Cartoonish Candidates Aside, the Far Right Is No Laughing Matter

It’s easy to dismiss Herschel Walker as the hapless face of the far right.

Yes, he lost. But he lost by less than 1 percent of the vote. Wildly unsuitable far-right politicians lost by similarly close margins elsewhere in the United States (I’m looking at you, Kari Lake). And some of them, of course, even won.

These politicians are, of course, fodder for late-night comics and political cartoonists. They spice up bland politics like a dash of hot sauce. But the news out of Germany is a start reminder that the far-right clowns are not content to just ride around in their clown cars.

German police this week arrested members a domestic terrorist organization determined to overthrow the German government because it had already been taken over by a “deep state.” Members of the group included someone from Germany’s far right Alternativ fur Deutschland party as well as quite a few with military training. There was a Russian citizen in the mix as well.

There are echoes of January 6 in all of this. But Germans tend to be more organized than Americans, and the far right even more so.

The foiling of this German plot is a stark reminder that the far right is not conservative but deeply radical in its determination to undermine and, if necessary, overthrow democracy. The far right in the United States is potentially just one election and one declared “state of emergency” away from dismantling the “deep state” and subverting democracy from within.