Note: this is Part 1 of a series. Part 2 is here.
I am currently reading the John Conway translation of The Path to Dictatorship, a collection of ten essays by German historians written shortly after the end of WW2.
There are many parallels between the US today and the situation in Germany during the rise of the Nazis from risible lunatic fringe group to Hitler being named Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and the Nazis shortly thereafter attaining complete political control and suspending all democratic mechanisms. I would like to concentrate on just one essay, “The Technique of the National Socialist Seizure of Power” by Karl Dietrich Bracher. Aspects of the Nazis’ successful strategy for attaining power give valuable insights for dealing with the rise of authoritarianism under the Republicans broadly and Trump particularly. History does not repeat, but it rhymes.
Bracher’s thesis is that in contrast to the violent and extra-legal revolutions in Russia and Italy, the Nazi rise in Germany was a painstakingly “legal revolution.” Although the brown shirts were committing criminal political violence on the street culminating in the Reichstag Fire, the Nazis studiously observed the letter of the law as they made each transitional step to strip the nascent German institutions of their authority and concentrated all power in their party and the person of Hitler. He maintains that in so doing the resulting German totalitarian state was more thorough and achieved more quickly than those that were achieved through an explicit break with legal means.
One problem for Germany was that the Weimar Constitution did not prevent a malicious party from using strictly constitutional means to undermine and eventually supplant the democratic substance of the German state and that constitution itself. Their constitution did not have strong enough self-protection mechanisms.
With the US Constitution, as explained by Madison in Federalist 51, the primary mechanism for self-protection is the checks and balances of the three branches. As originally envisioned, the executive was directly elected (with a fail safe of the Electoral College to screen out a rogue demagogue), the legislature was split between direct election by the people and indirect election via the state legislatures, and the federal judiciary, though nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, was independent of their continued influence via lifetime appointment.
The question is, is that sufficient protection to stop the rise of a cadre who wish to overturn the constitution itself and end democracy? Famously, the Constitution was not written at a time when parties had come to completely dominate US politics. Day-to-day politics was envisioned to take place within a matrix of constantly shifting alliances of economic and social special interests. One day the Senator from Massachusetts might vote with the Senator from Maryland to protect Catholic interests, while the next day they might vote against each other as representatives of rival New England and Mid-Atlantic geographic blocs, respectively. States, ethnicities, and industries were seen as the movers and shakers of public policy. Political parties (such as they were) were thought of as pestilential but local. The idea of trans-national parties was fairly inconceivable for people just getting used to thinking in terms of a “nation” at all.
The rise of national parties changed the fundamental calculus of power accumulation and gave governing factions and in particular the executive the ability to greatly magnify their impact. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: it might be impossible to govern a country as large and diverse as the US without some sort of “nationalized” plane of power at least competing in the political arena. But it has cut away much of the self-protection implicit in the Constitution against the accumulation of power to commit undemocratic acts.
That brings us to the second part of the Bracher essay: how self-deception by the rivals to the Nazis played into their hands. There were two major political factions opposing the Nazis and indeed significantly larger than they: the Social Democrats, a center-left alliance of everybody who wasn’t explicitly a Communist, and the Nationalists, a strongly right wing authoritarian faction that shared many of Hitler’s nationalist aspirations but did not aim to actually replace democratic government or enact his radical racist agenda. Both of these factions working together, or maybe even working intelligently alone, could have crushed the Nazis during most of the critical period of Hitler’s consolidation of power. They each failed for different reasons.
The Social Democrats abdicated: they flounced out of the legislature in protest and therefore removed themselves from the opportunity to continue as an active check. Their attempt to de-legitimize the government backfired as the right called their bluff and the population was completely unimpressed.
The Nationalists, in contrast, deluded themselves by working with Hitler, using him when it was convenient to further their policy aims. Ring a bell, Mitch? Of course, once the Nazis had absorbed governing authority into their party they ruthlessly purged their “Nazi Lite” Nationalist erstwhile allies in the same way that Hitler removed the SA as a rival power center with the Night of the Long Knives.
One further, small faction, the Communists, actively assisted the Nazis on many votes early in the game, calculating that Hitler could never govern and the ensuing crisis would make Germany ripe for The Revolution.
It didn’t.
I’m not trying to press the analogy of Trump with Hitler or the Trumpies and Nazis. What I would like to point out is IF a radical right wing faction was attempting to use our democratic institutions to subvert those very institutions, and IF they were looking back at the history of other right wing factions that were able to topple democratic regimes and install totalitarian regimes for cheat codes, it might look a lot like what we’re seeing right now in DC.
None of this changes what we have to do: organize, recruit, expose, vote. But it does add just a bit to an understanding of the stakes.
Because there is absolutely no reason why it can’t happen here.