Seymour Martin Lipset

Another interesting feature which was reported on in a post-election analysis by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Institute, the Kass Institute that does a lot of research, was 83% of the voters who voted for the AFD reported feeling that Eastern Europe, or sorry, Eastern Germany, or citizens from Eastern Germany were still regarded as second-class citizens.

So you can see there's a bit of a center periphery dynamic going on there, as Lipset and Rokhan would say.

And in the broader context that Professor Tan was mentioning, we've of course seen a rise of the AFD for the last few or three elections at the federal level.

There was almost a perception after the last federal election when Friedrich Merz was elected as chancellor that somehow the question was whether the AFD had reached a ceiling.

He was a comparativist, and he really is the one that destroyed modernization theory because he had a theory of political development where basically all good things did not go together the way that the modernizers, you know, believed.

Uh, and then, uh, the final one was Seymour Martin Lipset, a great, uh, both sociologist and political scientist, and it's from him that I learned about comparative politics.

You know, he had this saying that he, uh, [laughs] told all of his students, you know, that he or she who knows only one country knows no countries.

Because, uh, if you grow up in that kind of narrow framework without understanding the way comparable societies are organized, you're really not gonna understand anything about your own society.

But it really is just an example of how Americans are treated.

are different a brief story if you'll indulge me um the social scientist seymour martin lipset had this great example which was in 1976 or excuse me in 1776 if you were a royalist or a loyalist you probably went to canada or stayed in canada and if you were in favor of the american patriot cause the cause of the colonies of independence you were in or remained in the colonies And fast forward 200 years exactly.

In 1976, both the American and Canadian governments declare that they're going to switch to the metric system.

And Canada says, OK, in America, it's like, no, we're not.