Election Reaction - Fear and Depression

With bad election results flowing in, I am feeling depressed and, candidly, downright fearful - if not terror.  I can't stand to stay up and watch the results if they are pro-Trump and feel as if I am witnessing American democracy slipping beneath the surface of the sea like  the Titanic or some other lost liner of old.  

The depression part comes from the realization that there are so many truly hate-filled horrible people in America.  Perhaps I should not be surprised.  After all, this is the country that committed genocide against Native Americans, allowed segregation for generations, overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, and won its Caribbean possessions and Pacific possessions by conquest.   It also comes from supposed "friends" who are backing Trump.  This evening I unfriended a supposed Facebook "friend" who is celebrating over how well Trump is doing. Meanwhile this Fox News junkie doesn't realize that a Trump win means an anti-LGBT Supreme Court and right to discriminate laws for Christofascists. This is very, very scary. I feel like I am in 1930's Germany.

If Trump wins and the GOP controls Congress, our marriage could well be invalidated by a reversal of the 2015 same sex marriage ruling. A falsely named "religious freedom act" will be passed at the federal level and I will be a target for completely legal discrimination and bigotry. Thankfully, I can qualify to receive Social Security now if need be, but the husband has another 2 years. After that, we may have to move overseas. A very, very sad situation. Thank you to all of my Republican "friends."

In short, if Trump wins, my new task will be to begin researching where the husband and I can move to find an existence in a less hate-filled and bigoted country.  I am so afraid that America has opted to take the path of those who rejected Weimar Germany.  

Trump Versus Hitler: Learning From Weimar Germany

I have read a great deal about Adolph Hitler's rise to power and the horrors he eventually inflicted on Europe's Jewish population, Germany itself, and much of the rest of the world.   In part my interest in that period is a horrified fascination perhaps with how an advanced, educated and civilized nation like Germany could succumb to Hitler and the Nazi Party.  The period and what happened ought to be a textbook for others throughout history of how regular humans can be turned into monsters if lead by the right manipulative demagogue who plays upon their fears and prejudices.  Nathan Stoltzfus, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University and the author of Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany, has a piece at the Daily Beast that compares the end of democratic Weimar Germany and America as it faces the rise of Donald Trump.  While the parallels are not 100% complete, there are similarities between Hitler and Trump and their racism, uncontrollable narcissism and demagoguery that thinking Americans should see clearly that Trump MUST be defeated in November.  Here are op-ed highlights:

While commentators have increasingly likened Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler as a convenient condemnation—others assure us that we (Americans) are better than that. So far there are, in fact, some instructive points of comparison, most significantly in the relationship between these men and their followers, as well as in the compromises that established political leaders are willing to make with these two men, under the assumption that they will be able to control them once they reach office.

Like those who helped Hitler to power, politicians and operatives have decided that they can harness Trump to their own purposes. Polls consistently show that two thirds or more of Americans have a negative impression of Trump. But he still could become our next president as Republican politicians and operatives help maneuver him into power.

In September 1930, as the Nazis surged in the polls to become Germany’s second largest party, German president Paul von Hindenburg was confronted with how to handle Hitler, founder and leader of the Nazis. General Hindenburg initially scorned Hitler as a “Bohemian Corporal,” in reference to his Austrian origins and lowly rank in World War I.
With the election of July 1932, the Nazis formed Germany’s most popular party, and conservatives convinced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor, amusing themselves with the belief that they would soon push him into a corner so hard he would squeak.

The United States is not now facing a “Weimar moment,” because the sense of crisis is not nearly as palpable and widespread as it was in Weimar Germany. Trump also does not seem driven like Hitler to slip history itself into a straightjacket cut to his own ideology, and his criminal cunning is less acute. Still, if helped into power by a combination of mass popularity and political operatives hoping to help themselves, Trump could do massive harm to democracy, considering his racist demagoguery, unbridled self-confidence, and authoritarian hostility toward a free press, to name just a few factors. 

Like Hitler, Trump likes to promote the image of a great leader that no one has to question. Many, eager to believe in an easy solution, appear eager to embrace it. Both encouraged a direct popular dependency on a man rather than a system or constitution. Both have encouraged unity at the expense of outsiders. Both have issued a license for the crowds to unite in feeling like they can set their emotions free from social constraints. . . . . At his stadium-size rallies, supporters unite in signaling to Trump’s bullyboys that someone in the crowd doesn’t belong. “Trust me, they are not good people,” Trump says as the outsider is carted off. His supporters also respond to Trump’s invectives against the press by unleashing their own pent up fury.

In the 1930s, such a symbiotic relationship between a growing number of Germans and their leader proved to be the bedrock foundation of Hitler’s power, a relationship of the masses to their great leader that served as the foundation of Germany’s crimes. Coming to power by promising to make Germany great again, Hitler convinced more and more Germans to yield to him as a spectacular Leader. Then he drew them further and further into collaboration with the crimes resulting from his racism, a process that continued to develop a sense of insider-belonging and a new sense of power for his followers.

There are strong forces in this country against Trump such as Hitler did not face. Yet history shows that the more people come together in the belief that they have found an urgently needed super-politician to bail them out, the harder it becomes to stop others from joining the bandwagon.

As Weimar warns, constitutional protections can crumble in the face of majorities amassed by a demagogue. Sure Trump is a racist, but the fundamental threat in his use of racism to incite the crowds, illustrated in his case attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, is the possibility of gathering popular support sufficient to abrade the constitution and its balance of powers. Hitler had also aimed to remake law according to the will of his “racial” German people, once they followed him unquestioningly.

The more Trump wins, the more people once reluctant to support him will want to attach themselves to him—like the established Trump enablers who hope to use him. It is, however, unlikely that they will be able to exercise any more control over him, should Trump continue to whip up his crowds with the help of the presidential bully pulpit.

Are We Reliving the Equivalent of the End of the Weimar Republic?

Words do not adequately describe the sense of fear that I feel as I watch the 2016 Republican National convention and the coronation of Donald Trump.  Earlier today, on Facebook I posted a link to a YouTube clip of  Leni Riefenstahl 1935 propaganda film "Triumph of the Will"  that chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. The film contains excerpts from speeches given by Nazi leaders at the Congress, including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Julius Streicher, interspersed with footage of massed Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel troops and public reaction.    The film's overriding theme is the return of Germany as a great power, with Hitler as the leader who will bring glory to the nation.  Sound frighteningly familiar?  If you have not seen Riefenstal's film, view it here.  A lengthy piece in The Tablet, a Jewish news publication, traces the parallels between how Hitler ultimately seized power and what we are witnessing in Cleveland and among the Republican Party and Trump's followers.    Here are excerpts:

“What a memorable day!” wrote a middle-class Hamburg housewife in her diary on Jan. 30, 1933. She had just watched the parade of torch-bearing storm troopers celebrate Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany.

Frau Solmitz did not, however, extol only Hitler. She waxed melodic about Hitler’s cabinet, in which there were just three Nazis. All the others were upstanding conservatives, men like Franz von Papen, the aristocratic former chancellor and leader of the Catholic Center Party, and the career bureaucrat Constantin von Neurath, who was named to head up the foreign ministry. These were experienced men, reasonable men. They would contain Hitler’s excesses. After four years of economic depression and political paralysis, 14 years since the humiliation of the Versailles Peace Treaty, decades of an overweening Jewish presence in German public life, it was time for a new beginning. It was time to make Germany great again.

In the end, a small clique of businessmen, estate owners, bankers, high-ranking civil servants, and army officers prevailed upon the president, Paul von Hindenburg, to name Hitler chancellor of Germany. For these traditional conservatives, the Nazis were uncouth, low class, and undisciplined. Yet these same conservatives made a political bargain with the Nazi party.

[T]he process by which traditional and radical conservatives came together through a common language carries numerous warning signals as we experience the surge of right-wing populism from Poland across the continent, on to the United Kingdom, and across the ocean to the United States.

Americans often say that the German people elected Hitler to power, but that is not accurate. The highest vote the Nazis received in a free election came six months before the seizure of power. In July 1932, the Nazis won 37 percent of the electorate. . . . . In the end, the conservative elite saved the Nazis from the political wilderness.

There was nothing inevitable or predetermined about the Nazi assumption of power. It was the result of a conscious political decision by traditional conservatives made in a time of crisis when Germany wallowed in depression and the political system lay paralyzed.

The conservative elite had its roots in the churches, Protestant and Catholic,  . . . . These traditionalists hated the very idea of democracy, but they understood that there had to be limits to state power, and they shied away from rampant, excessive violence. They also understood that human beings are imperfect and prone to error and that the essential Nazi hubris was the belief in the perfectibility of the race.  Yet the traditionalists struck a deal with the Nazis on Jan. 30, 1933, one they reconfirmed many times during the 12 years of the Third Reich.

Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the two officers who led the Supreme Military Command and effectively ruled Germany dictatorially in the last two years of the war, shifted the blame for Germany’s defeat away from the military (and themselves, of course). The army had remained upright and upstanding, the army had never been defeated in the field, so they claimed. Germany had been betrayed at home by socialists and the Jews; that was the only reason Germany had to sue for peace.

It was a nasty, dirty game, and highly potent politically. Hitler used the stab-in-the-back legend to great effect; traditional conservatives—including Hindenburg though not Ludendorff, who later dallied with the Nazis—also found the rhetoric highly appealing.

The Weimar Republic is often seen as merely a prelude to the Third Reich. But that reads back into the past Germany’s later history. The Republic certainly suffered numerous crises and had a fragile character. Amid the chaos, Germans experienced the most democratic order they had ever known; a vibrant, thriving culture; and social improvements like public housing and public health clinics, which often dispensed sex and birth control advice. Many spheres of life largely closed off to Jews, like the universities, opened up; women obtained greater educational and professional opportunities.

Weimar, in short, represented a great moment of democratic reform, cultural efflorescence, and sexual experimentation. It was everything that conservatives, traditional and radical, hated. The choice words they used in common for the Republic marked another step on the road of their accommodation.

Traditional conservatives were by and large genteel anti-Semites. In the Weimar period, they tended not to share the murderous tendencies of the Nazis (though that would change over the course of the Third Reich). But they didn’t particularly like Jews, and they thought the Jewish presence in German public life overbearing and distasteful. Germany, in the common view of the Right, radical and conservative, faced an überfremdung, a flood of foreigners, Jews in particular, who exercised a degenerative influence on the German people and German society.

On all this the old conservative elite and the Nazis could easily agree, even though the Nazi solution to the problem would prove more far radical than anything the traditionalists had imagined.

Which brings us to the current right-wing populist surge all across Europe and the United States. Certainly, real grievances exist that have created support for the Right. As one report after another recounts, many communities have been hard hit by globalization. The factories rust away, the jobs available are low-level, low-paying service positions. Inequalities have risen everywhere, most obscenely in the United States.

[T]he right-wing sensibility in the Western world is largely cultural in nature. It is directed against those identified as foreigners, even when they are third-generation Germans, French, or Britons, whose families may have hailed from Turkey, Morocco, or Jamaica. Race is also a factor, but not exclusively so.

Sometimes the language is coded and comes across in polite terms. At other moments, it is virulent. The political language that they speak enables the creation of a broad-based right-wing populism. “Respectable” members of society in Poland, France, or the United States hear the coded language and nod their heads in approval, while those on the far right, prone to violence, respond affirmatively to the more virulent rhetoric.

Trump, like many other right-wing leaders, plays both sides of the rhetorical street (as Hitler did as well, and masterfully so).

Trump seems blithely unaware of the tainted history of the term [America First], which goes back to the isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, and anti-Semites of the 1930s and ’40s. “Make America Great Again” is also code that plays well. Trump conjures up the 1950s, a wonderful decade for some in America, but certainly not for African-Americans, who remained subject to Jim Crow legislation and violence of the worst sort in the South as well as the North, nor for Hispanics, who suffered all kinds of discrimination.

Republicans in the United States continue to dance around Trump, many unable to decide whether their party should back such an obviously incapable, self-aggrandizing, and racist candidate for the presidency. . . . . But by and large, Republicans have moved into Trump’s camp, Paul Ryan perhaps the most prominent among them. They bemoan the fact that they can’t control him, but they don’t have the courage to separate themselves from a candidate with substantial popular support.

Ours is a presidential system, and despite the difficulties Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had with Congress and the Supreme Court, presidents wield enormous power. In possession of that power, Trump will be fully capable of shredding the constitution from within, as the Nazis did.

Today’s Republicans and similarly-minded figures in Europe are like the conservatives who put Adolf Hitler in power: delusional about their influence, playing dangerously with the structures of our democracy. . . . . And much of the reason lies in the fact that Trump’s political language is only more blatant than what many Republicans have been saying for decades.

That is the lesson from the right-wing populist upsurge in Weimar Germany, which culminated in the Nazi assumption of power. The political language of fear and hostility directed at “foreign” elements (never mind the fact that many and even most of those so-called foreigners had been residents and citizens for generations) enables moderate and radical conservatives to come together. The moderates make the radicals salonfähig,  acceptable in polite society. That is the real and pressing danger of the current moment.

Is This the West's Weimar Moment?

Reichstag Fire - the end of the Weimar Republic

As has been noted a number of times on this blog, there are frightening parallels between what happened in 1930's Germany - and in Italy during that time period as well - and what we see unfolding both here in America and parts of Europe.  Under the "conservative" label, would be fascists, right wing religious extremists and out right racists are rebelling against modernity and, most importantly, the rise of demographic groups they deem as "other" due to the targets' faith, skin color, and, in some cases, sexual orientation.  Jochen Bittner, the political editor for the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, has a timely op-ed in the New York Times on whether or not the West, including America, are at a point akin to Germany on the cusp of Hitler's rise to power.  Here are excerpts:

Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s offers a frame for understanding how liberal democracies can suddenly turn toward anti-liberalism.

Setting aside debate about whether the rise of Nazism was built into the German DNA, there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder. To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today.

First, the history. The Black Friday stock-market collapse of 1929 set off a global depression. As bad as things were in America, they were even worse in Germany, where industrial production shrank by half in the following three years. Stocks lost two-thirds of their value. Inflation and unemployment skyrocketed. The Weimar government, already held in low esteem by many Germans, seemed to have no clue about what to do.

All this happened as traditional ways of life and values were being shaken by the modernization of the 1920s. Women suddenly went to work, to vote, to party and to sleep with whomever they wanted. This produced a widening cultural gap between the tradition-oriented working and middle classes and the cosmopolitan avant-garde — in politics, business and the arts — that reached a peak just when economic disaster struck. The elites were blamed for the resulting chaos, and the masses were ripe for a strongman to return order to society.

Some people today imagine that Hitler sneaked up on Germany, that too few people understood the threat. In fact, many mainstream politicians recognized the danger but they failed to stop him. Some didn’t want to: The conservative parties and the nobility believed the little hothead could serve as their useful idiot, that as chancellor he would be contained by a squad of reasonable ministers. Franz von Papen, a nobleman who was Hitler’s first vice chancellor, said of the new leader, “We’ve hired him.”

At the same time, even the imminent threat of a fascist dictatorship couldn’t persuade the left-wing parties to join forces. Instead of being conciliatory for the sake of the national interest, Ernst Thälmann, the head of the German Communist Party, branded the center-left Social Democrats the “moderate wing of fascism.” No wonder Hitler had an easy time uniting broad sections of the German public.

Are we at another Weimar moment now?

The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent global recession were nowhere nearly as painful as the Great Depression. But the effects are similar. The heady growth of the 2000s led Europeans and Americans to believe they were on firm economic ground; the shattering of banks, real estate markets and governments in the wake of the crash left tens of millions of people at sea, angry at the institutions that had failed them, above all the politicians who claimed to be in charge.

In America and Europe, the rise of anti-establishment movements is a symptom of a cultural shock against globalized postmodernity, similar to the 1930s’ rejection of modernity. The common accusation by the “masses” is that liberal democracy has somehow gone too far, that it has become an ideology for an elite at the expense of everyone else.

Mr. Trump is no Hitler, but that’s not the point. Today, as in the 1930s, we are seeing the failure of the liberal mainstream to respond to serious challenges, even those that threaten its very existence.