Trump supporters scoff:
"There you go again, with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Another lib claiming Trump is Hitler. Or a Hitler wannabe. Or early-stage Hitler."
There is a reason MAGA people hear the Hitler comparisons, Trump is doing things that parallel Hitler during the time that he consolidated authoritarian power in Germany in the early 1930s. Hitler -- the idea of Hitler in the popular American mind -- is shaped by the Hitler of the war years and the holocaust. That was late-stage Hitler, and easy to condemn. The Hitler who consolidated power looked less frightening. The takeover was gradual. Germans -- good Germans -- let it happen.
Jack Mullen spent his youth playing sports and reading history in Medford, Oregon in the 1960s, that Golden Age for young healthy White youth. We picked and thinned pears together in local orchards in our teens, and then both worked as aides to a Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Weaver in our 20s. Jack lives in Washington, D.C.
Guest Post by Jack Mullen
Both American and German societies are steeped in enlightened reason. Long before Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, the Prussian government contributed to the Age of Enlightenment, embodying the thoughts John Locke, Emmanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Frederick II, also known as Frederick the Great, modernized Prussia in the mid-18th century by promoting reason and intellectual exchange. He reformed the judicial system, allowed a free press to flourish, encouraged scientific inquiries, and promoted the arts and music.
Frederick’s influence on German history was two-fold. He set the table for a future enlightened democracy. He also nurtured the martial ethos that became emblematic of Prussia, the proto-state for 20th century Germany. He led wars of territorial expansion into Silesia and Poland, turning the enlarged Prussia into one of Europe's Great Powers.
It was this highly-militarized Prussia that was described not as a state with an army, but an army with a state.
Weimar Republic (1918-1933)
Kaiser Wilhem II, the last Prussian leader, abdicated after the World War I Armistice. In a time of political instability, Germany emerged as a parliamentary democracy known as the Weimar Republic. The first national assembly was held in Weimar, giving the republic its name in history books.
Mass unemployment during the Great Depression provided fertile ground for a rising nativist, xenophobic, white supremacist National Socialist Party. This Nazi party, which garnered only 2.5 percent of the vote in the 1928 elections, increased its electoral presence to over 30 percent in the 1932 elections. This set the stage for the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, to become chancellor, upon the death of war hero Paul von Hindenburg.
How an authoritarian takes over.
There are eerie parallels between the present and 1930s Germany.
1. Both Hitler and Trump had failed coup attempts, but continued undaunted with the same nationalist, nativist message. Hitler’s failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch and Trump’s failed January 6 coup resulted in disdain for courts and his country’s justice system. By having survived the coup setbacks -- and in Trump's case the assassination attempt -- each became a symbol of indomitable will, which drew popular admiration.
2. Both were successors to very old men, and therefore represented strength and vitality by comparison. President Paul von Hindenburg was a beloved 86-year-old World War I war hero who led the German Army in the 1914 defeat of the Russians in Battle of Tanneberg. When von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler became President. The June debate with President Biden set Trump up as the energetic, forceful leader by comparison.
3. Trump appeals to white Christian nationalist prejudices in much the same way Hitler and the conservative German right felt about non-Christian minorities. Trump flouts the rights of disfavored immigrants and defends it as a necessary war power. In Germany conservative industrialists allied with Hitler. In the U.S., the tech industry, out of a mix of ideology, business necessity, and fear of offending Trump allied with Trump.
4. Hitler and Trump invoked selected past glories to inspire patriotism. Hitler pointed to Charlemagne’s First Reich as a sign of Germanic past glory. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” new hero is William McKinley, not a leader in the same vein as Charlemagne, but a leader Trump believes made America a world power by use of tariffs and territorial expansion from the Caribbean to the Philippines.
4. Both Hitler and Trump favored government run by executive fiat, with little regard for their respective legislative and judicial branches. Both simply ignore old rules and norms and dare anyone to stop them.
I often think of the great German boxer, Mac Schmeling, the Muhammed Ali of his day, when asked years later if he knew what was going on in his country during Hitler’s reign. He said he did, so did his friends, who sat in outdoor cafes sipping beer and decided to just let it all slide. Muhammed Ali stood up for what he thought was right. Max Schmeling and so many other Germans did not.
Essential to an authoritarian takeover was the willingness of people to go along, to "obey in advance" as laws were broken. Keep your head down. Maybe he will target someone else. Trump, like Hitler, is using personal and arbitrary state power to generate shock and awe. Many Americans celebrated the psychological and moral effect of unexpected military violence when it targeted the Iraqi military. We are seeing it now, targeting political opponents of Trump in the courts, law firms, universities, the press, businesses, and people in disfavored groups.
Who will stand up to stop Trump, in this, the early stages of centralized authoritarian power? Congress lacks spine. Will our courts stand up?
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10 comments:
Trump supporters used to dismiss comparisons of Trump to Hitler as examples of Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” But Mike Godwin, the originator of Godwin’s Law, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post affirming that comparisons between Trump and Hitler are valid.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is real – he’s seriously deranged, as are his followers. In their zealous pursuit of absolute power, Trump and his white-wing whackos have launched an all-out assault on the separation of powers, our free press, science, medicine, and education, among others. Anybody with any sense is appalled, but not Republicans.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
… and if you play the album backwards, you discover that Paul is dead.
Pass me the beer.
Comparisons are less apt when considering what was going on in each country. Trump emerged in a peaceful, prosperous, thriving Constitutional republic. Hitler emerged in the depths of the Great Depression and with serious threats from Communists, the same revolutionaries who had overthrown the Czar; the same whose proponents used assassination of German leaders to terrify German's who might lean left. Hitler was admired for fighting fire with fire, i.e., killing Communists just as they killed others. (A comparable wave of political assassinations terrorized Japan in this era.) Marx had written that Germany would actually be the first country whose working class would rise up against their capitalist oppressors. That history is far more frightening to a public than anything faced in today's America. More food for thought: In 1910, 50 of the 100 universities in the world were German! In 2010, a century late? None. Read a biography of W.E.B. Dubois to get a sense of what German culture and scholarship meant to the world at the turn of the last century. We cannot be passive or it could all be lost...and for no reason.
Does Trump admire Hitler? I’m guessing yes.
Sorry: Couple of edits. Communist activists aimed to terrorize those who opposed them (not those who "might lean left"). And in 1910 it was 50 German universities ranked in the Top 100 ranked universities worldwide; in 2010, no German universities were ranked in the world's Top 100. (Rule of thumb, try not to kill all your Jews.)
Reminded of a favorite Onion headline from their "Our Dumb Century" book. For a newspaper published in 1933 (or so), The Onion wrote, "German Jews Express Concern About Hitler's 'Kill All Jews' Policy".
Hitler was minor regional agitator in 1923; Trump in 2021 the sitting president. Hitler served time. Even with the full opportunity, Trump critics couldn’t support charges of sedition, let alone of an attempted coup.
Yet the point is what could happen, eh? Trump COULD suspend Americans’ civil rights after the Capitol burns, invade a series of neighboring countries, and round up millions by ethnicity, to be exterminated in death camps.
Thankfully the then-fashionable “Bushitler” comparisons with Dubya proved unfounded, albeit barely.
Interesting piece. Yes, there are lots of similarities, but also significant differences. First is size. Germany has about 4 percent of the land mass of the US, and had about 20% of the our current population. Ethnically, the Germans were a white majority in 1939, and Nazis the targeted ethnic minorities were mostly Jews, Blacks and Roma people.
In the US today, non-Hispanic whites are almost 59% of the population. But according to the 2020 US Census, Whites are divided into 104 different categories (like Lebanese, Dutch, Jews and Palestinian); Blacks into 62 categories, and there are 30 different Hispanic groups broken into 4 categories. Overall there are over 200 different people groups who speak over 350 different languages. 27 of those people groups are over 1 Million people. It seems to me this would skew the calculus of who will stand behind MAGA mentality for long.
Second is the proliferation of technology and the ability of small groups to have an outsized effect on the national narrative or dialog. This was absent in 1930s Germany.
Like most here, I sense that our current moment is disruptive and pivotal and it’s never going back to anything we would recognize. But I don’t see how it’s a repeat of 1930s Nazi Germany. But I could be wrong.
Hitler was a totalitarian dictator. If Republicans continue their current trend of dismantling our separation of powers, Trump could be too. To imagine that it can't happen here is as delusional as the "stolen election" that most Republicans lap up with such relish.
Speaking for myself, I'm not necessarily worried about having a repeat of Nazi Germany in the U.S., but about our democratic republic degenerating into an autocracy. Trump and his cult have given us a good start.
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