When Old Parties Panic

I remember when Rezo’s video came out. He was a YouTuber in Germany and he’d made this long takedown of the CDU, the country’s center-right party, and it went everywhere just before an election. Suddenly younger people were actually paying attention to politics. The party’s leadership watched this happen and their response told you everything about where they’d ended up.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer decided the problem wasn’t their policies. It wasn’t that they’d become irrelevant to anyone young. The problem was that people were allowed to watch criticism of them online, and they needed to change that. So she started talking about needing laws to regulate speech before elections. If 70 newspaper editors published anti-CDU editorials right before an election, that would need governing, she said. The more she explained it, the more it was clear she wasn’t talking about fairness. She was talking about control.

She did admit the CDU had bungled their response—too slow, too late. But the answer wasn’t to change anything. It was to make laws. Which is just a cleaner way of saying we can’t make our case more persuasive than the case being made against us, so we need it to be illegal.

What struck me was how honest it all was. A party that still said the word democracy was describing, out loud, why it needed to silence critics. She used careful language, talked about asymmetric mobilization and political culture, but the meaning was obvious. We can’t compete if people can hear both sides, so make it stop.

Europe was building Upload Filters at the same time—automatic systems to remove content from the internet. And you could feel it: wouldn’t those be useful. A way to just erase the wrong kind of speech.

A party that’s aged out doesn’t need laws. It just needs to get old faster.