Authored by Frank-Christian Hansel via American Greatness,

Germany is not, in the first place, suffering from an economic crisis, an energy crisis, a migration crisis, or a crisis of state. Germany is suffering, chiefly, from a crisis of its elites.

More precisely, Germany is suffering from a crisis brought on by that milieu which regards itself as the country’s morally, intellectually, and administratively legitimate leadership class but which has, for years, sustained a regime of reality-avoidance, self-congratulation, and rhetorical substitutes for genuine action.

The misery of our situation is not that mistakes have been made. Mistakes are part of politics.The real misery is that Germany has produced a class of managerial elites that refuses to change course even when the consequences of its actions lie plainly exposed.That class does not correct itself, because it no longer measures itself against reality; rather, it measures itself against the approval of its own circles. It does not want to be right before the tribunal of reality; it wants to be right before the tribunal supplied by its own milieu.

That is the root of Germany’s decline.

The Federal Republic was once—for all its flaws—a country that drew its strength from a peculiar mixture of sobriety, an ethic of performance, technical reason, institutional discipline, and bourgeois self-restraint. This country was not great through pathos but through seriousness, not through visions but through reliability, and not through moral grandstanding but through quiet competence. That was precisely why it was strong: because it had the capacity to concentrate on what was necessary, instead of losing itself in what was desirable.

Of that Germany, little remains inside the ruling apparatus.

In place of prosaic sobriety, a political-media class has emerged that mistakes governing for pedagogical world-improvement. Its first instinct is no longer to secure, to enable, and to set limits. Its first instinct is to educate, to frame, to therapize, to reinterpret, and to morally cultivate. Its relationship to the citizen is no longer republican; it is curatorial. The citizen no longer appears to this class as the sovereign on whose behalf it works—as Helmut Schmidt once understood the office—but as a problem case: too skeptical, too stubborn, too set in his ways, and too interested in normality, safety, and prosperity.

This is where the real cultural rupture becomes visible.

Germany’s elites no longer distrust merely particular political positions. They distrust ordinary life itself. The desire for normality, the desire for affordable energy, the desire for borders, the desire for safety in public space, the desire for cultural continuity—the desire, in short, that a state should first be obligated to its own—all of this is held in the upper reaches of society to be suspect, unpleasantly banal, and morally backward.

Source: ZeroHedge News