There is a pink elephant in the House, but we are not allowed to look at it, the chairman said. And then everyone started doing that even more.
We saw this wonderful application of Wegner’s ‘ironic process theory’ (1987) in action last week when Volt MP Laurens Dassen called the PVV ‘extreme right’. Chamber chairman Martin Bosma (himself of the PVV) immediately intervened and forbade the House to use that word, “because it was a Nazi comparison.” Subsequently, other MPs started using that word much more, and each media channel devoted a text box to the correct definition of extreme right.
Everyone was talking about it. At the same time, every social science and humanities researcher knows that there is little point in doing so to provide intrinsically controversial concepts with an absolute interpretation corset. They will erupt again in no time. It is a lot more interesting to study the development of that discussion and see what function such a concept actually has.
The parties that will form the current coalition are not known for their fear of hyperbole. They are usually fighters for freedom of speech, no matter how extreme. And yet it was PVV member Bosma who wanted to ban the concept and tried to create a taboo.
Think upwards
Every democratic arrangement has its own moral foundation. The American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin called this the ‘moral paradigm’ of a particular political community, that which connected all members of the community and should also be available to everyone. That could be the struggle for emancipation and civil rights. Or just standing up for a completely free market economy and a state that is as small as possible. But there is an ‘eschatology’ behind it, an upward thinking: a struggle for a better future, based on a certain image of humanity, an idea of a society that is equally available to all members of the community. This is different from the purely utilitarian or technocratic view that sees democracy as a pragmatic arrangement that should produce as much happiness as possible for as many people as possible (the Benthamian approach). Dworkin argued for a moral benchmark. According to him, you need this when pragmatics suffers from conflicting principles about what is good for which majority.
You would say, we could really use something like that these days, a moral benchmark like that.
The major popular parties all had such an ideal blueprint somewhere, whether or not it had gathered dust in a drawer of their scientific office. But the new parties? NSC party leader Omtzigt himself admitted it: the negotiating parties had not gotten around to discussing images of humanity and underlying values. The consensus on the banal matters of life, such as pensions, was already fragile enough. (Note: I am not concerned here with an image of God or a concept of a utopia, it is simply about an image of humanity and a specific representation of what good coexistence is).
That’s why Bosma’s attempt was so interesting. The new coalition parties have no blueprints for an upward movement. They have exactly the opposite: they operate from the taboo. Don’t mention the war. We are not Nazis.
That’s a genius move, because with that black hole of the term-that-must-not-be-used, they suck all the energy out of the opposition parties. As soon as opposition parties start waving the moral cudgel of the extreme right, they hit themselves on the fingers. Bosma had seen it right, every time he manages to portray himself and the PVV as victims of ‘stigmatization’ and ‘demonization’, this results in virtual seat gains.
The problem is of course not the term ‘extreme right’. That term has good credentials. It was already used in the Netherlands in 1930 to indicate ultra-right parties in Germany that stood up for a national popular community and that distanced themselves from views on universal rights and equality, such as the NSDAP. But it was always a relative concept: the extreme right is extreme compared to the center.
A moral benchmark
In short, the extreme right is a fluctuating concept that you can easily use and apply to the PVV, if it were not for the fact that our political community has made it a moral benchmark. And that’s a shame.
Yes, the Shoah and the war of extermination are a black hole in our modern history. But just like the obsession with genocide in the debates about Israel and Gaza, it is very problematic to rule out all other morality against it. Are there no other benchmarks to indicate what is objectionable? Or even better: to indicate what constitutes morally high action? Why do we need the Nazis and their genocide for that? Can’t the opposition parties stand up for a clear moral benchmark for a fair minimum subsistence? Can’t Omtzigt explain whether he bases his social contract and associated view of humanity on Hobbes (man is selfish) or on Rousseau (man is free)? And can the PVV finally explain what the moral benchmark of their national community is, and how pleasant that will be for future generations of Dutch people?
In short, how do you get rid of that pink elephant? Not by banning it and fighting against it, but by inventing a better one.
Beatrice de Graaf is professor of history of international relations in Utrecht.
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