Ten percent for an anti-fact governance device: Braun’s “Crown,” 1968 without Jews, and the exportable technology of sacred jurisdiction

This is not a text about Poland and Poles. It is about what happens when politics stops arguing about reality and starts competing over who gets to define it. The costumes may look provincial. The mechanism is not.

Once a formation approaches ten percent in polling, it stops being a curiosity and becomes an institutional forecast. In mid-February 2026, Konfederacja Korony Polskiej hovered around that threshold in national surveys. That is the point where the correct object of attention is no longer a “set of views,” but an apparatus likely to acquire parliamentary leverage, committee access, media time, and routine immunity advantages.

This is not moral pleading and not a taxonomy like “populism.” Those labels describe style. The relevant question here is function. The function is a governance device built from coupled operations that travel well across countries: the production of a target group as a reusable causal key, the destabilization of factual baselines, the substitution of intrusion and pressure for procedure, and the invocation of a higher jurisdiction grounded in destiny, scripture, or national myth. When these operations lock together, you do not get a party that competes inside a shared reality. You get a party that competes by degrading the conditions under which a shared reality remains usable.

Begin with the most basic operational signature: turning a category of people into administrative shorthand. In this ecosystem, “the Jew” is not primarily a neighbor. It is a portable explanatory module. It is the metacause that can be redeployed across domains: law, education, history, media, public health, foreign policy. Once installed, disagreement becomes confirmation, because any refutation can be folded back into the story as proof of suppression. This is why the demographic objection—“but there are hardly any Jews in Poland”—misses the point. The module is designed to operate without contact with reality. Contact introduces friction and correction. A module that does not require contact can run indefinitely.

This is where the historical analogy sharpens the analysis. What we are seeing is not simply a revival of pre-war nationalist thought. Mechanically, it is closer to the late-1960s apparatus of suspicion associated with the Gomułka period. Natolin and Puławy were not merely two factions of a party. They represented two different projects of constructing the political subject. One required an organic enemy; the other required a class enemy that could be relabeled. March 1968 marked the victory of the more portable module.

An organic enemy is structurally superior as a mobilizing device because it travels across registers. “The bourgeoisie” mobilizes economically and weakly culturally; it does not automatically plug into civilizational fear. “The Jew” as metacause operates simultaneously in economic, cultural, media, and security registers. It absorbs crises rather than being replaced by them. This is why antisemitism without Jews is not a paradox. It is an optimized configuration.

The second operational signature is the puncturing of factual baselines as a political instrument. Holocaust denial, when voiced by public officials or parliamentary actors, is not interesting as psychological aberration. It is interesting as a stress test for the public sphere. The effect is not to persuade a majority that Auschwitz did not happen. The effect is to make the denial speakable, then debatable, then memetic, then controversial, then one of the opinions. At that point a fact has been converted into a loyalty test. What matters is not truth, but who will say the line and withstand backlash. Backlash is not a cost. It is fuel, because it can be converted into persecution theater and used to harden the in-group.

The third signature is method: pressure replacing procedure. A formation becomes dangerous not when it holds radical opinions, but when it demonstrates readiness to treat institutions as targets and disruption as political technique. The anti-abortion front, in this sense, is not simply a culture war. It is a rehearsal space for coercion against hospitals, professionals, and the operational autonomy of public services. Even in a country without a large immigration crisis, the device requires operational theaters where it can keep the boundary machine active. “Poland for Poles” does not describe a policy problem. It describes a sorting mechanism. It trains a constituency to think in terms of conditional belonging.

The apparent paradox—rhetorical siege narratives coexisting with transactional visa policies in previous administrations—reveals the structure. The rhetoric is not about empirical consistency. It is about maintaining a permanent state of boundary alertness. The immigrant can be a specter even when mobility is monetized. The function is to keep the permission structure alive: who belongs, who does not, who is suspect, who is protected.

Territorial language shows the same pattern. “Recovered Territories” was not merely propaganda; it functioned as a social invention in the Tardean sense—a narrative module that replicated through imitation before its genealogy could be interrogated. The territories were never “recovered” in any continuous modern legal sense. Yet once the narrative module was launched, it generated its own continuity. It did not describe a history; it produced a claimant.

That distinction matters. We are not dealing with the history of territory. We are dealing with the history of a claim that produces the subject who claims.

Seen from that angle, “Judea and Samaria” operates in the same structural register. It is not a neutral geographical term. It is a jurisdictional module. It anchors territorial entitlement in scriptural time, displacing modern legal time. When a diplomat invokes biblical cartography in contemporary statecraft and then retreats into the language of “hyperbole,” the retreat does not cancel the claim. It manages exposure while leaving the entitlement in circulation. Sacred jurisdiction is not an emotional flourish. It is a technique: a claim framed as anterior to and superior to contemporary law.

The same jurisdictional move appears locally when “Poland from sea to sea” is treated not as historical poetry but as a license to redraw boundaries under the banner of destiny. Borders, rights, and institutions are no longer framed as agreements under law and responsibility; they are framed as expressions of mission. Once that lesson is normalized, it can be redirected inward. Not only geography, but personhood and protection become negotiable under the rhetoric of destiny.

This is why “populism” is the wrong frame. Populism suggests a style of appeal. What we are looking at is a technical composite with a predictable workflow. A boundary-breaking claim is issued. An institutional response is forced. The response is converted into persecution proof. Loyalty is harvested. The range of what can be said and done is widened. The device grows stronger not despite condemnation but through it, because every cycle of boundary testing, backlash, and loyalty harvest expands the permissible the next time.

The United States demonstrates that such a device can operate at presidential scale. Israel shows how emergency politics can accelerate jurisdictional claims under conditions of permanent security tension. Poland’s variant draws on different historical residues, but the underlying logic is identical: target-category governance, factual destabilization, institutional pressure, and myth-jurisdiction.

These devices do not have authors. They have genealogies. Braun did not invent this machinery. He operates a machine assembled in different moments: parts forged in the 1930s, recalibrated in 1968, stabilized in post-Tridentine Catholic identity politics as a substitute sovereignty during periods without a state. What changes is not the machine but the interface. The grotesque surface misleads. What appears as theatrical excess is often simply the onboarding protocol of an older apparatus.

The operational conclusion is procedural, not emotional. Stop treating this as a debate of ideas. Audit operations. Who is made into the reusable target category? Which factual baselines are punctured? Which institutions are treated as legitimate objects of disruption? Where is sacred jurisdiction invoked to bypass law and evidence?

Democracies can tolerate many views. They cannot tolerate the normalization of intrusion, intimidation, and factual sabotage as governance tools. When ten percent of the electorate is ready to treat facts as negotiable and institutions as targets, the question is no longer whether the device exists. The question is how much of the shared reality it will be allowed to rewrite before the cost becomes visible to everyone.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)