The Right’s Race to the Bottom

It’s understandable that a movement tired of losing wants a win. It is less clear why the German right has decided that Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante counts as one.

You can almost understand it. When you’ve spent years feeling like the losing side of every argument, sooner or later you want a win of your own — a moment when the tables turn and you allow yourself the mean little laugh, however badly it makes you look. A serves you right.

But whoever loses every last shred of decency in the process risks throwing away every ideal he claimed to stand for. All for one brief hit of satisfaction.

In 2024 a clutch of Sylt party-boys with sweaters draped over their shoulders made national news in Germany by belting out “Foreigners out, Germany for the Germans” to Gigi d’Agostino’s Amours toujours in the manner of drunken football hooligans. The left-wing mainstream was scandalised; the right saw its opening and moved to claim the chant as its own. For a few weeks D’Agostino’s melody was recast as a symbol of resistance; editors-in-chief called out excitedly to their staff that “people aren’t taking it anymore,” secretly waiting for the revolution to break out any minute.

Nothing happened. But anyone with foreign roots — or with a modicum of taste and manners — could only furrow his brow. Are these really the values a conservative counter-movement should be standing up for?

You see the same phenomenon on the international stage. Kanye’s “Nigger heil Hitler” was mostly there for the provocation, as is the wider, uncritical rehabilitation of the Austrian painter and his ideology in certain online circles — provocation for the sake of provocation.

It’s always the same thing: getting one over on the enemy. Winning an election, gaining in the polls, generating clicks and grifting nicely off the whole thing. But what does it build? Is a right-wing world in which the former land of poets and thinkers reaches the summit of its artistic achievement with “Foreigners out”–cover chants, “Am-I-still-allowed-to-say-’Negerkuss’” fairground beats and Uwe Boll exploitation really a desirable alternative?

The excuses are always close at hand. You “can’t take a joke,” or you “have to understand that the frustration needs to come out.” Fair enough — but after ten years of resistance, would it not be about time to see some sort of positive vision, and not just bottom-drawer trolling?

Enter Uwe Boll

Hardly anyone could escape the Uwe Boll Citizen Vigilante phenomenon these past weeks. Boll’s provocation worked. A trash film, viral on the strength of a garishly telegraphed political message, drew more attention than it could ever have earned.

Enough has been written about the film’s plot and message that I’ll spare you mine. But it needs saying that the director’s explanation — that the film critically interrogates the violence it depicts, since the protagonist “goes too far” and the audience is meant to notice — is unconvincing, and reality has given it the lie.

96% positive audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, at time of writing, tell you that a large share of viewers are willing to let the film get away with quite a lot, whether out of a taste for provocation or ideological alignment — the cathartic at last someone said it.

There’s not much critical distance to be found there, and honesty compels one to note that the average Uwe-Boll-film-enjoyer isn’t exactly a discerning aesthete before the Lord, but takes his pleasure in the bluntness of the cinematic weapon.

That some people — or their AI — feel moved to write hymns to the film as a major cinematic achievement, and even, one struggles to believe it, to compare its brutal opening scene to a depiction of the Last Supper by Uwe Boll, is telling: the provocation, the trolling of the mainstream, all of it is deadly earnest. No wink softens the rage; on the contrary, the encomiums reveal a readiness to indulge the lowest instincts without restraint, so long as they service the right political resentments.

The Question of Quality

The usual objection is that the left glorifies revenge fantasies on screen too. Fair enough — and rightly criticised for it. But there is often a decisive difference: quality.

Plenty of films and works of art take up morally questionable positions, and yet their worth as art earns them a right to exist beyond that. Aesthetic quality is not an accessory; it is a constitutive element of all art. You can still listen to Beethoven’s Eroica today without being a supporter of the Napoleonic campaigns. You can prefer the Habsburgs to the Bourbons and still enjoy the music of Lully. Because it is good music. And so one can watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another with profit, even though it stages a leftist waging a revenge campaign against the right, because Anderson is a masterful director.

This quality is missing not only in Boll — the feel for this quality is missing across large stretches of the right-conservative camp. Out of a hunger for any moment of unity, usually sought at the lowest common denominator, one is prepared to accept anything at all so long as it might serve the political gain.

But the conservative-right house must stand on solid foundations, not be built on sand. To say that God is that foundation has become almost fashionable again by now — but what does it mean? God calls us to strive toward him, toward the fulfilment of our potential. The easy, the low, the tasteless, the ugly — these are not from God. They are repulsive, and it can hardly surprise anyone that the young especially, searching for meaning and beauty in life, turn away from this right in disgust.