Weimar, Weimar, show me a sign

From 'Weimar America'? The Trump Show Is No Cabaret by Niall Ferguson.  Well worth a read.  He always has some biases but is rich in knowledge, detail and argument.  

His topic is the reflexive habit of pseudo-intellectuals to compare America to the Weimar Republic.  He has a good thumbnail of the history of that habit.

Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel and play “It Can’t Happen Here” launched the genre we might call “Weimerica.” Inspired by his wife Dorothy Thompson’s experiences as a foreign correspondent in Germany, and her observation of the ambitious and charismatic Louisiana Senator Huey Long, Lewis imagined the sudden collapse of the New Deal and the advent, under the dictatorial leadership of the bombastic Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, of an American Third Reich. 

 

Windrip’s ideology, devised with the assistance of his Goebbels-like press secretary, Lee Sarason, is “The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.” They form “a nationwide league of Windrip marching-clubs, to be called the Minute Men,” with a uniform suggesting “the pioneer America of Cold Harbor and of the Indian fighters under Miles and Custer,” and a five-pointed star as their swastika. The Constitution is swept aside, the free market replaced by a corrupt corporatism, the free press stifled. Darkness descends. 

 

Weimerica has recurred in dystopian function: in Stephen King’s “The Running Man” (1982), Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004) and Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” (2008). In each case, although the focus is on life in a fascist America, there is a version of the Weimar back story, for without the degeneration of the republic, the rise of the dictatorship is inexplicable. (For some reason, the Weimar syndrome rarely claims dear old Canada, which provides a bolt-hole for the U.S. resistance.)

 

So when my old friend Andrew Sullivan urged us last month “to be frank” about recent developments in American politics and admit that it is all “very Weimar,” he was adding to an 85-year-old tradition.

 

“The center has collapsed,” Sullivan wrote. “Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.”

He then provides multiple examples of how the analogy is constantly recycled.  

He offers six reasons why the analogy is inapt.  My paraphrase.

While there has been an increase in violent riots in the US, it is nothing near the volume, nature, or capacity as existed in Weimar Germany. 

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was presaged by a rise in support for right-wing authoritarianism within the Military, within the University system, and within the Administrative State.  None of those attributes are true in the US today.  I think he misreads the military which tends to work hard to remain out of politics at all.  But Universities and the Administrative State, while hankering for authoritarianism, are definitely not right-leaning.

The American economic system has shown sustainable resilience completely absent from that of the Weimar Republic.

The American two-party system is far more stable than the factionalism of most democracies.

The American constitution is replete with systemic and structural checks and balances which were absent from the constitution of the Weimar Republic.

The global system of trade, politics and diplomacy is far more settled and standardized than was the case under the Weimar Republic.  We live in a world which broadly assumes the benefits of global trade and some sort of democratic norms, lightly policed by the US and the UN.  Disagreements are more about degree than kind.  During Weimar, empires, democracy, communism, fascism, monarchies, dictatorships, tribalism, military Juntas, and isolationism all coexisted as viable models of success.

He has a couple of interesting observations:

That is not to say that we have nothing at all to learn from the Germany of a century ago. Among the authors of the Weimar constitution was Max Weber, the great sociologist. (He was one of those who favored a powerful presidency, perhaps imperfectly understanding the American system.) I have been thinking a lot this year about Weber’s vision of modernity — of a world “demystified” by the advance of science, of an economy liberated from the “cage” of the Protestant ethic, of business and government run on the “rational-legal” basis of bureaucracy, of academic life as a “vocation” that should be divorced from politics. The constitution Weber helped draft did not last long. His vision of modernity, by contrast, was largely fulfilled in much of the world in the course of the 20th century.

Increasingly, I think, we are leaving that Weberian modernity behind. In the new post-Weber world, magical thinking is eroding the supremacy of science, a version of the Protestant ethic of work and thrift has been reincarnated in East Asia, corporate and bureaucratic governance is yielding to charismatic leadership (think Elon Musk as much as Donald Trump), and academia is being politicized to death. But these are global trends. They have little, if anything, to do with Weimar. 

He closes with:

America seems likely to survive its latest brush with the Weimar analogy. Life, it turns out, isn’t always “Cabaret.” Whether the world as a whole can survive this new, post-Weberian era is another question.

I agree but would put it somewhat differently.  As global crises have moderated in the postwar era, the need for and deference to the old, comfortable, sinecured, establishment class with their trappings of unearned financial success and undemonstrated competence is being questioned by the populace.

It is presented as populism, and to a degree there is that component.  I think what is missed by most of the commentariat is that most people who might be tarred with the populist brush are not seeking to overturn the system.  They simply want it to run according to its established principles.  

Congress needs to legislate and to develop transparent budgets which are arrived at through debate and compromise.  The Executive needs to administer within the constraints of that budget and the law (no government by executive order).  Agencies need to be brought to heel with Congressional oversight.  The Courts need to administer effective justice within the confines of the law as written.

More broadly, the denizens of the State need to constrain themselves to their authority and to their competence.  Not all problems are solvable and the more complex the local problem the less likely it is that there is a national fix.  

There is a crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness which is about the only real analog to Weimar.  But all government structures everywhere are always subject to periodic crises of legitimacy.  It is when the establishment interests defend their unearned privileges at the expense of ordinary citizens that things get bad.  

And one of the symptoms of Mandarin Class manipulation and panic against the interests of all citizens is when they fall into the habit of catastrophizing everything.  The habit of constantly invoking the catastrophe of the Weimar Republic is an example.  The establishment is legitimatized by being seen to effectively address catastrophes.  Without catastrophes, the legitimacy of their own position is in peril.