As a rule, employees in our system benefit from solid competence and performance: They then earn more, get the next job as a self-employed person, and soon lead a team. The usual working world of “normal” people is a performance milieu.
The mediocrity environment
The situation is different in the political parties and their affiliated think tanks. There are constantly very few formally qualified personalities who hardly show any competence, who at best spread a dull shine.
What differs from the high-performance environment of the economy is broken off vocational training, unfinished long-term studies, bad English and holterdie blustering rhetoric here no problem. Because two laws essentially determine progress in the parties.
They are: 1. “You have to (really each) be a good friend.” 2. “You may no Speaking out before you are unaware of the majority opinion of your friend network.” Following these rules creates a mediocrity milieu.
Installation is a network thing
We elect the politicians – but first after the few officials among the 1.4 percent of the population who are members of the Bundestag parties have made their selection for us for election.
That is why (following Law 1) in the parties everyone who is willing to get promoted indiscriminately fawns over everyone to be on the safe side – because everyone could be “affiliated” with everyone else. And that’s why (following Law 2) nobody who wants to become something freely speaks their mind in the party – because you never know how your own network sees something. Careless discussants split the network from which they want to be set up.
Consequently, the substantive level of the discussion remains in parties systembedingt far below the informed citizen in the kitchen and on their walks.
party democracy
But that scares people who come from a high-performing milieu in which networking and being nice alone are not enough for advancement. The latest, even tried-and-tested knowledge and skills from business and research are therefore hardly represented in the parties. The seemingly arbitrary lateral shifts of politicians from one ministerial office to a completely different one speak volumes about this.
Upward selection and downward protection of mediocrity are the laws of movement of the personnel in parties: whoever is moderately popular, soft in terms of content and visibly harmless to the powerful gets to the top. Whoever is at the top protects personnel below who cannot endanger their own position. “A weak boss hires even weaker people,” as we know in business.
And the party democracy is done, in which above all parties with their internal logic and only secondarily people are represented. For this reason are, for example, fraud (in Berlin even repeated Fraud) in publications, open conflicts of interest and corruption affairs are no obstacles to careers in parties: the poverty of some actors does not disrupt the network game of choosing candidates and also creates options to publicly (but not within the party) discredit competitors.
The all-German turning point
Those who represent clear values and are technically competent are quickly eliminated from the upward selection of mediocrity in our parties. Therefore, self-sufficient party apparatuses should lose influence within the framework of a constitutional reform.
Much more often, citizens have to vote directly for themselves and in a way that is binding for everyone, and elect their MPs directly. The backroom lists of the parties, through which a network of functionaries sneaks into the government, have to go.
Until our next, this time all-German turn to more direct democracy, we will live with the mediocrity of German politics and adjust the pale colors of our parliaments every few years.