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I don’t know about you, but to me the word “threat” has an undeniably pejorative value in our daily news parlance. As in Hamas or Iraq “pose existential threats to the state of Israel” or “Al Qaeda threatens our collective security” or “deficits threaten the futures of our children.” No?

So here we have a reporter and/or a headline editor using this word to refer to citizen organizing in Germany.

From what I’ve always understood, citizen organizing was the lifeblood of democracy, a key sign of the vitality of democratic processes.

But here, it is described unambiguously as a “threat.”

Let’s walk this back. For whom is this democratic organizing a threat?

For the existing elites, of course.

So what we’re seeing in this article is that the writer and/or headline editor have effectively adopted the point of view of the elites as the one they will use as their own in this article.

This headline could have been written lots of other ways. For example: “Germany Politics Riding a Wave of Citizen Involvement” or “Long-Dominant Germany Parties Challenged by Citizen Activism” or even “German Public Life Reinvigorated by Citizen Activism.”