Yellow: Germans who feel they can speak freely. Red: Germans who feel they CANNOT speak freely.
If anything, the grip of “political correctness” is stronger in Europe than in the U.S. The prescribed (and sometimes mandated) ideology of socialism, equality of outcomes, anti-mobility, anti-automobility, trust in government, and the climate doomsday religion is repeated incessantly–every hour–by every official and corporate platform in Germany.
Polling shows the percentage of Germans who now feel unfree to express their opinions is higher than the percentage who feel free to speak. And for the most part, feelings of freedom exist only for leftist elites. See here.
The online philosopher Eugyppius writes on December 22, 2023 that surveys are regularly taken of German attitudes, including Germans’ assessment of their individual freedom. The German “Freedom Index” score recently registered an abysmal -0.8.
“Since the 1950s, they have been asking Germans whether they feel they can express their political opinions freely. . . . This year, only 40% of their respondents said they felt free to express their political opinions.”
Eugyppius writes that “Surprisingly, that number – which if anything seems implausibly high to me – actually represents an all-time low.”
Not surprisingly, this feeling of being stifled is registered most prominently among the working classes. While “[a] clear majority (75%) of Greens alone feel that they can speak their minds, and so here we learn who feels best represented by our present discourse.”
“51% of those with university degrees or an Abitur feel their political expression is unhampered, while clear majorities of everybody else say they cannot speak their minds.”
“The opinions which govern German society, as I’ve written many times before, are not those of most people, but rather of an increasingly insular, university-educated urbanite class, who are relatively affluent, who vote overwhelmingly Green and who constitute no more than 15% of the population.”
