The difference between Weimar Germany and today's USA is one of degree, not kind...

Last edited Mon Jan 8, 2018, 02:24 AM - Edit history (1)

...and it has taken me a *long* time to reach that conclusion. I've heard Weimar analogies my whole life, especially in the turmoil of the late 60s-early 70s, and again under Dubya. I always dismissed them out of hand. Germany was an autocracy until 1918, had lost a war, had inflation and depression and an unstable, unpopular democratic regime. It was ripe for the plucking by a demagogue. We, on the other hand...well, *we* were The Good Guys, the country that destroyed slavery, won two world wars against tyranny and a cold war against another one, we gave civil rights to the dispossessed, went to the Moon, were the leaders of the Free World. Etc, etc, etc...
But. Germany was the most civilized country in Europe, right to the moment of Hitler's accession--even, maybe especially, in the Imperial era. It had a tradition of respect for constitutionalism. It was moving slowly but surely towards a parliamentary system in the years before 1914, and even during the War, the Reichstag was able to get its way against the generals if it put its foot down. As for America...yes, we destroyed slavery. After our Constitution, for 72 years, had enshrined it, and the pro-slavery forces had pretty much total control of the government. And it took 600,000 lives to change this. Then we had slavery in all but name for another 100 years, and it was only in the wake of a national emergency--the JFK assassination--that Congress finally ended Jim Crow.
Indeed. Congress. For the vast majority of its history, it has, as an institution, essentially functioned as a cover for the worst impulses of our national life. Slavery, Jim Crow, militarism, plutocracy. Only great disasters--the Civil War and its aftermath, the Depression, World War Two, and the Civil Rights movement and the JFK murder--only these have ever made it do anything approaching the right thing. For the most part, it's been a useless weight on the American people. The Supreme Court has been similar, regarding its job as defending slavery and plutocracy.
In short, American democracy has always been weaker than we may have imagined. Even forgetting the Civil War, look at the elections of 1876 and 1896, the Banker's Plot against Roosevelt, the Cold War pressures, culminating in the assassination of JFK...or so I believe. (See *JFK and the Unspeakable*, by James Douglass, for a good argument of this position.) Look at the GOP in the elections of 1968, 1980, 2000. The Republican party today does not believe in democracy. Which is why I'm not too reassured by all the talk of "2018" or "2020". Any temporary advance of ours won't be met with the Republicans breaking their fever and "compromising". It will simply make them more and more extreme. By 2030, they will openly and explicitly assault the very idea of free elections and racial (and gender) equality. Trump is really a distraction. His party, which has sold its soul to him, is the real problem. Yes, I shall work for Dem candidates. I've been doing so my whole life, and I shall continue. But I'm more and more afraid that the Democratic Party will go down the same path the Social Democrats did in 1933...