The story dates back some years. In 1517, the German monk Martin Luther is said to have nailed his ’95 Theses’ to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church. Among the arguments in this document, one of the foundational texts of Protestant Christianity, was the claim that the faithful don’t need tradition, custom or religious authorities to access the word of God, as it’s all there in the Bible.

This signalled a turning away from the general belief that you should rely on kings, priests or other human, worldly authority figures to tell you what was right. Don’t submit to them, Luther argued, read the biblical texts.

Some five centuries on, this anti-authority revolution has gone well beyond Christianity. Today it is hard to think of a mainstream cultural or institutional arena where it’s not generally accepted that authority and tradition should be questioned, challenged and if possible superseded.

First as Nonconformists and then as general non-conformists, we’ve moved beyond questioning the authority of the Catholic church to questioning the Christian church full stop. Having run out of priests and doctrines there, we’ve moved on to questioning everything from history, teachers and Boy Scouts to fathers, and all that lies in between. The aim has evolved somewhat; whereas Luther was concerned with what he saw as a more authentic faith, today we’re agitating for freedom from anything that hasn’t been freely chosen. One Mumbai antinatalist, Raphael Simons, even proposed suing his parents for having him without his consent.

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This collapse of faith in authority poses a particular challenge to liberal parents. One Washington Post writer frames it: “I’m A Die-Hard Liberal. It Ruined My Parenting.” If you believe all humans are (or should be) as free as possible, then how does that apply to children? When children are neither fully rational nor capable of full independence, how does the doctrine of human freedom apply?

For one thing, liberal views make it harder to order your kids about. According to Pew Research, the more liberal parents are, the less emphasis they place on obedience in their children. Only 35% of consistently liberal American parents believe in teaching their kids obedience, compared to 68% of consistently conservative parents. Anyone who believes passionately in freedom for everyone will struggle with the prospect of telling your children to do as they’re told ‘because I said so’.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Even the most right-on anti-authoritarian will drop the metaphysics and do Commanding Mummy Voice when a toddler runs into the path of an oncoming bus. But for those truly committed to the enterprise of freedom, a whole subculture of ‘child-led’ parenting practices has grown up. It’s full of advice to mothers on how to remain available so your child can breastfeed whenever he likes, stop breastfeeding at her own initiative rather than mummy’s, offer a range of weaning food for free choice rather than mush on a spoon, sleep in your bed for as long as they like and so on.

At the radical end of this child-led style lies ‘unschooling’, which takes the view that the structures of education themselves constitute an unacceptable impingement on a child’s autonomy, and that education is better and more effectively pursued by supporting the child to follow their own interests. Such approaches are common targets of conservative ire: the Daily Mail loves to make a spectacle of parents who devote themselves to their children’s absolute freedom, or inveigh at liberal parents raising a generation of ‘little horrors’.

What’s often missing from this critique, though, is the fact that this focus on freedom doesn’t in fact remove parents from the picture. Quite the opposite. ‘Child-led’ parenting is labour-intensive. I have mum friends who spend hours singing, back-rubbing or breastfeeding their pre-schoolers every night, because in their view imposing a bedtime boundary on their kids was in some profound way morally wrong. It’s also time-consuming: I remember once watching in bafflement as one especially anti-authoritarian friend waited patiently for her 18-month-old baby to put her arms voluntarily into a bib before starting tea. (It took a while.)

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The upshot of this is a child who can’t easily be raised by a village. If parenting is a matter of being constantly present and attuned to your child’s needs, and following their lead at all times, then how can a mother ever be elsewhere, or doing anything else?

In effect, then, the shadow side of freedom-focused child-rearing is micromanagement. In this, unschoolers share an affinity with another contemporary parenting approach more commonly associated with micromanagement: ‘helicopter parents’. Unschoolers and helicopter parents are both, are in different ways, inheritors of Luther’s tradition: the former fixated on freedom, the latter on salvation through applying the Protestant work ethic, and both pursuing their aims through a pervasive presence in their kids’ lives. In both cases, too, we see an abdication of authority, in favour either of radical libertarianism or a kind of cuddly, enmeshed totalitarianism.

Parents are thus echoing in family life what’s going on in the wider culture. Our individualising and privatising of family life echoes a parallel collapse of social norms, institutions and shared values under the modern questioning of authority. And as Patrick Deneen has argued, the fewer shared social norms we have, the more the state must intervene to ensure order and social harmony. In the state, as in the nursery, freedom and tyranny are two sides of the same coin.

The standard conservative harrumph about kids today, whether at home or rioting in the streets, is that they should just be made to do as they’re told. But in practice, at least as a parent, it doesn’t really work like this. Evidence suggests that punitively authoritarian parenting is associated with bad behaviour and psychological difficulties in children, something echoed recently by Met police chief Cressida Dick to much Right-wing anger.

The more nurturing ‘helicopter’ style of absolutist parenting doesn’t fare much better, with children raised by helicopter parents showing trouble controlling their emotions in childhood and early adolescence. Nor does this resolve when they grow up, with one study showed such children struggle to self-regulate as adults. They also lack confidence in their own agency – that is, their ability to affect their lives or environments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, having grown accustomed to intrusive and ever-present authority in family life, helicopter-parented young adults also express higher than usual support for surveillance and nanny-state policies.

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Others have drawn a link between social-justice discourse of ‘safety’ and ‘harm’ and risk-averse, highly involved modern approaches to raising kids. But unlike Jonathan Haidt, I’m unconvinced that a front-brain, rationalist solution is the answer when the heart of the problem isn’t a rational one.

I’ve long since learned that when my three-year-old is crying uncontrollably, the quickest and kindest solution is not to offer choices, reasoning or punishment but a big hug and confident authority. When I trained and practiced as a psychotherapist, my experience was that this human yearning for kindness mixed with authority isn’t exclusive to children. It wasn’t unusual to meet a client who would try to bend the ‘rules’, test limits, sometimes get very angry at me — only to acknowledge some time later the relief they found in neither succeeding nor being punished for testing boundaries. But if all someone encounters when pushing back is empty space, they will push still harder, and with growing fear.

Two women are screaming at the cops outside the White House. pic.twitter.com/V9wTsoFDzf

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) June 23, 2020

Mixed with the real-world conditions driving today’s increasingly mutinous politics, I see young adults behaving exactly as they were raised to behave, having grown up amid the endgame of our rebellion against authority. Dysregulated activists screaming at authority figures, as though begging a parent to relent. Debates about ‘systemic’ oppression that none of us can fix (because we have no control over anything in our lives), but which must be tackled by authoritarian means anyway. A politics of harm and safety. It leaves me wondering just how much fear and distress lies under relentless search for a boundary, any boundary, that might offer some resistance.

It also leaves me deeply pessimistic about the future. Because while I can contain my own young daughter’s distress with a mix of love and appropriate authority, no institution now exists with the public support to make an equivalent intervention in our public life. We’ve devoted some five centuries of progressive politics to dismantling all the structures that might be capable of doing so. It’s far from clear what comes next.

Die Linke, Germany’s equivalent of Corbynite Labour but (happily for Germany) its very own party, also did well in Thuringia — spectacularly so, hitting 31% and becoming the strongest single party in a state administration for the first time.

So, judging from those results, is German liberal democracy caught in a fatal pincer-movement of the populists, who claim to be mortal enemies but are both anti-EU, anti-NATO and pro-Putin?

Recent election posters from the populist “left” and “right”, accusing the establishment of NATO warmongering.

Well, yes and no. It depends on how you look at it; or rather, where you look at it. For talking about German politics nationally is becoming almost as meaningless as talking about the UK as if it were, in our days, a single political unit.

A map of the 2017 Bundestag election shows this division with extraordinary clarity.

But why do Easterners vote so differently from Westerners, thereby upsetting the political applecart of Europe’s most important economy? Right across the respectable political spectrum, Germans seek desperately for easy, modern explanations.

Conservatives tell themselves that the East Germans did, after all, unfairly pay the final bill for 1933-45, being traumatised by half a century of occupation by the Red Army, so that it’s no surprise they feel hard done-by; free-marketeers in the German ordoliberal tradition, which assigns the state a more active role in enabling and regulating than Anglo-Saxon classical liberals do, argue that more should be done to attract — effectively, to bribe — private enterprise into the old East.

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And then leftists claim that former East Germans are simply driven by righteous if misdirected anger at having been de-industrialised by predatory western capitalists, who asset-stripped perfectly viable ex-GDR State businesses (although they’d struggle to find any actual viable examples). Because of this they thus deserve massive, ongoing state help.

Meanwhile, the old West just keeps on footing the bill, and since 1990, well over €2 trillion has been pumped from Western taxpayers to the East. The so-called Reunification has dragged West Germany back into the role which Bismarck assigned it: to subsidise the economically moribund East because it is their patriotic duty.

Western German voters, rather sick of this, are more and more wary of keeping up this settlement, on top of their traditional role as paymasters of the stable Europe from which German industry benefits so greatly. Yet the Prussian myth of “reunification” has trumped economic reality, which goes to show something we in Britain should know all too well: that there is nothing worse for a country than to misunderstand its own history.

Southerners in the USA dwell on the Civil War as if it were yesterday, but who in western Germany now recalls that Germany was never “united” in the first place? It was militarily defeated by Bismarck’s Prussia in 1866, after which Austria was kicked out, some of the beaten states simply annexed by Prussia, and some allowed a sort of half-life until 1871. Who, today, dares to say that the only definition by which East Germany was more German than Austria is Bismarck’s definition?

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The founder of West Germany, Conrad Adenauer, knew his history. After the First World War he begged the French and British to help him split Prussia off from Germany. When he had to visit Berlin, he would always draw the curtains of his train compartment as he crossed the fatal River Elbe, muttering “Here we go, Asia again!” (“Schon wieder Asien!”) After the second war, though obliged in public to support re-unification, he told the British most secretly that he was determined it should never happen.

The most obvious sign that there are two countries is the confessional divide between Catholics and Lutherans. Anyone who doubts how significant that division is should just look at a map of the Nazi vote in 1932 superimposed onto a map of the Catholic population according to the 1934 census. They are, to all intents and purposes, mirror-images.

Religion in Germany is really just a sign of the Germany you come from: the one which partook centrally of western European civilisation right from the start — or the one which has a completely different trajectory. The classic line between these two Germanies is the River Elbe, which the Romans thought the natural limit of Germania. Charlemagne’s restored “Roman” Empire ended there, too.

While early medieval western Europe was developing its unique signature, the power-sharing of international Church and national-state, the lands beyond the river Elbe were still populated by pagan, illiterate tribes. No real attempt was made to exert German control and settlement beyond that point until 1147; Cologne had already been a flourishing western European city for 1,200 years when the first German conqueror-farmers reached Berlin.

If there’s one thing worse for everyone than a successful mass-colonisation, it’s a half-successful mass-colonisation — ask anyone in Ulster. East of the Elbe, the Germans never entirely supplanted the Slavs (some, the Sorbs, remain even in the truncated eastern Germany of today, just north of Dresden).

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For 800 years, generation upon generation experienced this same colonial reality. Within living memory, whether you called your hometown Posen or Poznan, Danzig or Gdansk, could be a matter of life and death, on both sides.

So while no one ever disputed that the western Germans belonged where they were, the eastern Germans always knew that the helots might rise up one day. Like the poor whites of the American South, the settlers of Rhodesia, the Protestants of Ulster or the Pieds-Noir of Algeria, the eastern Germans came to believe that they must, above all, have a political elite of their very own tribe, ready to respond instantly and ruthlessly if their supremacy was ever challenged.

Social psychologists call this “social dominance orientation”, the cultural belief that “we” have to at all costs lord it over “them”. The Germans of the east came to accept rule by a caste of warlords — the famous Prussian Junkers — and, later, the new Lutheran paradigm of a state which controlled its very own Church and against which there was hence no appeal.

Not for nothing did Friedrich Hayek see Prussia as the template for all modern totalitarian states, whether of the Left or of the Right. Max Weber constantly referred to a place he called Ostelbien, East Elbia, palpably different, for all its local variation, to ciselbian, western Germany

Of course, psychologists, philosophers and sociologists can all be wrong and often are. Electoral maps, however, do not lie. They show that ever since Germans have had votes, eastern Germans have voted very differently from western Germans.

Under the German Empire (1871-1918), the Prussian Conservatives — conservative in this context meaning supporters of royal and militarist rule under an agrarian Junker elite — depended almost completely on votes from the East, having scarcely any traction at all in the West.

The First World War changed nothing. In the first normal elections of the Weimar Republic, the extreme Prussian conservatives of the DNVP (officially anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, violently antidemocratic, their members implicated in several high-profile political murders) were the second largest party nationally but — exactly as with the AfD today — that position was entirely dependent on votes from the East.

And when the deluge finally came in 1933 it was, again, only thanks to heavy votes in the East that Hitler got 43.9% nationally, enabling him (with support from the rump DNVP) to seize power by semi-constitutional means. If the whole country had voted like the Rhineland or Munich, he could only have attempted an armed coup, which the Army would have crushed.

In short, wondering how voters in the East of Germany would go for antidemocratic, authoritarian and anti-EU politics, while the West of Germany sticks with the CDU and goes Green, is like asking how it can be that a Democrat should win New York at the same time as Arkansas and Alabama vote Republican. It’s all about cultural history, and Germany has its very own version of the Mason-Dixon line, but far older and deeper.

This is bad news, of course, for Germans wedded to the notion of a united and more or less culturally homogenous state. On the other hand, it is very good news for Germans who fear that the politics of eastern Germany might spread. They won’t, any more than New York is ever going to be an Open Carry state.

If the West holds its nerve — that means, on a practical level, no preferential financial treatment and never entering coalitions with the AfD or Die Linke, however awkward that may make things — the “spirit of the East”, as Adenauer called it, is no longer strong enough to pull Germany away from its natural place at the heart of Western Europe.