Rick provides nice followup to this bit of Lemkin wisdom in a New Yorker piece:
…it’s not as if German conservatives are a bunch of crazy far-right nihilists. This is not the Republicans we’re talking about. Both the CDU and the FDP recognize the urgency of global warming. Neither of them has a problem with gays. (The FDP’s leader, soon to be foreign minister, is the country’s other openly gay political bigwig.) Nor do they have a problem with allowing a woman to end a pregnancy if she feels she must, or with telling kids to use condoms if they can’t resist having sex, or with the theory of evolution, or with gun control—or, for that matter, with “socialism.” The vast majority of Germans, including most CDU voters and probably even most FDP voters, have no desire to junk the basic architecture of German social welfare, which, of course, is mainly the creation of the SPD. That’s another reason the SPD found it so difficult to get fired up and ready to go.
Thanks, Rick!
Lemkin 