Since 2020, a formidable array of scholars and public intellectuals has sought to explain the paradoxical political subjectivities and alliances that emerged during and from the COVID-19 pandemic. How can we make sense of the vegan influencers, assorted esoterics, and peace activists who made common cause with the far right? What prompted the yoga teachers who posted social media content alleging global conspiracies? Or the polite middle-class pensioners who expressed a desire to crush their enemies in the name of freedom? These questions have spawned insightful writing, ranging from short-form interventions, such as a widely-shared Boston Review essay by academics William Callison and Quinn Slobodian,Footnote ¹ to bestsellers such as Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger,Footnote ² and to book-length academic treatments such as the newly translated Offended Freedom by sociologists Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey.Footnote ³

A standard empirical reference point in this literature are the German Querdenkers. The term initially became associated with anti-lockdown protests in the city of Stuttgart, where a group called “Querdenken 711”—referring to Stuttgart’s 0711 area code—agitated against pandemic measures. Soon, groups of Querdenkers sprang up elsewhere, leading the charge against lockdowns and later against vaccination campaigns.Footnote ⁴ The term Querdenken is reminiscent of the interwar red-brown Querfronts, a term also sometimes used to denote politically heterogenous reactionary coalitions generally. More colloquially, Querdenken has long referred to of out-of-the-box thinking, a term one might encounter in management publications.Footnote ⁵

The Querdenkers offer what one might call a “diagonalist” politics, which is difficult to pin to on a left–right axis, but hostile to contemporary parliamentary politics, blending “convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.”Footnote ⁶ Observers were puzzled by the coalition assembled by the Querdenkers. While calling for “Peace, freedom, no dictatorship,” the German diagonalists at the lockdown protests were initially at least open to the far right, before the far right came to dominate the protests entirely over the course of 2022 [186]. Even at the individual level, their politics appeared riven with contradictions, mixing authoritarian sentiments with a passionate defence of freedom. Observers generally agree that developments in information and communication technologies have played a role in shaping and spreading these beliefs, as has the withering of civil society organisations which formerly connected citizens to mainstream political parties. Beyond these shared insights, explanations diverge.

Some, such as the critic Richard Seymour, draw on Freudian scholarship to argue that the Querdenkers’ complaints and conspiracy theories should be read as a kind of “dreamwork.”Footnote ⁷ For example, conspiracies about tracking devices embedded in vaccines can be read as expressions of a fantasy about penetration. “It is in the work of distortion, the mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor, that unconscious desire secretes itself,” Seymour writes. “[T]he effect [of the dreamwork] is to transform a network of often rivalrous powers, both capitalist and state, whose inability to master the systems they benefit from has been exposed in multiple crises, into a single omnipotent and omniscient command centre.” Here, the “strange dialectic” between resisting overwhelming state power and embracing it is resolved through an account of the ambivalent pull of desire. “What is at stake here is the conspiracist’s contradictory desire for totalitarianism, as a solution to the crisis of authority.”Footnote ⁸

Another set of explanations draws on the history of ideas to clarify the complex origins of, for example, environmental thinking. Although environmentalism is now coded as a belief of the left, its political history is more complex, as histories of far-right ecologism testify.Footnote ⁹ In light of such histories, the alliance between eco-conscious former Green voters and their fellow protesters from the far right loses some of its paradoxical quality. Naomi Klein charts similarly intertwining histories in her own effort to explain an emergent diagonalist politics,Footnote ¹⁰ tracing among other things how efforts to “cure” or harness children’s autism traversed the political spectrum, resulting in recent years in a lively community of “autism moms” who blame vaccines. The arguments developed by this community provided a ready supply of vaccine scepticism to be rapidly recycled into viral disinformation, such as the film Plandemic. Here again the history of ideology allows us to understand how seemingly contradictory political inclinations are connected.

In their book Offended Freedom, sociologists Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey offer a third path, drawing on the seminal report The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno and his Berkeley colleagues. Amlinger and Nachtwey describe the pandemic protesters they interviewed as libertarian authoritarians. “They are authoritarian in the sense that they display several of the authoritarian personality traits as described by Adorno and his colleagues: authoritarian aggression, displays of ‘toughness’, destructiveness, cynicism, (conspiracy theory-based) projectivity and superstition can often be seen in severe and variously combined forms […] [But other characteristics] are either absent or coded differently: the Querdenker are not oriented towards the conventional values of the old middle classes but want to be unconventional” [215]. They adhere to no leader figure, but only to the abstract principle of freedom.

With a dash of Kulturpessimismus in classic Frankfurt School style,Footnote ¹¹ the authors locate the origin of the Querdenker mindset in a flawed concept of freedom, which laments all restrictions on (negative) freedom and denies the interdependencies that make positive freedom possible. Such a conception of freedom is an outgrowth, they argue, of a neoliberal society in which the citizen is required to be a self-actualising and self-determined individual, while stripped of “the social conditions on the basis of which they are supposed to develop their competitive autonomy” [126]. Thus, people fight limits to their negative freedom in the strongest possible terms. In forty-five interviews with Querdenker, Amlinger and Nachtwey’s interviewees describe lockdown measures as dictatorial and mask mandates for children as akin to sexual abuse [195].

Like other scholarship on the seemingly irrational fears of the diagonalists and conspiracists, Offended Freedom must navigate several challenges. First, it runs the risk of overstating the liberal bona fides of existing societies. If the original Frankfurt School sought to protect the individual from society, Amlinger and Nachtwey write, “[t]he Critical Theory of the present no longer needs to enlighten individuals about the dangers of a repressive society; its task is, rather, to warn society about the individual rebelling against this same society” [29]. The “we” to which Amlinger and Nachtwey refer appears to be a citizen, with a powerful passport (“we can pack up and travel wherever we want to” [62]), as indeed all of their interviewees seem to be. The “historically dominant social characters” or ideal-types that populate the book have comparatively little to fear from the state, but the violent and coercive side of the state, which is mostly absent from their account, is nevertheless real. Amlinger and Nachtwey’s interviewees are wrong in their allegations that the pandemic was manufactured for the purposes of social control, but this is no reason to exonerate the state altogether. The words “we” and “generally” do a lot of work in the authors’ assertion that “we are generally protected from a despotic state” [2].

Second, the framing of ressentiment—or resentment—which recurs throughout the book, can lead to an anti-democratic, psychologising approach to mass movements. Amlinger and Nachtwey draw explicitly on Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Scheler, whose theorisations of resentment were expressly anti-egalitarian.Footnote ¹² Framing ideology as resentment is often patronising, akin to reducing socialism to the envy of wealth.Footnote ¹³ Nevertheless, Amlinger and Nachtwey do wield Nietzsche thoughtfully: the present-day Nietzschean revolt is not spearheaded by the powerless, they argue, but equally by the privileged, whose sense of powerlessness emanates not from their subaltern position in society, but from the very restrictions that make society possible. This is an innovative and interesting approach, which may prove useful in political sociological work beyond diagonalism per se.

Finally, locating the origins of diagonalist politics in the condition of society as a whole inevitably leaves open questions about why some sections of society are more likely than others to adopt this mode of politics. At times, the authors’ diagnosis of society in general seems to be at odds with the social position of the Querdenker more specifically. Amlinger and Nachtwey list education as a dialectical driver of progress as well as of regression in empowering people to “think for themselves” without reckoning with the vast complexity of the modern world. Yet we know that anti-vax and COVID-sceptic views are generally concentrated among those with fewer, not more educational qualifications. (In their own survey of COVID protesters, the higher-educated are overrepresented, but Amlinger and Nachtwey concede that this may reflect sampling bias rather than a greater propensity of the higher educated to become Querdenker.)

With the waning of the pandemic from the cultural consciousness, scholarly interest in diagonalist politics has receded somewhat. It would be a mistake, however, to disregard the lessons of the pandemic-era political upheavals. Just as submerged currents of far-right ecologism, suspicion of the pharmaceutical industry, autism activism, vaccine scepticism, and late-20th century countercultures merged to create the Querdenker, so too will future political orientations draw on the arguments put forward by the paradoxical coalitions of our recent past.