict, and why is it that in this particular situation, we have on either side of the Atlantic these openly ethnonationalist, right-wing, sort of authoritarian parties that are rising and becoming stronger. And honestly, I don’t want to be too flip about this, but I’m getting a little tired with the mental gymnastics that are necessary to look at the situation, right, and make it into something other than what it looks like.

Because what it looks like—I’ll give you one specific example. There was a very, I think, revealing question in these exit polls on Sunday in this Saxony-Anhalt election, where people were asked, do you feel like you’re getting what you deserve in Germany, or less than you deserve, or more than you deserve? And the voters who said, “I’m getting less than I deserve,” the AfD got most of those people, right?

And so, to look at this and say, Oh, they probably mean wages or social security, or they don’t know how to pay the rent—no. They didn’t say that, because they were also asked those questions, but that’s not what they said. They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question. And this who is deserving is so clearly defined in racial, and gendered, and sort of ethnic terms, right?

Why do they gravitate towards the AfD or towards MAGA? Because these parties or these movements are offering them an idea of, Hey, you deserve better, because you are a true German, or a real American, or an authentic American, all these terms that these people are using, right? And so they think, Yeah, no, I deserve—because I am a, quote-unquote, real German, I should be at the top of this society, and not just in politics, but in the family, in the workplace, in the public square. Why do I have to, quote-unquote, “share” my country with all these undeserving others, who are then again these racialized and gendered sort of categories.

And I think, again, that to me is why are we not—usually when you are faced with a sort of an important question in life, and there is a very clear, pretty obvious answer that seems to be explaining the things, that should be our default assumption. Rather than saying, “Oh, it clearly looks like this has something to do with race and gender and ethnonationalism, but how about we do all these mental gymnastics to find other ways to make it look like something else?”

Bacon: So when you and I met in 2019, 2020, what you were saying about the sort of racial, cultural dynamics of Trump was obvious and everyone agreed upon. Right now, I think that has become more debated. What I see as the reactions to the rise of the far right are two reactions. One, what I saw in Britain with the Labour Party, what I’m seeing in Germany, is the sense that, OK, this is about race and culture and so on, so we need to crack down on immigration. So you’re seeing the center-left and center-right parties crack down on immigration. So that’s one reaction, which is almost saying, “We’re the problem. We need to move to the right on immigration.”

The second reaction is in the sort of left-wing populist parties—I’ll say the sort of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders wing in the US—which is to say, “This is really about economics, and if we just have a more populist economics program, that’ll take the energy out of the far right.” I’m guessing you have some concerns about both these approaches. Can you talk about why neither one of them was probably likely to work?

Zimmer: It’s remarkable to me that after the Keir Starmer debacle in Britain, where you had a Labour government that went all in on adopting far-right positions on immigration, right? Properly all in, far more—

Bacon: And transgender issues as well, but yes.

Zimmer: Yeah, but I’m taking sort of immigration as the most salient issue. Going all in on this, far more than what the Democratic Party has done. And it didn’t work.

Now, that is not surprising if you read anything from any sort of political scientist, sociologist, whatever. Again, we have a mountain of evidence that adopting these far-right positions on immigration and on any other sort of, quote-unquote, “culture war issue,” and adopting their framing—the effect of that is, you’re not gaining back voters from them.

Because A, voters will generally see this as merely a tactical adjustment. They will not believe you, right? B, you are constantly legitimizing and normalizing this sort of framing of the problem. If the Labour Party in Britain constantly tells the people, Oh yeah, no, the far right is correct. Immigration is this great threat. It is the biggest problem that we’re facing, then people do not vote for the Labour Party. They vote for that party that says, We are the answer to this, the far right, these sort of ethnonationalists.

And so the only thing you’re doing is you’re shifting the entire discourse to the right by adopting their frameworks and their answers to the problem, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Again, we have 15 years at least of mountains of evidence of why this sort of normalizing doesn’t work. It is absolutely remarkable that anyone is still even considering it. It is stupid. And I’m not even saying it is morally abhorrent, right? Or normatively—which I also think it’s normatively wrong, or morally. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, as electoral politics, it is a disaster, and it doesn’t work, and yet everyone thinks, “Got to do it.”

Bacon: As far as I can tell, the governing party in Germany, their solution is going to be, and they’re going to move to the right more, right? That’s what they’re going to do. All indications are that’s what they’re going to do.

Zimmer: That’s already what they’ve been doing since they came into power in early 2025. Immigration is way down in Germany. And we’re not just talking illegal immigration. Like, asylum has basically been cracked down on. It’s gotten way more difficult. They’re already doing all this, right? And it’s not working. It’s just clearly not working, right?

OK, so that’s the one thing. And then on the economics front, I want to be clear. My point is not to say, there is no economic deprivation, or social and economic deprivation has no role in this story, that has nothing to do with it. No, it’s not helpful. It doesn’t help if people are generally thinking the system doesn’t work for them because they’re under too much sort of social, economic, financial, whatever pressure, right?

Again, there is this general sense of resentment towards the system, and clearly that is something that the far right, with this sort of promise to wipe away the status quo, can tap into. And so it’s not good if we have this sort of general sense of resentment. And to the extent we can fight that with a different sort of more egalitarian—that’s my position, right—economic policy, I am all for it. I am all for it. I’m all for redistributing wealth downward, right? And sharing that more equally. I’m all for it.

I just think, we have, again, all these studies that tell us, for instance, about, where is the support, who are the people who supported the Tea Party? Who are the people who are hardcore Trump? And then sometimes people will say, Yeah, but isn’t it true that a lot of that support comes from poorer regions in the United States, regions that are economically struggling?

Yes, but we also have studies that show us pretty clearly that within those, generally speaking, economically struggling regions, it’s not the poor, it’s not those who are really devastated, who are gravitating towards the far right. It’s those who are, relatively speaking, within those regions, relatively well off, and fear for the loss of status.

So that is just not the same as saying it’s the poor, and those who are really struggling, they don’t know how to pay the next rent. That is not the core support group for Trumpism. So we have to at some point just accept, that’s not what’s happening here.

Bacon: So part of what I think is going on is, the analysis you’ve given about the Trump supporters, even if you read that pretty well—the far right supporters are not poor people. They’re people who fear a loss of status. I assume as a politician you can’t say that out loud, because you’re not going to win their votes then. So I think part of what’s going on is, politicians, even the ones who probably have read these studies, probably can’t discuss what is the actual root of the far right. Is people resenting changes that make minorities and women and so on more powerful? That gets close to the Hillary Clinton thing.

And so I think part of it is, our analysis is harmed by politicians who can’t speak honestly about this stuff, and then pundits and so on who are playing politician and want to discuss these things dishonestly in a certain way. Does Ezra Klein really think Charlie Kirk is doing politics in the best way possible? I doubt it.

I just think there’s a lot of performance that’s going on here. Is it fair to say—I think these analyses have been read. It’s not clear to me politicians can speak honestly about the conclusion that what is driving the far right is this kind of cultural resentment.

Zimmer: I think there’s a few things coming together helping us explain why these sort of economic anxiety—that’s the thing, right? And everything else is downstream from that. All the racial stuff, and all the cultural resentment, and all the—that’s all downstream from what is at its core an economic anxiety. That sort of story, right?

Bacon: Despite, as you say, reams of evidence that the cultural anxiety is a huge part of the story. Despite that, people want to write that away.

Zimmer: At the very least, we have to see this far more holistically. As not, there is this one core issue and everything else is downstream from that. Far more holistically—which, by the way, is one of the big advantages the far right has, because they have a holistic sort of understanding of it. If you ask the far right, Hey, are you guys all about race, or gender, or religion, or is it wealth? they will just say, Yes, Exactly, right? Because they see this as, like, yeah, look, it’s about all of those dimensions. And so we would be much better served with coming up with an equally holistic sort of understanding of the problem.

But I think the question, why is this sort of economic anxiety tale so attractive, why are people clinging to that despite, again, empirically it just doesn’t work. First of all, I think there’s just this sort of enormous incentive to sanitize the discourse, and sanitize these sort of political choices of people who are coded as, quote-unquote, “regular folks.” And that’s sort of white people, right? That’s white conservative people.

We are constantly asked to come up with explanations of what they’re doing politically that sort of preserve their innocence, right? There’s this sort of idea of white innocence, right? And, by the way, this is not a new thing. When David Duke in the early ‘90s was close to winning a governorship in Louisiana, the next day what you read in the Los Angeles Times was, Oh, goodness me, economic anxiety must really be quite pressing in Louis— That sort of thing, right? It’s always been like that, right? Sort of this sanitizing thing.

And the other thing is also, I think, what you touched on, is—look, this is a coping mechanism, in the sense that if it were economic anxiety, then we would have a recipe to fight that, a political answer, right? We would say, “OK, you can fight this with a different distribution of wealth,” right? Redistributive policies can answer this and solve the problem. And that is just—honestly, that is almost a soothing kind of thought.

Rather than accept—and that would be my position—accept that, unfortunately, a significant portion of the people around us are simply not on board with this idea of an egalitarian pluralistic democracy, and that is a fight that you cannot hug away. You cannot find the right tone, and then they will be all, OK, we get it now. You can’t just—I don’t know. Again, you can’t just solve it with just economic policy. But then what do you do?

And at that point, I have to admit, me personally, I have to admit, I don’t know. Other than, you have to fight the fight, right? You have to accept you are in this fight, and you have to fight it and win it. But that is a far less attractive sort of message.

Bacon: I was going to ask, the next is, so what is the Thomas Zimmer plan to fight the far right? It’s not to talk about economics only in a sort of Bernie Sanders 2016 way. It’s not to move to the right on immigration or trans rights. So what would that kind of—you don’t have to have a full platform, but give me a sense of, what does this look like? And not as candidates, but what does a society—because I think a lot of your work is like, what does a media—I think part of it is, it’s not just Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Angela Merkel.

I think we’re putting too much on this one candidate, or one person. What does a society look like that’s trying to stop the far right from growing and entrench multiracial democracy? What does that look like? What does a plan to do that look like?

Zimmer: Yeah, again, I’m just glad I’m not a politician. But yeah, I think, so first of all, we need to stop pandering to the supposed needs and whims of these far-right voters. And so centering everything around what they may or may not want, it’s just not working. We need to break out of this vicious cycle of, right-wing parties are rising, that leads to democratic, small-D democratic parties adopting their framings and ideas, especially on migration and trans issues and whatever, and then that only helps the right. And in reaction, democratic parties double down. And we need to break out of this cycle. It doesn’t work.

What we need is, I think, any sort of progressive egalitarian democratic vision—you need your own agenda, and it cannot be just defend the system, defend the institutions, defend the status quo. I think what is very clear to me is that any sort of clinging to any kind of status quo politics is just not going to work. I think it’s also entirely inadequate as a response to the problems that we’re facing.

So substantively, it’s also the wrong thing to do. But we’re talking even in terms of just strategically, electorally, right? And I think, to me, again, one big advantage the right has is that they are pursuing what I would call a transformative vision, right? They do not want to just preserve—

Bacon: And you would say Labour, the Christian Democrats, the Democrats in the US are all doing some status quo-like politics. That’s part of the problem. They might debate that, but they, in general, come off to people like status quo parties.

Zimmer: Yes, I think so. I think they have, in response to the far right assault, unfortunately, I would say, accepted the role of defenders of the system, defenders of the status quo. And that, by the way, that also very much includes the Green Party in Germany, for instance, supposedly a progressive party, right? This is, I think, most likely the equivalent to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. That would be sort of the Green Party in Germany, right? They’ve all accepted, oh, we can’t do transformative politics right now, right? Because we are in a crisis. We’re in this crisis of liberal democracy, so we have to defend the system, right?

And it’s just not working. Again, you need a transformative vision. You need something that does not just promise to restore the status quo from before Trump or whatever, right? Because no one wants that. That, I think, is to me also the lesson from the Democratic primaries in the United States. I do not read the sort of relatively strong support for DSA candidates, or pretty sort of left-wing candidates, or DSA adjacent candidates—I do not read this as a pervasive longing for the party to move significantly to the left.

I read it as a pervasive longing for candidates who will just not do status quo politics, who can be trusted to pursue a transformative vision, right? To just move beyond the status quo. Not necessarily in a kind of far left kind of a sense, but in a, defending the status quo is not good enough. A political project that is just centered around the restoration of, or defending the system and restoring the status quo before, right—I think that is destined to fail. It’s just incapable of winning elections.

Bacon: That seems obvious. What about the sort of economic bit of, OK, if the transformative thing is basically only economics, I’m going to expand Medicare for All. Is that more transformative? I agree the status quo is not working, but is a political program that’s very economics-only focused, but I’m going to make everything free and so on—is that going to help?

Zimmer: Again, this is not a magic bullet to solve, like, right-wing extremism, right? I think we need to very quickly move away from that sort of—because again, look at what’s happening over here in Western Europe. Every single one of these Western European countries, aside from the UK, has a significantly stronger social welfare net than the United States. It doesn’t matter.

There’s no correlation whatsoever across Northern and Western Europe between the strength of the social welfare net and the strength of the right-wing parties. There’s no correlation whatsoever. You have countries with super strong social welfare systems, like the Scandinavian countries, and yet the far right over there is also basically as strong as anywhere. Like, polling at 25 to 30 percent, whatever, right? And sometimes they get more and sometimes they get less, but roughly speaking, they have gotten stronger and stronger.

Bacon: And by the way, there are countries in Western Europe that already have the Bernie Sanders economic plan, has already been implemented basically, and the far right—OK, I hadn’t really—I’m glad you put it that way.

Zimmer: It’s simply not a magic bullet, right? It’s simply not a magic bullet. But yes, a transformative vision must very much also mean a socioeconomically transformative vision, but it must mean more than that. Also transformative in the sense that, why are we not having a strong sort of political leadership that says, You know what? Yes, we are the party of pluralism. Of cultural, social, ethnic, racial pluralism, and that is our vision. Yes, that is the offer we are making to you, the electorate.

We’re not just offering you anti-immigration policy light. We’re not just offering you a kind of ethno state light. Because that offer is already out there, right? That’s already on offer, if you want that.

Bacon: So in the US, I think people think Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris offered a muscular multi—and I would argue they offered status quo with different race and gender, but the sort of strong, robust defense of a new multicultural world, I would argue Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris did not articulate. But I think that’s why in the US, I think people feel like that vision has been rejected. I would argue it’s not been articulated yet. But go ahead.

Zimmer: It’s not being rejected. Again, I think in the United States, if you look at the actual empirical evidence we have from, like, really good survey data, right? Something like what PRRI does every year, right, where they ask deeper questions, not just do you like Trump or not, but proper questions like, hey, should America be a pluralistic, multiracial democracy, or should it be a white Christian nation? And very clearly you see a stable majority of the population, somewhere between 60-ish percent or so, that say, No, we don’t want America as a white Christian nation. That’s not what it is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a pluralistic country where people can come, and if they agree with sort of the egalitarian idea, then they can come and be here with us.

Again, not saying this is any sort of magic bullet, but can we please have a little more of a robust sort of a kind of muscular defense of that sort of vision, rather than an almost, like, Oh, yeah, no, so sorry, I also feel bad about being a Democrat right now. I also feel bad about being progressive. I also feel really— Almost like a sort of almost apologizing constantly for not being a sort of white conservative Christian. What are we doing here? That offer is already out there, right?

Bacon: I think the word woke is used almost to attack that kind of view that you’re expressing, right? I think that’s what that word is coming to mean, is, like, someone who cares too much about inclusion and so on. I think that’s what that has come to. It’s become a pejorative almost.

Zimmer: I think, to me, in the United States especially, people who prefer to live in a multiracial, pluralistic, gender egalitarian democracy should, with a lot of force and courage, tap into the national myth that has always been—hey, it says all men are created equal. It’s literally sort of the country’s founding, almost like a religious sort of status document. Let’s just say, look, we all know it’s never been realized in any serious way, but it’s also always been a very strong something to refer to, something that people could refer to as a sort of foundational myth.

Why do we let the far right—the same in Germany, by the way—why do we let the far right pretend that they are representing the national mythos, right? They are the ones who are the guardians of the nation, and what the real nation is supposed to—instead of saying, no, in the United States, right from the start, there was this other egalitarian idea. An outrageous idea, by the way. It’s remarkable. We’ve never had it.

In world history, it would literally be the first time, right? First time in world history that you would actually create a society where the status of the individual would no longer be determined to a significant degree by race, gender, religion, or wealth. We’ve never tried this anywhere in any country in the world, right? So what a remarkable vision that is.

And again, I do not—if you look at the voting public on either side of the Atlantic, it doesn’t seem like people want a kind of ethnonationalism light. That is just very clearly electorally not working. So if the choice is, you could either move from ethnonationalism light to full on ethnonationalism, or you got to offer something else, right? A sort of robust defense of a transformative multiracial egalitarian vision—then why don’t we try this? Again, it’s remarkable to me. Keir Starmer—we should be grateful to him. He tried. It’s almost as if he said, Hey, guys, look, we’re going to do this. This is the experiment. I’m going to—

Bacon: We’re going to run the populism experiment in the UK. We’re going to let the UK do it. The US can just watch it. He literally followed the David Shor playbook to a T. So it’s amazing how unpopular he was.

Zimmer: I don’t know how many more times we need—how much more evidence, right? But I wanted to bring this back to the German case one more time. Again, this current German government, right, is doing the same stuff. Is all in on a very harsh sort of immigration restrictionist approach.

And the Conservative Party that is leading the German government right now is basically being decimated by the far right in response. So if the approach actually is, Oh, hey, if only we reduce immigration, then this problem goes away—OK, we’ve tried this several times in many countries over about a 15-year period.

At some point, can we at least—you know what really bugs me is when people pretend to be dumb. I just don’t want to play dumb. It bugs me, right? If someone wants to do something else, OK, but don’t expect me to play dumb and not look at the actual evidence we have. I don’t like that very much. It makes me angry. So let’s not do that, right? It’s been tried. It doesn’t work. We need to try something else.

Bacon: I think that’s a great place to end, actually. Thomas Zimmer, thanks for joining me. It sounds like there’s another state that’s having an election in East Germany in 10 days, so we might have to come back and have this same conversation, or a similar one.

Zimmer: The situation is slightly different, in the sense that over there, there’s currently a social democratic state government.

Bacon: What’s the name of the state? Sorry to interrupt you. What’s the name of the state?

Zimmer: It’s called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It’s in the northeast of Germany, at the Baltic Sea. And the AfD is again polling as the strongest party. But something interesting is happening there, in the sense that the Social Democrats have decided in that state, Hey, how about we tap into our sort of anti-fascist roots? Social Democrats were, in the early Nazi period, the ones who led the resistance against Nazism, right? And so they’re tapping into this, and basically saying, Hey, listen, the most anti-fascist sort of force in German history has always been Social Democrats. Come over here. We’ll prevent them from taking over state government.

So they’re running that sort of experiment, right? Rather than normalizing, which is what the conservatives tried in Saxony-Anhalt, the sort of, Oh, who knows? Maybe they’re not so bad. And if so many people vote for them, can they really be that bad? That sort of normalizing discourse. The Social Democrats are trying something very different in that other state. Let’s see if it works or not.

But I think Germany is looking at a series of elections, just like Western Europe is looking at a series of elections over the next few months, where my general sense is, unfortunately, that the far right is just so strong now, and it has broken containment. That to me is the biggest challenge, right? Is, how do you contain them again? And I don’t just mean politically, I also mean in terms of political culture. How do we make it not OK again to vote for far-right extremists? That to me is maybe the bigger challenge.

In the United States also, Perry, you’ve seen that so many times. You go to the airport, right? And you wait for boarding, and next to you sits some guy in, let’s say, a white middle-aged person, right, with some T-shirt that says, Hey, make leftists disappear again. And it’s like a silhouette of a helicopter, right? And it’s a reference to the Pinochet regime in Chile, where they put all the dissidents on helicopters and threw them out of the helicopters or the airplanes, right? This sort of thing, right?

We need to make that not OK again, because it’s not OK. We live in a society, and to put on a T-shirt that basically is an immediate violent threat to half the population—that is basically running around in the airport with a T-shirt that says to half the population, If you disagree with me, I want you to be thrown out of a helicopter, right? This sort of almost, quote-unquote, “playful” endorsement of political violence. We need to make that not OK again, because it’s not OK, right?

And that is what I am really concerned about. How can we contain that again? How can we rebuild these sort of boundaries around that sort of behavior, that goes far beyond just winning elections, but goes to a kind of social consensus, right? That sort of behavior is not OK, and it needs to be ostracized, and you need to be ostracized from mainstream society if you are a person running around in a T-shirt like that. And that is, I think, where we need to get back to.

Bacon: Let’s end there. Tell people where they can find your work and how they can support your work. And I know you have a great newsletter you’re working on right now, so talk about that a little bit, and also talk about what social media you’re using these days.

Zimmer: Yeah, I’m mostly using Bluesky. You’ll find me there under my name. So, mostly Bluesky. And then I write a newsletter called Democracy Americana, where every week I try to go big picture and put into perspective what just happened in the news. It used to be very much focused on the American far right and sort of American conservatism. And now, I guess since I now live in Germany and we have the situation over here, I’m also going to write a little bit more about the international dimension of this struggle, and the global far right assault on democracy.

So this weekend, for instance, I’ll write something about MAGA and the AfD, and the relationship between MAGA and the AfD, and the sort of America First foreign policy that is basically actively trying to force regime change across Western Europe, and actively intervening in the domestic politics over here on behalf of these right-wing extremists, which is, again, outrageous. But I think I’ll start writing more about that also, I think, because it seems appropriate.

Bacon: And Democracy Americana you can find—it’s not a Substack newsletter, right? You have to find it on a different platform?

Zimmer: It is still on Substack, so you can still find it on Substack, you can still subscribe on Substack. But it is mainly hosted by a platform called Steady. So if you want to support the work financially—I’m a full-time independent writer, so if someone wants to support me financially, that is via the Steady platform. But it doesn’t matter, if you subscribe on Substack you’ll find it.

Bacon: Great. Thomas, thanks for joining me. Great conversation. Take care.

Zimmer: Thank you so much. Bye.

Bacon: Bye-bye.