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Horst Seehofer is the most privileged living German. Well, it has to be one, right? (Why not Steinmeier, you may ask.) Good question! Steinmeier is hierarchically higher than Seehofer, he is head of state, higher does not go. But he is in the SPD.) Worse is that the most privileged German is one in whom you like in the textbook can show how a wrong handling of privileges looks like.
It's not bad to have privileges. It only depends on what you make of it. Quite a lot of people have social, undeserved privileges over others from birth. People without disabilities are more privileged than people with disabilities, people with German passports are more privileged than people with most other passports, men more than women, rich-born people more than poor-born, and so on.
Peggy McIntosh referred to privilege in the 1980s as an invisible backpack given to white people at birth. And then there are still privileges that come later, because you have achieved a certain status. Such as an office as Federal Minister of the Interior, of which one simply does not resign - and will not be dismissed, no matter how badly you do the job.
I'm not very old, but I can remember times when people resigned jobs because they drove drunk because they were talking about something in a difficult way, or because they found themselves too old. You can argue about what was right in which case, but you'll have to admit that resignations are less in vogue today than they could be. You do not want to incite anyone to get drunk in the car, but with Seehofer you think about it for a short time, if that would not be the case - if only you could make sure that he does not do anything wrong, just be filmed.
He is not stupid, even though he is often senile
Horst Seehofer would have had many perfect opportunities lately, to which he could have resigned. For a brief moment in July, it was finally happening, it was sweet hours. You could easily say: Yeah, it was really bad at last. He has sabotaged the work of this federal government by stubbornness as a member of the Federal Government, he was pleased when on his 69th birthday 69 people were deported to an insecure country. When shortly thereafter one of them committed suicide, Seehofer found that "deeply regrettable", but that sounded more like "he messed up my party" as "Oh god, I'm ashamed".
Privileges give some people opportunities for action or access to resources that others do not have. They can do things without punishment that others can not do without punishment (not only in the legal sense, but also more generally, socially). Horst Seehofer has paraphrased the sentence "the alien is guilty of everything" in the phrase that migration is "the mother of all problems" - and he gets away with it. When a television crew interviews an unemployed East German who represents this attitude, he is the stupid Nazi Ossi who seeks to blame others. When Seehofer advocates this attitude, a few people get upset for a while and go on.
The bad thing about Seehofer: He seems to know exactly that he completely exceeds the measure. He is not stupid, even though he is often senile. I hope everyone has seen the video of his beer talk speech. Look at that. I do not want to shame anyone for their age and health or mental state, but this man is completely over. But he stands over it and says things that one would rather expect from a drunk, who later apologized profusely ("I am happy about anyone who is criminal in Germany and comes from abroad").
It gets worse the longer you listen
That's not fair, it was recently published on "Welt Online". They tried to explain that Seehofer was not the wretched racist he appeared, but it was not quite right to explain. It was "not fair" to focus on the sentence with the delinquency, because Seehofer previously referred to Sami A., the alleged former Bin Laden bodyguard. But that does not make things any better, because if Seehofer is "happy" about people who are being deported even though they may be threatened with torture, he has not learned much from his birthday party.
Some people are rhetorically inhospitable and need to be listened to longer to understand them. With Horst Seehofer, the longer you listen, the worse it gets. The puzzle of free-wheeling racist hate and superficially tried values automatically merges on its own. If Seehofer speaks of his acting according to the Christian conviction, then this has nothing to do with any basic Christian value, but serves only as a regional marker to delineate Islam. Seehofer might as well refer to the broadcast with the mouse or herring salad, and his speech would rhetorically lose nothing.
Of course, the Minister of the Interior knows about the criticism of him. "So now the evil Seehofer is in front of you, the murderer, the terrorist, the racist," he said in the beer tent. The murderer and the terrorist are not right. But another feature of privileges is not having to worry about certain things, even if they are perceived as conflicts. To know that you can continue.
A friend of mine is a therapist. He knows, like any reasonable therapist, that you should not ask for remote diagnosis. Only some things are like a picture book. One speaks in psychology of projections, if you transfer your own internal conflicts to others, he said recently. And there would be a very fitting example for it: "Horst is happy that others have to go because they have built shit."