"World on Fire," Part III: U.S Domestic Politics
"It" - Fascism - not only can happen "here" - it is happening here. It hasn't yet won, though.
“ ‘Charismatic rule has long been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psycholoigical and social conditions are set. The Leader’s charismatic power is not a mere phantasm - none can doubt that millions believe in it.’”
Franz Neumann, 1942, from Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism.
“I am no longer confident there is the necessary desire and ability to make this country succeed. As a result, I cannot rule out continued paralysis and dysfunction at best and widespread political violence or even dissolution at worst.”
Dr. Richard Haas, President emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, quoted in a Thomas B. Edsall Guest Essay in the NY Times, January 10, 2024: “A ‘National and Global Maelstrom’ Is Pushing us Under.”
Image from A Nation of Change article by Chris Hedges, Oct. 17, 2016 entitled “Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism.”
Introduction and Background: On the Road to a Trumpian Dictatorship
More than a decade ago, I had a brief conversation with a cognitive linguist/philosopher who was much in demand with the defeated Democrats of 2000-2008. It was in Washington, DC, just before a conference at a think tank, which one, I don’t remember. But George Lakoff’s name I do, having read both “Don’t Think of An Elephant,” and the much better, and deeper, “Moral Politics.” “Framing” was his catch phrase and “tool” on the mind of many beaten-down Dems, who felt the Republicans were out-debating, and out-propagandizing them. Better “framing” was thought to be the key to regaining the upper hand in the media realm. I had thought a good deal about Lakoff’s books, been to framing “workshops” for Progressives, and marvelled at how hard it was to come up with ten or so words which captured Democratic moral values compared to the rather easy ones which Lakoff used to encapsulate the Republican Right: less government; lower taxes;family values; free markets; strong defense. I don’t think “law and order” was on their list, but it should have been since Mass Incarceration was already well under way, with the blessing of Bill Clinton and even many black Democratic leaders.
“Framing” for Lakoff meant leading with one’s moral values in speeches and candidate responses, stating them in clear examples, rathering than restating the opposition’s on the way to responding - hence “Don’t Think of an Elephant.”
Lakoff’s attempts to do the same for the Progressive Democrats, left out, by design, the key word for them since the New Deal, if not before… back to at least the farmer’s Populist Revolt and the election of 1896: “Equality,” or at least: “Greater Equality.” The great “Social Question” of the Gilded Age, which only intensified until the Red Scare after WWI shelved it, was the situation of the industrial workforce, “the workers,” with the courts and two party politics making no room for their formal representation, their pay and working conditions, health, retirement and medical care. Is it any wonder that a party which I have repeatedly described today as “fragmented” into a collection of movements that don’t work easily together nor march under a coherent banner of more universal values would have trouble with this basic task of naming its core values, before getting into the public exercise of “framing” them? Quickly now, give it a try: universal healthcare; affordable housing; environmental protection; women’s rights; gender equality, economic justice…racial equality; immigrant rights; equal justice under law…I could add in economic equality, but unqualified, its a non-starter with the Center and Right of the Democratic Party so we are forced to substitute “Greater Equality” to indicate our non-Utopian aspirations. And hence we encounter one of the great limitations of “framing”: it’s much easier when one’s party has moved in a definite if not dominant ideological direction, as the Republicans have continued to do since Reagan and 1980 - and much harder where the opposing party is a “composite” of often conflicting movements and values, especially the relation of labor and environmentalists to the substantial, veto wielding business element in the party. In the resulting tumultuous currents economic equality loses out to other issues and the public battles known as the “culture wars.”
No wonder Thomas Ferguson’s 1996 book “Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems” got (and still gets) so little attention, including my own, until very recently, despite its back cover plaudits coming from authors I admired - William Greider, Walter Dean Burnham, James Galbraith and Theodore Lowi - only one of whom is still living. Ferguson’s work tempers the “average voter rules” theories defending our American versions of democracy, by positing that successful participation is very expensive in terms of time, knowledge to be acquired, and the money to propagate one’s voice, or a group’s point of view. Keep that thought in mind when we visit the rise of Right Wing Talk Radio in the 1990’s.
Back under Lakoff’s research findings, he and other cognitive scientists found the brain responds positively to values it is familiar with (imprinted with) and comes to agree with, a positive feedback loop, which unfortunately, at least to me, means repetition is the key to successful communication in the media, and the spread of one’s values. And therefore Repetition is the key, logically, and maybe sadly, to advertising and political propaganda, which are closely related. You may have noticed in watching favorite cable TV stations, that businesses invest a lot of money in repetition of their ads - audience “saturation” might be the better term.
Therefore I chided Lakoff on leaving “Equality” out of the Democratic value equation, but my more substantive reservation about how far framing would take us on the left was that the Right seemed to play the public sphere with much greater emotional intensity, even reckless intensity, which the rational, Enlightenment based “House of Reason” Liberal-Left had been trained not to attempt to match. Raising an emotionally charged egalitarian banner was forbidden in the Joe McCarthy era of the early Fifties (and actually lasted until McGovern’s challenge and beyond, to Jesse Jackson and until Bernie Sanders seemed to break the chains and raise the flag in 2015-2016); on the other hand an emotionally charged attack on the entire left spectrum from the Right was fine: liberal, democratic socialist, and the remains of the tiny Communist Party. And by alleging that the rising Civil Rights movement was Communist dominated the American Right could neatly stretch to cover the new racial egalitarian threat. The “traitors within” which McCarthy hunted have now come back in a very vivid form as “vermin” at the end of Trump’s long Veterans Day address in New Hamphsire:
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections…” (Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2023)”
In the post World War II years emotional intensity was out of favor, certainly on the left, and ostensibly on the Right as well, given the human wreckage wrought by totalitarian Nazi Germany after 1933 and the devolution of the Russian Revolution of 1917 under Lenin, then Stalin - into the Age of Totalitarianism. The reticence of “Eisenhower Republicans” to engage in hot ideological speech was very frustrating to the hard-core American Right - the John Birch Society, for example - until Goldwater came along at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in the summer of 1964 and announced that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice… that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
There was something else which I had concluded by the first decade of the 21st century, after four decades of policy and political activism, and I emphasized it in my critique directly to Lakoff : the Republican Right was willing to not only endlessly repeat its winning formula of ten or twelve values: it was willing to dip, and dip deeply, into that vast inner, if not underworld of human emotion, the subterranean abode of resentments, hatreds and yes, jealousies, the reservoirs of red hot political lava that would-be demagogues could ladle out not only through relatively “chaste” signaling of dog whistles on race, Nixon style, but via range of words which would demonize their opponents across a spectrum of values, a mainly post-Nixon development (I’ll talk about how George Wallace fits into this later). Of course there was the public Nixon who spoke largely within the traditional confines of American political discourse, but then there was the flowing “lava” revealed by his tapes, the intense hatreds, the Enemies List, the attempted capture of the FBI, CIA for his political purposes… a “sneak” preview, perhaps, of what would come some 42 years later.
This sinister turn evolved into Newt Gingrich’s “GO-PAC” dictionary entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” from 1990, which a friend mailed me in the form of a Harper’s magazine article about this startling descent to calculated demonology and propaganda. I still remember reading the original because it was in such stark contrast to the institutional restraints I operated under at my employer NJ Audubon Society. Maybe we were too “wholesome.” In Gingrich’s hands, political differences became Manichean ones, the characterization of liberals turning towards their psychological illness and other deep character flaws. And Gingrich gave us a glaring example of psychological Projection from the Right onto its left opponents. During his run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012, during the South Carolina primary, “he got a roaring ovation when he blamed the ‘destructive, vicarious, negative nature’ of the media for making it so hard to govern. He ended the debate calling President Obama ‘the most dangerous president in our lifetime, who, if re-elected would bring a ‘level of radicalism’ that would be ‘truly frightening.” This according to James Salzer’s 2016 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article - “Gingrich’s Language Sets New Course.” Remember that this was the former House Speaker infamous for pushing government shutdowns upon President Clinton, casting the moderate, dignified Obama Presidency as the epitome of radicalism. If that characterization wasn’t so foreboding for the future turn of American politics, it would have been laughable - as it was to the American left. The American left, all the species of vermin in late 2023, are not laughting now.
And as anyone with an ear for Republican messaging knows, since in those Newt Gingrich’s “instructional” tapes, the “gospel” is usually consistent from the school board level on up to the State House and on into races for Congress and the Presidency: the private market is good, governmet bad; raising taxes a mortal sin, lowering them a holy commandment…family values sacred…secular liberal “institutions” like the New Deal’s CCC, or the state PIRG’s, Nader’s Raiders or the Sierra Club…not so good. And despite being launched by Nixon, a grand ideological straddler, caught between eras, big federal regulatory agencies like the EPA and OSHA became the very devil incarnate, their personnel referred to as “Jack-booted Nazi stormtroopers.” Hmmm. On the other hand, large megachurches with conservative leaning ministers are very, very good and in some ways are projected as the direct alternative to government programs, offering a whole range of social services. Francis Fitzgerald paints a portrait along these lines of the city of Lynchburg, Virginia, in her 2017 book “The Evangelicals: The Struggle To Shape America.
And then there is the line of reasoning that explains the unraveling of the “New Deal Order” and its replacement by “Neoliberalism” - as the change from a “managed” capitalism to one of deregulated “Markets Uber Alles.” This turn, beginning in the 1970’s, exemplified by the Carter presidency, went on to sweep the Republican Right and the Democratic Center (Carter, Clinton, Obama) and also shifted the mindset inside key regulatory agencies to one of awe of Wall Street. That led to a widespread notion that “I want to work for them someday” a far cry from the disciplined skepticism and independence necessary to regulate the increasingly mighty financial markets.
Just to be clear, there have been excellent books tracking this monumental shift, and here are just a few in rough chronological order: William Greider, “Who Will Tell the People” (1992); Kevin Phillips, “Arrogant Capital” (1994); Thomas Ferguson, “Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems”(1995); John Gray: “False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism” (1998);David Harvey, “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” (2005); Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” (2008); Kim Phillips-Fein: “Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan” (2009); Daniel T. Rodgers: “Age of Fracture” (2011); Jane Mayer: “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Right” (2017); Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” (2017); Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway: “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023);”Nicholas Lemann, “Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream” (2019).
Demonization in political speech didn’t start with Gingrich though, it evolved from earlier, largely Southern models, as Dan T. Carter’s fine 1996 book “From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994” demonstrates.
Wallace (1919-1998) actually came from an wealthy family of landowners and his grandfather was also a doctor, but by the time Wallace was born in 1919 the family’s slide down the social scale was well underway. It was a tough childhood, and it brewed some intense resentments - and ambitions. Wallace, like Richard Nixon, who was obsessed with the political threat Wallace posed to him, was an achiever but always outside the circle of socially confortable wealth. It sounds like a personal quirk of biography for both of them, but actually this class and cultural resentment becomes a basic building block of Republican Right politics, as the rise of the Tea Party and Trump demonstrate. It is writ large in contemorary figures such as Steve Bannon, who once traveled in exalted top 10% circles. And it complicates one dimentional causality, pitting class and culture alongside one another, with race ever looming over the political shoulder, when it is not center stage.
Wallace was a gifted politician and in terms of style, it was not a coincidence that he was a very good collegiate boxer. He evolved as a politician, realizing that the hard core race baiting acceptable in Alabama, with it intentional repeated use of the “N” word, needed a more generalized populist side to succeed in other parts of the country. And so it was that the pointy-headed bureacrats, Washington ones, liberal social reformers and do-gooders who were using the federal government to carry out their expensive reforms - at the expense of virtuous local, religiously oriented folks - took on the role of political demons. Wallace would punch them hard in his speeches. Of course, the social landscape of America in 1968 was fertile ground for Wallace’s characterizations: anti-war protesters, Civil Right protesters and then black rioting in urban areas all fed a sense of the old social order breaking down.
Wallace worked on the old Democratic Party’s fault lines, more than hinting at the full political migration which would come decades later, many blue collar Dems moving into the Republican camp, and college educated Republican “types” into the Democratic base. From Wallace to Lee Atwater to Patrick Buchanan to Newt Gingrich…with Atwater’s Willie Horton political ad a major contributor in routing Michael Dukakis in 1988 - making explicit the mixed lava flows of crime, race, sexual violence and the impotence of Democratic bleeding hearts to protect the public. Does any recall the Democratic Party making anything as biting to highlight the millions who lost their homes in the wake of the great mortgage deriviative bust of 2007-2008, or contrasting the mockery of “Equal Justice Under the Law” where race clearly loses to class: Mass Incarceration for drug offenses versus No Incarceration for Mass Marketing of fraudulent mortgages and their securties.
Contrasts in style and means can’t be any clearer than the end of this “devolution” with Donald Trump ripping into women journalists with misogynist gusto, and into immigrants for “poisoning” American blood, while Joe Biden wants to hug everyone in sight, include the not very huggable Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Let me note also that Trump’s overall speaking style is low throttle, like the game show host he was, but usually working towards the visceral punch lines, where his opponent and liberal Democrats are “fired” for neglecting the common folk. Trump’s style is not the classic raging bull demagogue from Fascist history between the wars. Instead it is imprinted with the style of the deal maker, self-promoter and approachable TV host. But the policies he is doubling down on in 2023-2024 are ominious and have led some previously cautious academics, cautious about too loosely applying the term Fascist in political dialogue, to openly admit now that Trump “has crossed the line” and there is an even more ominous administrative storm front gathering ahead of his possible second term. More on that later.
Well, I diverge just a bit here, trying to capture the varied currents that led to the Radical Right’s position in 2024 American politics.
And so what I finally said to George Lakoff was rather blunt: the Right, going back to the Nazis in the Weimar Republic’s (1919-1933) great propaganda wars, were always willing to go lower than the social and centrist democrats were in that fated Republic, The specific hatreds vary with times and cultures, but always mean a starring role for the dangerous “other,” and the demagogues had no shame in using all encompassing media repetition to mark themselves as the saviors of orderly “hard working” citizens and in the Weimar case, special virtues of German culture, and then an American Exceptionalism turned into something closer to chauvinism than patriotism. I told Lakoff that sadly, Joseph Goebbels was the master of this, leaving the political world of the interwar West in the electronic dust of the new mass media of radio, film and magazines. I also said that most writers, including political writers, were tempermentally opposed to the constant repetition of the same themes or memes and to the vast propaganda machines which the Republican Party had set in motion. Set in motion from its chief funders on the business right, the conservative foundations - and on to every branch of the national party, so that one would hear the same themes from school boards in Wisconsin to gubernatorial races in Florida. A modern drum beat of ideological marching, perhaps the equivalent of the mass rallies, banners and torchlight parades of the Germany of the 1930’s. In the US, the torchlights appeared late in this devolution, during the Charlottesville, VA march in August of 2017.
{If you would like to consider torchlights and further foreshadowing of our times, just visit the accounts of the mass KKK rallies of the 1920’s where Catholic immigrants, Jews and always the Reds were the targets, besides black people. Here is the title of a NY Times article from 1924 about a proposed march by the Klan outside my home town of Trenton, NJ: “RACE CLASH FEARED IF KLANSMEN MARCH; Proposed Parade of 100,000 Near Trenton, N.J., on Labor Day Causes Concern. TROUBLE IN JERSEY TOWN Patrols Doubled In Two Sections -- Business Men Now Plan a Housing Code.” The march did take place in semi-rural Hamilton Township, because the City of Trenton would not issue a permit for the march, Trenton being at that time the home to thousands of recent immigrants from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, and having a sizeable black population living in an area called the “Coalport.” And here is the same story from the Trentonian newspaper, which is much in tune with the Times account, but states that only 10,000 turned out for the march. https://www.capitalcentury.com/1924.html }
Of course, demagogues and their skill at demonization have a long geneology in Western political history, going back to Aristotle and his Triparte sorting of the types of ideal government - and their forms of decay. Despite the more recent memories from the fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany in 1933 - the Ur warning against Fascism from the Right - conservatives in the West have traditionally painted the French Revolution (and the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789) as their Ur warning against Revolution from the left, only to be superseded in the 20th Century by the masses taking the Winter Palace in the Russian Revolution in October of 1917. In these two instances, left and right, it’s propaganda driven mobs combining with an organized state apparatus bent on stamping out the traitors. In the Russian case, it’s more complex than that.
To this day, Edmund Burke is one of the patron saints of the American Right, the one who has all the answers to what was horrible and destructive in the French Revolution. He’s still right there, front and center, in the very first essay by the late Russell Kirk (1918-1994), in Andrew J. Bacevich’s collection of a century of writings, “American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition.”
Mobs - or Justly Enraged Citizens?
It has been been fascinating therefore for me to reconsider the 1989 work of a master story teller and professional historian, Simon Schama, about the second great Atlantic Revolution on its 200th Birthday: “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.”
Schama has tried to turn the meaning of the French Revolution upside down from its older conventional readings, at least those from the left. Was it really necessary, he asks, all the great bloodshed and turmoil which lasted from 1789-1815, when France was, in actuality, relatively prosperous, and getting more so with a semi-Enlightened monarch, a growing middle-class of businessmen, pressing on the aristocratic orders above them, those of the “Ancien Regime,” including marrying their daughters, and with the growth of science promising even more progress? Instead, even some of the most educated in the nation, via famous salons, regrettably listened to a few dreamy Philosophes from the Enlightenment and their romanticization of Nature and later their Rights of Man - "Nature’s Children” - and to “outsider” demagogic lawyers seducing the Paris crowds turned into “mobs.” (Note these lawyers are famously not the same as the almost noble aristocratic lawyers who had done so much to set the the Estates General in motion and therefore begin the revolutionary chain of events in 1789) {If the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” which emerged from the new National Assembly’s struggles to write a French Constitution in July and August 1789" were upsetting to many in aristocratic Europe, you can imagine how upsetting the potential “Rights of Nature” are today’s for the Democratic Party’s Center and all parts of the strained Republican Party Spectrum. “We” didn’t even make it through to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights from 1944 - economic rights - in 2019.}
These rising secular leaders from the private clubs of highly politicized Paris were the creators of the categories of demonization to be pinned on aristocrats and the clergy for plotting with the foreign monarchs to bring Louis XVI back to the throne…It didn’t just lead to the Terror we all know, that of the Guillotine, but to the massacre at the Tuilleries in August of 1791, of the horrific September Days in 1792 when 1400 prisoners, common criminals, royal suspects and priests were chopped to pieces and their bodies further desecrated, some say sexually mutiliated, and the even more massive and equally horrific mob dynamics in the Vendee region of Western, Atlantic France in the Spring of 1793, starting with local resistance to the military draft, and then the corresponding reaction of the central Revolutionary government in Paris which sent an army to crush the revolt.
Here’s how Schama puts it:
“And to this day the history of the Vendee is capable of polarizing French historians and readers more implacably than almost any other event of the Revolution…Like the September massacres, the sanguinary acts began with an uncontrollable spontaneous need to visit public and brutal punishment on men who symbolized intolerable evils and immediate threats: foreigners inside the culture of hearth and home. Like the September massacres, the eruption of popular anger was quickly directed, controlled and even given some sort of spurious legal form….The brutality of the Vendee rising, and of its repression, was a product of the Manichaean language of the revolutionary war.” Their “common fraternity as Frenchmen” was gone. .. “they had each become so accustomed to damning stereotpes of monsters and incarnations of evil that reason collapsed back fatally to these mutual demonologies.” (from the Chapter entitled “Enemies of the People? Winter-Spring 1793, page 693; my italics for emphasis).
Totaling up the casualities from the Revolution’s persecutions and the Civil War in the Vendee, and in Lyon and Marseille as well, has become more than a bit of a left-right interpretative contest, with the numbers of civilians killed rising the further in time we get from the actual events. Today, the toll in the Vendee massacres has risen into the hundreds of thousands, making the toll from the more infamous Terror in Paris pale by comparison.
Schama, however, may have gone too far in his revisionism, and I found myself repeatedly asking, questioning not so much the death totals from the massacres wrought by both sides - and I’m willing to concede the highest of the totals - but whether demagoguery alone could have generated the level of popular anger resulting in such a slaughter, and especially that stemming from the early mob behaviors in Paris. Or is Schama too bent on minimizing the social pain and resentments arising from the unusual institutions of the Ancien Regime, and especially stemming from the mass of artistocratic customs, grating deferences and schemes of bizarre taxation…my reasoning being in part this: if mere oratory and demonization were the chief drivers, what’s to prevent every age from first ascending to high aspirations, then descending into the brutal violence, the depths we know societies can descend into, in the more “special” turbulent times of 1848, 1871, 1905, 1917-1922, 1919-1933-1945…
And I’ve left out another huge line of discussion and speculation over causation in the French Revolution: the bread riots in 1789, stemming from the cruel weather and thus poor harvests in 1788-1789. Food shortages and thus higher prices were one of the focuses of the Parisian crowds/mobs, and the state of French agriculture, its harvests, methods of distribution and taxation schemes can take the reader, the modern reader in economics back to one of the foundational left-right disputes already forming in 18th century France before the Revolution breaks out in 1789: should French agriculuture move more towards a laissez-faire unregulated model, or should a fair and low price of bread be once of the chief objectives of state policy? It’s glimpse through a salon window into debates which inform this essay, the trajectory of American economics from the heavily regulated New Deal model to the purer free market models of the still reigning but wobbling Neoliberal “order” which Clinton ratified and which the ultra Right revolutionaries today want to continue with their legal and extra-legal attacks on the “administrative state.”
Back to the driver of crowds and mobs: it’s a question of assigning weight between competing schemes of causation, one emphasizing demagogues and demonization of language, the other the social and economic conditions which may have helped “weaponize” those words for the inflammatory agitators, picking up here a favorite word from the contemporary Republican Right which we hear time and again in the “Trump” era. This is Trump’s accusation throughout his indictment laden year of 2023, that Biden has weaponized the Justice Department if not the federal government entirely against him.
This train of argumentation reminds me of the lectures given by political economist Mark Blyth, who teaches at Brown University, and takes up the causation argument over the rise of Right Wing Populism/Trumpism, and the impact of Neoliberalism, whether it is primarily economic or cultural/racial. He predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 based on his assessment of the anger level among the bottom 60%, and was rewarded, so he says in his talks, by his wife punching him in the stomach the morning after when it was clear Trump had won. The economic pain of globalization preceded the cultural backlash, Blyth maintains, the pains of de-industrialization and the turn against blue collar jobs towards service jobs and the vast entry and success of women in the workplace. And the deep economic damage caused by the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the ten million who lost their homes/mortgages, and the fact that no major responsible Wall Street figures went to jail over the catastrophe, just to rub even more salt into “populist” wounds. I agree with that assessment although the transitions in economic life often unfolded side-by-side with changing gender and racial hierarchies. Add in angry blue collar white men with high school degrees displaced and middle and small business people unhappy over taxes and regulations, and you have some powerful fuel for a populist revolt on the Right. Should we consider the Republican Right’s deflection of the blame for the great derivative driven housing bust - onto liberal’s bleeding hearts encouraging the lending to marginal buyers - the beginning of the embrace of the Big Lie? It’s a good candidate for it. And a march/mob to reclaim a “Stolen Election,” even if it was a total lie - which it was - was only the immediate spark to build upon the list of grievances I’ve just outlined.
There is more to think about, triggered in good part by the place of the French Revolution in Western Political thought. Ira Katznelson, writing one of the better recent interpretations of the New Deal, “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time,” (2013) placed that American achievement “almost on a par with that of the French Revolution.” In 2019, Jeremy D. Popkin’s “A New World Begins” maintains that the story of the French Revolution “is still relevant to all who believe in liberty and democracy. Whenver movements for freedom take place anywhere in the world, their supporters claim to be following the example of the Parisians who stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789” - an event which Schama seems to go overboard in ridiculing as an unnecessary and even hollow gesture: a crowd liberating a nearly empty prison - which didn’t hold any political prisoners. But the fortress prison did hold a lot of symbolism for Parisians, and gunpowder and weapons for future citizen actions in the street.
My take on Schama is this: he’s writing “Citizens” at the near zenith of a conservative, globalizing era, of Thatcher and Reagan, and the idea of the need for a radical upsurge from the left, and much less a bloody one, seems completely anachronistic to his time: 1989 and the blase mood of the French towards their own famous Revolution seems to confirm that. Communism has fallen or is about to, and the “End of History” is in sight, the future is all liberal capitalism and democracy, other notions and eras sent to the “trash bin” of history.
Schama is also so fantastically knowledgeable of the details of the eras he’s writing about, whether its the zenith of the Dutch Republic in the 17th Century or the France of Louis XVI, that the reader, and maybe the author himself, is so lost in their dazzle that some of the powerful emotional currents which arise from earlier facts on the ground are lost to an almost pointillist method which ends up not clarifying the overall picture but rather dissolving it. And I think one of the most difficult tasks for historians is to look back at an era and accuraely gauge the emotional undercurrents of the public (note the gap today between professional economists’ take on the economy and the public’s feeling in the polls.) And it is a bit ironic, don’t you think, that such a long and major work of revision occurs as the Reactionary Revolution from the Right in Great Britain and the U.S. is more than well under way, devolving decade by decade after 1989 as the divisiveness and demonization proceeds apace on the Right; there being no better example mirroring the French instance of a Revolution “devouring its own children” than the destructive behavior of the Radical Right in the American Congress in the fall and winter of 2023-2024, House Speakers devoured before our very eyes, the momentum always moving to the right, not to the left as in the French Revolution from 1791-1793. A bit difficult, I think, for the Atlantic World to shift gears historically and consider Revolutions blowing from the Right side of the ideological compass.
I’ve written before of my admiration for a great work located chronologically here in the evening twilight of democracy - and by extension, of liberalism itself, as John Gray has suggested above in my December 17th posting. And that work is J.S. McClelland’s “A History of Western Political Thought.” (1996). No one I’ve read even comes close to his clarity - without sacrificing depth - in handling the great issues arising out of our traditions in the West since the classical Greeks. And from the greatest thinkers of all persuasions. For our purposes at hand here, I find the structure of his book’s second half (of 800 pages) revealing not only in the details but in the general schema of devolution. It begins with “Liberalism” in the classic sense of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, names familiar to all who suffered through college political science classes…and that occurs just at the half-way, four hundred page mark of the text, and then moves (downhill?) to the broad categories of “Reactions to Liberalism…” from the Hegalian State to the left reactions of Marx, Socialism, Social Democracy and then what he calls the synthesis of Jacobinism with Marxist-Bolshevism: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
And then under the broad topic of Irrationalism and anti-rationalism we come to a very interesting Chapter Heading for # 28: “Liberalism’s Special Enemies: The Crowd and Its Theorists.” Next, Chapter 29 is “The Leader and His Crowd: Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). Extending the train of thought of those two very important chapters takes us to #30: “Fascism, or Being Revolutionary without Being Marxist.” Although he doesn’t get a Chapter to himself, we find that Gustav Le Bon (1841-1931) dominates these concluding chapters almost equally with Freud himself. Le Bon’s seminal work among his many varied volumes was “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895). And he gets his own Biographical page in McClelland’s format, right after Vilfredo Pareto and followed by Freud and then Adolf Hitler. I hope the drift, if not the immediate linkage, is clear.
Le Bon is on the conservative side of the spectrum of Western political thought, and he wonders if the way to divert a crowd from going populist left, is to have elite leaders, who lean conservative, and who can, by their charisma and understanding of its dynamics, bend it in a conservative direction. That is, before it turns into a “mob” of the sort that was alleged to have stormed the Bastille and committed the September Massacres in Paris. Digging deeper into the work of Le Bon and Freud we find the late Victorian era’s fascination with the work of hypnosis, of individuals and groups, which seems to open up insights into their darker impulses going back to childhood traumas. Keep in mind the phrases “he was a hypnotic speaker” who “held the audience in his hands,” bending them this way and that.
Now of course, one can see the enormous amount of Western learning potentially up for discussion here - and all before George Lakoff’s framing schema and work with brain patterns in learning. In most of 19th century history, the crowd, beginning with the French Revolution, has been associated with popular protest which turns ugly as with the infamous torching of French historical shrines like the Tuilleries during the Paris Commune of 1871. And which, if they do not committe atrocities in the name of the common people, invite barbarous retribution from the Right as in the Russian throne’s response to the 1905 Revolution’s movements, starting with Father Gapon’s peaceful march to petition the Tsar in St. Petersburg in January of that year, which became known as Bloody Sunday. Part of the Throne’s response was the formation of the “Union of the Russian People” and then para-militaries called “The Black Hundreds,” which noted Russian historian Orlando Figes calls “an early Russian version of the Fascist movement” (in his seminal history of the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, “A People’s Tragedy.” (1996). As Figes notes in the Chapter entitled “First Blood” - “the worst violence was reserved for the Jews,” not the students and revolutionaries, who surely had Jews prominent in their leadership. “There were 690 documented pogroms - with over 3,000 reported murders…The worst pogroms took place in Odessa (now Ukraine) where 800 Jews were murdered, 5,000 wounded and more than 100,000 made homeless.”
And to demonstrate the complex left-right tango of crowd action turning into mob violence, don’t confuse the work of Le Bon with that of the much later, 20th century historian George Rude (1910-1993), a Marxist scholar who stressed popular history, most famously in his 1964 work “The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848,” followed by his “The Crowd in the French Revolution,” 1967.
Where am I headed with these historical tributaries? First, for much of the past two centuries, long centuries in Western historical and political writing the crowd, the gathering of large numbers of protestors, has been considered a liberal leaning or progressive event, of the common people against monarchs - British, French, Russian - and in the United State, against the Crown in the 1770’s, against Jim Crow racial regimes, for the right to vote, against implacable employers in the 1930’s (the sit-down strikes in the automobile industry)… and more recently, the massive, hundreds of thousands of marchers against the War in Vietnam, for Women’s Rights, to stop Global Warming.
Yes, the American Right has taken up the style in Anti-abortion/Pro Life rallies, various religious revivals usually gathered, as the left’s marches were, on the Washington Mall…and although the vast majority of the left leaning protests were peaceful, there always was a fringe of violent activity, usually against property, and American Conservatives always held up the spectre of all-out left mob violence as the greatest threat to American democracy. You could hear that schema as background music in the long career of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, and of course it was explicit in the career of George Wallace. It became more than background noise in the culture as whole, however, with the extensive violence of black rioting in the 1960’s, the infamous tales of Detroit, Newark and many other old industrial cities with volatile black ghettoes.
In these matters of racial protest, turned mob violence, it didn’t seem to matter that most of the 1960’s rioting was black destruction of the business communities in their own neighborhoods (granted, there were many stores owned by whites) and not black on white personal violence…excepting the police violence which often triggered the rioting…foreshadowing events many decades later in the rise of “Black Lives Matter.” The message though, was one of fear to whites, especially white ethnics in neighborhoods often adjacent to the worst of the black ghettos.
As a whole, white middle class and working class Americans were not sympathetic to the use of "historical context” - the long and often awful history of black people in the United States, and the bleak circumstances of the racial urban ghetto, where agricultural black workers were losing their traditional roles and jobs to mechanized farming in the South, and migrating north just as the old industrial machine was packing up and heading to more rural white American sites, then the border with Mexico and then Southeast Asia. Whites didn’t want to hear that “context’s” role in building black rage; their parents and grandparents had often come up through ethnic ghettos and they didn’t buy the fine tuned comparisons of why their parents’ circumstances were easier than those facing post WWII black migrants to the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Not even the "KERNER COMMISSION REPORT ON THE CAUSES, EVENTS, AND AFTERMATHS OF THE CIVIL DISORDERS OF 1967,” all 440 pages, made a difference.
That’s just some of the left-right context on crowds, and how they might turn into mobs, and when the last vestiges of social and personal restraints get peeled away and any type of violence can result: beatings, rapes, mutiliations…torching of property…which Le Bon and Freud would say peel back all the layers of modern Western Civilization, and turn individuals in the mob into the equivalent of the Nomadic Barbarians coming off the Asian steppes, the Golden Hordes…etc.
Today, we have frequent references to the “electronic herd” or mob, the vicious personal “trolling” that occurs on the electronic platforms, where the anonymous chance for commentary seems to strip away all civility…and the attacks mimic in words the brutality of actual beatings in the traditional pogroms. And where, I must add, it is generally conceded that the American Right, Conservatives, have held court in the political arena, first in talk radio with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin…Glenn Beck, and now in the Alt-Right platforms which have grown with even fewer restraints against mangling facts, and building towards the assorted Great Lies of contemporary Propaganda wars. Let’s try to keep these musings, historical threads in mind as we consider…
How We Got “Here”: Preparing the Way - A Decade of Listening to Right Wing Talk Radio
Nigel Perry photo for the NY Times from a July 6, 2008 article by Zev Chafets, “Late Period Limbaugh.
I still have very vivid memories of the time I spent in the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s listening to various Right Wing Talk Radio shows. Because I commuted some long distances to my environmental jobs first at Sandy Hook and then Bernardsville, NJ, and the many meetings they spun off, I couldn’t help avoid the shows’ beacon-like prominence on AM radio. Here’s what sticks in my memory on the road to where we are today in American domestic politics.
At times it seemed like nearly 24 hour non-stop Right Wing Republican propaganda - no exaggeration in stating that. The late Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) - roughly my age, and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom at Trump’s State of the Union address in 2020, was usually on the air from 12:00 noon until 3:00 PM. I would therefore catch him in commuting between meetings. Then from 3:00 until 6:00 PM would be Sean Hannity (1961-), who startled me when he had guests to interview, by asking them, out of the box, “Do You Believe in God” - just to be clear where he stood on the secular-religious spectrum. And that bluntness serves as a reminder not to forget the role of the Religious Right within the broader Right’s national dominance. Then from 6:00 until 9:00 PM came the most intense of the indoctrinators, and the most educated (neither Limbaugh or Hannity had completed college) who had served fairly high up in the Reagan administration, attorney Mark Levin (1957 -). Although in retrospect it appears that Limbaugh has had the greatest impact on American culture (and I’ll explain why shortly) it was Levin’s rants and his tone that made me worry about where the American Right was headed. In previous writings over the years, I’ve said that when he got going into his denunciations of the left, his voice sounded like the crack of a whip, and the indictments seemed like a modern flashback to the high ideologicals trials infamous in history…McCarthy and the Hiss trial…both in language and intensity. Indeed, in brushing up on my talk radio memories at Wikipedia, I found the following compiliation of evidence on Mark Levin:
“A 2016 study which sought to measure incendiary discourse on talk radio and TV found that Levin scored highest on its measure of "outrage". The study looked at 10 prominent radio and television programs, known for incendiary discourse on political matters, and scored content on the basis of whether it used "emotional display", "misrepresentative exaggeration", "mockery", "conflagration", "slippery slope", "insulting" or "obscene language", and other factors, finding that Levin was the radio host who engaged in the most outrage. The study found that he utilized "outrage speech or behavior at a rate of more than one instance per minute."[4] In How Democracies Die, Harvard University political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write that Mark Levin was among the popular right-wing talk radio hosts who "helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse" in American politics, and contribute to the erosion of democratic norms.[72] According to Politico, Levin has a ‘penchant for hysteria.’"[73] Mark Levin compared
Now I haven’t changed my ideological leanings since graduating from college and working in the McGovern campaign in 1972, right on through to door-to-door campaiging for Bernie Sanders in Cumberland, Maryland in the spring of 2016. I had found my calling in my environmental work, which was non-partisan, and the Boards of both the American Littoral Society and especially of NJ Audubon (1988-2013) were politically divided boards: Democrats, including some quite liberal ones, and Republicans, including some very conservative ones, and Independents. I do confess, however, to leaning left, or maybe it was my old Catholic grammar school egalitarian heritage breaking through, when I testified that the State of NJ and the Federal Government should not be spending a billion dollars pumping sand onto NJ’s beaches in a futile long term commitment to hold back rising sea levels and offshore currents - as long as there were thousands of homeless citizens in the Garden State’s cities and some of the nation’s worst urban scenes, such as in Camden, Newark and Trenton.
I lay out that brief personal biography to help indicate the feelings I had during these years of being caught in a giant undertoe from the Right, being swept out to sea, my head pushed under by 18 hours a day of steady conservative values, viewpoints and visions - a tsunami - of one sided propaganda that I don’t believe had any precedent in American life. This feeling I had, and the actual reality of the Right’s domination of the AM airwaves was made possible not only by the political turn to the Right of the U.S. voters in 1980, but the abolition of the fairness doctrine (1987) by the Federal Communications Commission. That and subsequent decisions allowed red hot political and ideological viewpoints to go unanswered without “equal time” rebuttals on the same station; further legal developments then allowed single station owners to buy up vast numbers of additional ones which would broadcast the same view - all with the blessing of the logic of market choice, that they are justified by their popularity, ratings, and revenue. The bias to the Right side of the American political spectrum also extended to the hosts’ screening of caller’s, and in most cases (I think Hannity was the lone exception) the absence of guests from different ideological points of view, so that the net effect over time was “All Conservative, All the Time.” And I’m not describing the more subtle bias that the Right accused the Mainstream Media of hiding. This was indoctrination however nicely it was packaged, and tempered, by personality and style. I could almost say it was “sweet” propaganda, although that’s perhaps going to far because I also detected some very ominous notions swimming in the stew.
It so happens that almost all the prominent conservative voices during these years were anti-environmental, with Limbaugh never referring to greens without a pejorative adjective preceding the term or the name, or worse - referring to the sad states of their mental health. The only talk show host who from time to time spoke up on behalf of conservation causes was Michael Savage, who had several advanced degrees from serious schools which bent him in that direction. But that was more than compensated for in the other direction, which I always thought suited the general drift of Right Wing Republican Talk Radio: he was the leader of the “Savage Nation,” and he seemed to take some delight in the further implications of that adjective for American politics. Let’s roll those words around on our lips “Savage Nation” vs Civic Virtue, Civil Discourse, Pluralistic Balance…and going back to the founder’s, the “Atlantic Republican Tradition” brought to us by P.G.A. Pocock.
Did the nation realize that the cumulative reality of these shows amounted, absent any new counter version of the Fairness Doctrine, to massive indoctrination in one political school's view of the world, literally and with no exaggeration, round the clock propaganda? Sanctified by the market view of the world: let the best ideas win, as demonstrated by market share and listener choice…after all, there was quaint old Public Radio, NPR, wasn’t there, also being policed by the Republican Right via Congressional oversight hearings, which in actuality became all that remained of the Fairness Doctrine, so in effect, by being scrupulously “fair” - Dems and R’s and Liberatarians balanced - NPR was in fact no real ideological balance to those 18 hours of uninterrupted Right Wing propaganda. And on the “for profit” Radio and TV waves, open liberal voices could not hold a candle to the millions of viewers racked up by most of the major voices on the Right, who also were each publishing best selling polemicals in print. (I found a Wikipedia article on each of them to be a good refresher course, and shocking in confirming the extent of their audience reach.)
Sure, that segment of the electronic media spectrum was all Right, all the Time, but didn’t that just balance the Right’s accusation against the “Mainstream Media’s” liberalism, the bias in journalists themselves, the majority of whom are liberal, and by a good majority? One could argue that, as the Right often did, but what was happening in actuality was that citizens were fracturing into ideological camps, and identity politics, so that many, if not most were avoiding ever having to listen to a serious counter-argument side-by-side to their own viewpoints, in the way that Willam F. Buckley’s “Firing Line’s” format used to guarantee - with advantage to Buckley still because of his intensity (a hint at the intensity imbalance to come between left and right), preparation and skill as a debater, always trying to steer the left-liberal guest into the corner of confessing to “state coercion” in matters of taxation and egalitarian legislative proposals.
And then there was the tone, the startling contrast between the Right’s instinct for the juglar in politcs, witness Limbaugh’s constant drumbeat of mockery or worse for Greens, Hannity’s obvious prejudice against non-believers, and the shrill diatribes that Mark Levin would launch out on against the Left taking away citizen’s Liberty and Freedom, usually in the form of alleged politically correct speechifying, but also including regulatory measures spanning the full spectrum of economic activity.
When I talk about “tone” (I almost wrote “tea and tone” to summon up an image of a Victorian parlor at afternoon tea time) I can’t but help recall that aspect of NPR, Public Radio, with Bob Edwards (on the morning news, “Red” Barber’s sports commentary, or the long interviews by Terrry Gross on her long running “Fresh Air” show, so restrained in her slow drawing-out of literary and cultural figures, barely casting a shadow of her own philosophy or politics upon the guest…I hope I’m making the drift clear, on the way to the conclusion of all this slanting - year’s later in Herr Trump’s persona. It’s not just the ideas and ideologies that register the sea change in American political life, it’s the tone of speakers, and the formats as well which allow for unmediated and unchallenged hour long speechifying, if not rants of one-directional winds.
And so, sometime in the second decade of the new century, someone asked me why I continued to listen in to “Rush” while I was home gardening or cooking. My answer may have sounded a bit too worried, but it was what I felt; I said I listened to them the way a Jew in Germany might have listened to the drift of public speeches in the late Weimar Republic, especially after the Great Depression set in - listened for clues about what was to come.
And on the other side of the isle, in the Democratic camp of Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, 1992-2000, did we have an intense, counterbalancing wind blowing from the left, either in terms of rhetoric, or policy? Here’s Nicholas Lemann’s take in Transaction Man, his 2019 work on the end of the New Deal era of institutions and the rise of the new fluid, fluctuating economic actors:
Robert Rubin encouraged people in the administration never to talk about rich people at all, as it would encourage resentment and spook the markets. ‘People who had done well’ was better. After Reich (Robert) as Secretary of Labor made a speech calling for an end to ‘corporate welfare’ - undeserved subsidies for big companies - the White House Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, called him in and told him that Rubin had threatened to resign unless he stopped using that term. (Page 162). {Editor’s note: Robert Rubin held several positions in Clinton’s two terms: as head of National Economic Council and then Sec. of the Treasury. He also had a long career prior to Clinton’s presidency with Goldman Sachs, and later, after he left public service with Citigroup- which is a story in itself.}
And truth suffered, enormously, under this tide of Right Wing ideology - and propaganda. Let me share one instance which bothered me a great deal, relevant for today’s consideration of whether Herr Trump has crossed a line into outright Fascism. It centered on his handling of the “political spectrum” and the blurring of distinctions between liberal, liberal-left, social democratic, socialist and communist principles which is rife on the Right. It greatly facilitates the policy wars of the Right to be able to lump liberals and social democrats with Socialists, and Socialists to Communists. Here I have to say Bernie Sanders did not help cure the Right’s habit - or was it a tactic? - but virtually handed it to them by keeping the label “Socialist” despite rejecting any programs to nationalize the “means of production” - private businesses - and then contradicting himself by linking his vision not to the history of American Socialists (never mentioning Michael Harrington) but to FDR’s very conservatively framed Second Bill of Rights, economic Rights, from 1944.
I’m pretty sure Limbaugh’s rant happened in 2014, and I found a comment I left at historian Corey Robin’s blog site to remind me of the time frame, and the circumstances. I had heard Limbaugh make the linkage that the Nazis and Hitler were socialists, on the way to being able to more easily hurl the dual insult at President Obama, where they were becoming words easily rolled off the tongues of the President’s hard Right critics - initially over his private sector favoring health care bill . I don’t recall Limbaugh going into any great detail - apparently the Nazi party’s formal name, the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the NSDAP) containing the words National Socialist did the trick. And their reliance on the state. Case closed. And there were policies lightly advanced during the 1920’s and before 1933 which were very much in the German Bismarkian tradition of worker protections, well before, many decades before any comparable American protections in the New Deal. Bismark had enacted these policies in the last quarter of the 19th century as much to head off the growing SPD (social democratic party, the main socialist party) in its “revolutionary” phase than out of concern with the genuine plight of the German working class. And something I didn’t hear Limbaugh mention, that very early in his “career” Hitler was a paid agent of German military intelligence in the tumultuous years just after WWI, spying on socialists and the many minor far right splinter parties blossoming after the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1919. At the time the largest party in Germany was the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (the SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany), which was Socialist in ideology but democratic and pragmatic in its public life, and further on its left was the Kommunistische Party Deutschlands (the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, the second largest left party in Germany).
Because Americans rarely hear an accurate discussion of the meaning of terms along the historical political spectrum (beginning with the French Revolution and on through the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the German one of 1919, the later being the least well known one) Limbaugh’s characterizations were important given his popularity by 2014, so I acted to try to get a public correction on the record. I did so by sending a letter to the two leading American professional organizations of historians, asking them to set the record straight on where Hitler stood vis a vis the Socialists of Germany, especially the Social Democratic Party. I said Limbaugh had committed a gross historical distortion and it needed to be corrected by professional historians speaking through their formal organizations. They refused, saying they did not get involved in politics, and I replied that the matter at hand was not politics, it was historical accuracy concerning the nature of the causes for arguably greatest catastrophe to befall civilization…ever. And the political labels being carried over so inaapropriately to contemporary politics.
The professional reaction was disappointing, but not surprising. Ever since at least the Red Scare of 1919-1920 and its deportations, and the McCarthy Era’s intimidation of public discourse on precisely the areas of the political spectrum I’m concernted with here, there has been a too easy inclination of far left parties in the US to hurl the accusation of “fascism, Nazism or Hitler" against conservative political opponents, and even rivals on the left. Therefore academic historians, political scientists and cultural historians all ran from “Hitler/Fascism” accusations surfacing in contemporary discussions - and not without reason. But in the question at hand we had an American on the Right with an audience in the millions, the largest in radio broadcasting, proclaiming a gross historical error, distortion and travesty upon the Weimar situation, 1919-1933. And in my estimation, doing so to “free up” the awful “Socialist” word, and linking it directly to the most despised name and cause in Western history, all in the cause of contemporary American political polemics.
Let me set the record straight. In Volume One of Ian Kershaw’s “definitive” biography of Hitler (out in 1998, so available years before Limbaugh’s distortions), he states in the chapter entitled “The Making of the Dictator” that “Hitler was never a socialist.” Kersaw wades into his views on the economy, something Hitler was a complete amateur in - completely adrift:
Although he he upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship, and economic competition, and disapproved of trade unions and worker’ interference in the freedom of owners and managers to run their concerns, the state, not the market would determine the shape of economic development. Capitalism was, therefore, left in place…he thought essentially in terms of race, not class, of conquest, not economic modernization. (pages 448-449).
Hitler had made his name on the Right, not the left, in his wild Beer Hall speeches in Bavaria in the 1920’s, in Munich, leading up to his failed Putsch in 1923, his “imprisonment” under rather genteel conditions, and thus chance to write the first volume of Mein Kamph in 1924. In his early speeches, it was a virulent anti-Semitism (what Kershaw labels “primitive antisemitic rantings”) that won him fame as an emotionally charged speaker, that and the widely shared view on the Right, and further in Germany, that the nation had been “stabbed in the back” by the architects of the Versailles Treaty, the Social Democrats and other Marxists and Internationists who had overthrown the Kaiser and set up the Weimar Republic.
However, when Hitler began to speak in the wider Germany, in Hamburg, for example, as early as on Februaray 26, 1926, we get an even greater clarification of what the term “socialism” in the party label meant against the background of the intense German politics of Weimar, and the broader left:
By ‘Marxism,” Hitler did not merely mean the German Communist Party…beyond the KPD, the term served to invoke the bogy of Soviet Communism, brought into power by a Revolution less than a decade earlier, and followed by a civil war whose atrocities had been emblazoned across a myriad of right-wing publications. ‘Marxism’ had even wider application. Hitler was also subsuming under this rubric all brands of socialism other than the ‘national’ variety he preached, and using it in particular to attack the SPD and trade unionism…No ‘Marxist’ apocalypse threatened from that quarter. But Hitler’s rhetoric had, of course, long branded those responsible for the Revolution and the Republic which followed it ‘the November criminals.’ ‘Marxism’ was, therefore, also convenient shorthand to denigrate Weimar democracy. As a rhetorical device, therefore “Marxism’ served a multiplicity of purposes. (page 286)
Attentive readers of contemporary American politics, specifically Herr Trump’s Veterans’ Day Speech in New Hampshire in 2023, will note with alarm the use of the term Marxist in a similar broad brush way, bluring that troublesome political spectrum again, but including all the main dissenters in contemporary American society as “vermin.” And including the “fascists” whom nowhere in Post World War I Europe were they tolerant of Marxists, whether social democrats, socialists or communists.
Hitler went further in his Hamburg speech, Kershaw tells us: “Hitler reduced it to a simple formula: if the Marxist ‘world-view’ was not ‘eradicated’ (ausgerottet), Germany would never rise again. The task of the National Socialist Movement was straight forward: ‘the smashing and annihihilation of the Marxist Weltanschauung’. Terror must be met with terror. (pages 286-287).
I had to remind myself just how early this Hamburg speech was, 1926. How loaded it was with the portent of future violence - and cynicism towards the masses - in Kershaw’s view. “‘We are all wokers’” Hitler asserted, but it was not the message that the traditional social democratic left, the socialists of Germany’s largest party had been preaching for many decades, moderating their earlier 19th century views on revolution to become a democratic partner in the modern Germany. Their evolution over the period 1870-1910 - from a Revolutionary Socialist Marxist party to an “evolutionary one” - confident they could usher in the socialist vision by peacefully working within the German democratic tradition, weak as it was, was the subject of enormous controversy in the world of the Socialist Internationale, and marked a major disruption if not rupture with the older Marxist tradition. Among hard line revolutionary socialists the term “rotten social democrat” became a favorite epithet to hurl long into the 20th century. (Editor’s Note: Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics At Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University, devotes 200 pages in two long chapters to German Social Democracy in his 2019 book, “Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism.” I’ve never heard or seen him interviewed on any mass media channel, his name being far eclipsed in these theological/political matters by Glenn Beck’s, Beck himself being a master of distortions and confusion in using the terms socialist and fascist in his talk shows, public speeches and many writings. )
All these ideological and historical details Limbaugh passed over, and I don’t think we ought to cut him any slack, even in his grave. But it gets much worse than these detailed tracing’s of Hitler’s changing rhetoric, his tactical twists and turns. He never abandoned his stated objective in Hamburg to terrorize and destroy all of the German left: socialists, social democrats, communists, trade unionists. And how could someone as allegedly politically savvy as Mr. Limbaugh have passed over the real test of whether Hitler’s Nazis were “socialist” as the socialists themselves understood the word and the movement behind it?
After Hitler was appointed Chacellor in early 1933, three major events subsequently unfolded which should have forever cleared up where he and his movement lay on the political spectrum of his time - and for its use in future “spectrum” controversies.
The first was the arson attack on the German Reichstag building on February 27, 1933 by a former Dutch communist who had dropped the party and moved to Berlin in mid-February. Hitler worked himself into a fury over the fire, but recovered quickly enough to seize the opportunity to show his real hand against the left. The very next day he issued an emergency decree “For the Protection of People and State” which ended any civil liberties surviving from the Weimar Republic’s constitution, and an additional paragraph essentially wiped out the already diminished independence of the Lander - the German equivalent of American states, some of whom had already been taken over by appointed Nazi leaders, as in Prussia.
The fire set by a one-time foreign communist was the pretext for a vast, organized pogrom against the left, beginning in the late night and early morning after the fire:
But Social Democrats trade unionists, and left-wing intellectuals…were also among those dragged into improvised prisons, often in the cellars of the SA or SS local headquarters, and savagely beaten, tortured and in some cases murdered. By April the number taken into ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone was some 25,000. (Page 460; Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, Volume I, Ian Kershaw.)
The national election of March 5, 1933 saw the Nazi Party reach the zenith of its share of the national vote - still below a majority - with 43.9 percent, the Communists and Social Democrats both under 20%. But the electoral triumph seemed only to make the violence worse, and on March 22 the first formal concentration camp was established at Dachau. On March 23, 1933, “with 441 votes to the ninety-four of the Social Democrats, the Reichstag, as a democratic body, voted itself out of existence.” (Kershaw, p. 468.)
Worse was not too far away. If Mr. Limbaugh had needed any other hard factual clues as to who was left or right in the German Spring of 1933, the renaming of the classic left holiday of May 1st from “International Workers Day” to “Day of National Labour” should have provided some clues. The very next day the Nazi operatives arrested the trade union leaders, closed down their headquarters and confiscated their banks and accounts. “The once-mighty Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest labour movement that Europe had known, was also at an end.” (Kershaw, Vol. 1, page 476.)
And finally, in late June, 1934, came the elimination of the leadership of the S.A. in the “Night of the Long Knives (June 30th). These were the Brownshirts, some 4.5 million strong and led by what many saw as the last vestige of any trace of traditional socialist leanings in the person of Ernst Rohm, the head of the S.A. - that notion despite the fact that his movement was the fist in the streets which had been brutalizing the left - the SPD and Communists since the early 1920’s, it’s socialist fragments being based on some populist worker measures the movement had hoped to eventually enact, and the fact that a considerable number of its members were former Socialist and Communist street fighters. But the S.A. and Rohm had been making demands for its integration into the regular army, and the traditional military leadership wanted no part of them. Later, the Reichswehr (the Weimar Republic’s new name for the German Army) would have to give some ground to the SS units which had grown to replace the role of the S.A. after the summer of 1934. They would be the Nazi party political ideologues with their own units within the regular army.
And so with the suppression of SA, any case or claim that the triumphant Nazi party was “socialist” was destroyed forever. In fact the broad public welcomed its destruction:
What the people saw for the most part was the welcome removal of a scourge. Once the SA had done its job in crushing the Left, the bullying and strutting arrogance, open acts of violence, daily disturbances and constant unruliness of the stormtroopers were a massive affront to the sense of order, not just among the middle classes. Instead of being shocked by Hiter’s resort to shooting without trial, most people…acclaimed the swift and resolute actions of their leader. (Keshaw, Vol. 1, pps. 519-520.)
Will the U.S. Repeat the Tragedy of Germany’s Weimar Republic, 1919-1933?
I’ve mentioned in previous writings that I had the sense that every young man or woman of the American left coming off a liberal arts eduction during the late 1960’s at some time considered the fate of Germany’s Weimar Republic, founded in 1919. Graduating as an American Studies major in 1972 with courses in European Intellectual history which whetted, but did not satisfy my curiosity, one of the first books I read that summer was Peter Gay’s classic, Weimar Culture, which came out in 1968 and is still available online in a revised 2001 edition. I suppose the urge to read about a great “lost cause,” some might say, is inherent with the American left, and just then we were about to suffer through a second term of Richard Nixon, which was about as awful as we young idealists could imagine. How, and why, I asked myself before all the revelations about Nixon via Watergate, could most of the American voting public not see through this man’s insincerity, his manipulativeness, and the ugly streak we on the left knew existed beneath the plodding, rational public persona, which had been with us since his election to the House of Representatives in 1946?
Well, things in the US never really signalled left turn again until Bernie Sanders’ candidacies in 2016 and 2020, with the Center-Right of the party slamming the door on Sander’s fingerhold in March of the primaries in 2020, in such a abrupt and dramatic way that the public has yet to see its full explanation (and the last gasp of justification from Sanders supporters was that he was beating Trump in polls at higher margins than Biden); from at least the Carter presidency, the story for the left has been the erosion of the old New Deal Order and the triumph of Neoliberalism even among the Democrats. And with the rise of Trump in 2015, I was back to reading Peter Fritzsche’s demanding book, once again, after a first time in 2009, “Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany,” (1990).
Its focus is on the intense mobilization of German society before the electoral triumphs of the Nazis which did not come until after the Great Depression had primed the societal pressure cooker even further. The focus is on the many parties - 38 - for example, in the elections of 1930, in lower Saxony in the Northwest region of Germany near the North Sea, including agricultural areas and the major cities of Hamburg and Bremen as well as the neglected German cities and towns with populations of around 25,000. It seems as if every issue under the sun became politicized, and led to constant public parading, with banners, posters and the battle of the flags, the old Imperial German one - Red, White and Black - vs the variations of the Weimar Republic one - black, red and gold. For some consolation after the catastrophe of 1933-1945, the Weimar Republic’s flag became the flag of re-unified Germany in 1990. In particular, Fritzsche’s focus is on the middle class, where it seems every economic interest had their own party, civilian interests to match all the patriotic Stahlhelm (veterans) groups. It was this middle which did consolidate into a large enough centrist party to match the largest party, the Social Democrats on the left, and the Communists even further to their left, and then the rise of Nazis after the Great Depression had done its work, 1929-1932.
In the United State, it was the intense polarization of American politics under President Obama - which he was not the cause of via any extreme policies - which brought me back to re-read this book, which I had taken up and set down many times prior to the shutdowns and the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. The book had been haunting me, like the Ghost of Weimar itself, sitting on the shelf with its suggestive black, white and red lettering, as US politics drifted further and further to the Right after Reagan, and two Bill Clinton terms didn’t seem to stem the tide.
I’ve mentioned before this essay that by 2017, I had competing theories or models of where U.S. politics was going - downhill, to be sure, but was it going to be a pattern of an intensifying low level civil war, as in the decade of the 1850’s, or something even worse, the rise of our own brand of Fascism, with the fate of American democracy going the way of the Weimar Republic in 1933?
What sent me leaning towards the Weimar model were the words, actions and events surrounding President Trump and his lost 2020 election, the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which was, to be clear, a fumbled Coup attempt, an Insurrection, and the rapidly escalating rhetoric of Trump in the fall of 2023, especially his language on immigrants and their “poisoning” of American blood, and the “rooting out” of the enemy within, the “vermin” of the American left of various descriptions. His open talk of dictatorship, intention to set up detention camps for the millions of immigrants he plans to deport, and the growing scale of an organized ultra-Right “movement” to carry out a far more systematic program than Trump’s fumbled first term efforts - plus his stated intent to purge some 40,000 civil servants and replace them with loyalists, far dwarfing the usual administration turnover of some 4,000 positions - all have contributed to heightened worries that Trump has crossed the line into a form of Fascism. For a refresher course in Trump’s long train of abuses of democracy, and his office, and basically the common sense notion we had driven into us in our high school civic courses about necessary Presidential gravitas, President Biden’s speech in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania on Friday, January 5, 2024, lays out the full list of outrageous statements and previous actions which so far have not legally disqualified Trump from holding office. Here’s the link to Biden’s 33 minute speech:
However, well before this speech I had been convinced that a line had been crossed into territory that no other American presidential candidate had crossed before. Helping convince me was the thought process of a traditional Republican, a college political science Professor who also taught at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, but is now retired. I caught his appearance on November 29, 2023 on “Amanpour and Company.” His name is Tom Nichols, and here is the link to his 18 minute exchange on the program:
And here is the link to his Atlantic magazine article from Nov. 16, 2023 which goes into greater detail about what Trump has said in “crossing the line.” Nichols also adds in some cautions about the nature of the movement behind him, indicating that although Trump has told us enough now to use the word “Fascist” consistent with its infamous historical manifestations, it is not clear if his followers will all go down this route at the polls in November of this year, or independent voters perhaps more crucially: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/11/trump-crosses-a-crucial-line/676031/
Before I embark on an exercise in comparative history, of comparative citizen pain and its consequences for politics, as hinted at in the heading for this section, I want to share a long quote from author Ian Kershaw, from the second volume of his acclaimed biography of Hitler, from the Preface. It is a caution as well to Professor Nichols’ hope that although Trump has put his Fascist “identity” cards on the table, we should not treat his followers, as yet, exactly the same way - at least not before the election.
Hitler…stands uniquely as the quintessential hate-figure of the twentieth century. His place in history has certainly been secured….as the embodiment of modern political evil. However evil is a theological or philosophical, rather than a historical, concept. To call Hitler evil may well be both true and morally satisfying. But it explains nothing. And unanimity in condemnation is even potentially an outright barrier to understanding and explanation. … I personally find Hitler a detestable figure, and despise all that his regime stood for. But that condemnation scarcely helps me to understand why millions of German citizens who were mostly ordinary human beings, hardly innately evil, in general interested in the welfare and daily cares of themselves and their families, like ordinary people everywhere, and by no means wholly brainwashed or hypnotized by spellbinding propaganda or terrorized into submission by ruthless repression, would find so much of what Hitler stood for attractive - or would be prepared to fight to the bitter end in a terrible war against the mighty coalition of the world’s most powerful nations arrayed against them. (Preface, page xvii; Volume II: Hitler, Nemesis: 1936-1945).
The Weimar Republic: Germany, 1919-1933
No large nation in modern Western European history has undergone anything like the traumas that befell Germany after losing the First World War in 1918. A revolt backed initially by many rank and file in the army and navy overthrew the Kaiser, proclaimed a Democratic Republic even as others further left simultaneously proclaimed a Socialist one, elected a new Reichstag (Parliament), wrote a new constituion in a symbolically important city, perhaps the most progressive of any in existence in 1919, giving women the right to vote and bestowing civil liberties that a citizen of Great Britain would be proud of. But out of that gate, the new Social Democratic Chancellor and then President, Friedrich Ebert, had to call upon the Army and para-military units of demobilized veterans, like the Freicorps, to crush the more radical uprising of Communists and radical socialists. The ferocious reaction took the lives of thousands, including the famous Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht, and the desire to restore order meant that the new government never was able to take on, politically, the dominance of the Prussian nobility over their vast estate lands in the East, or their historic power in the higher ranks of the civil service and military.
The ruling Social Democrats had been forced by the Allies to reluctantly sign the humiliating terms (in German eyes) of the Versailles Treaty, which stripped crucial lands away from German control, imposed reparations which would have, if fully honored, extended out to 1987, radically reduced the size of the army and navy, and added a bitterly resented “war guilt clause, Article 231” which pinned the blame for the cataclysm of 1914-1918 on Germany alone.
Not only had the vaunted German military lost the war, but the entire society had to pay up for reparations from a weakened economy. The Treaty was universally despised in Germany, and the blame for signing it fell to the ruling Social Democratic Party, and the “stabbed in the back” story - a great lie - came to dominate the explanation for the troubles: it was the German left, socialists, communists and the Jews who had undermined morale at home and led to the defeat, not the German ruling class and the Kaiser’s pre-war foreign policies. As Eric D. Weitz notes in his fine history, “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” (2007; 2018), “the infamous stab-in-the-back legend, which would be used to stunning effect by Adolf Hitler, was launched even before the armistice had been signed.”
The psychological effect of losing the greatest and costliest war in human history (until its sequel) was enormous, the treaty terms and reparations even worse. The economy, of course, was in a shambles and before it had fully recovered one of the most infamous instances of hyper-inflation in economic history took hold in 1922-1923: “By the end of November, 1923, a single U.S. dollar bought 4.2 trillion marks” which Weitz dryly calls “a barely comprehensible exchange rate.” (page 102).
It’s the text book example of buying groceries with wheel barrows full of a shrinking currency and was only cured by creating a new currency, but the cost was the ruination, the evaporation of middle-class and working class savings and pensions. The years 1926-1928 brought some stability to the economy, and became known as the “Golden Years” of the Weimar Republic before the Great Depression hit in 1929 and intensified all the political forces originally at logger-heads in the Reichstag.
Despite all these difficulties, the Weimar Republic managed to maintain the long traditions, since the 1880’s, of social welfare programs for workers and the poor. Weitz tells us that in 1913, they “accounted for 19.3 percent of all public expenditures in Germany; in 1929-1930, that figure had reached 40.3 percent. But that high level couldn’t be maintained in the face of the downward spiral of unemployment and lower tax collections ushered in by the Great Depression, and the accompanying fight between the right-center-left in the Reichstag, a battle of proposals for higher taxes versus cuts in spending that left even the traditional unemployment benefits hanging to dry in the face of mass unemployment.
Contemporary observers shouldn’t be too smug in contemplating the gridlock in Weimar’s legislative body: it’s still the central public spending dilemma between Right and Left today in the United States, and avoided only during the Covid “generosity” spending splurge by the low inflation preceding 2020-2021 and the fact that the Covid plague was seen as a medical, not an economic event, thus capitalism and the remedies for its periodic downturns escaped the traditional struggles, such as the ones which plagued the Obama administration in the wake of the Great Recession in 2008-2010.
Let me summarize - and emphasize: most scholars agree, that the election successes of the Nazi Party in 1932-1933, never an absolute majority of the votes cast, would not have been possible without the intensified suffering under the Great Depression. And that the economic cataclysm was the crucial factor in deciding between a Conservative or even Far Right Party and the dynamics of the Fascism which would follow Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933.
Once again, no Western modern nation has suffered the intensity of successive psychological and economic blows that the German Weimar Republic did, and the closest sequel, setting aside Italy after WWI, is the fate of the former Soviet Union from 1989-2001. Readers should mark this observation carefully. The trauma of losing the Cold War to the West, having the old Soviet Republics break away one by one, and the economy suffering the greatest loss in GDP - some say 40-50% - of any nation, even in the Great Depression, the dramatic drop in life spans for men…We’re describing the conditions for the rise of another form of Fascism under Putin, and the Eastern European scholar Timothy Snyder has made it clear that the Putin regime is a Fascist one.
The United States: Psychological and Economic Trouble if not Trauma, 1977-2024…
Remember, the intent here is to search for the reasons behind the rise of Trump, and his passage from the authoritarian to the Fascist column of political categories.
In more than a few senses, I could take the years specified above back to the Vietnam War days, 1964-1975, the first war that the nation lost (well, there was the little one in 1812-1815), a deep trauma in itself; add in, before the loss had healed, the resignation of Richard Nixon over Watergate crimes, crimes leaning strongly in the direction, behind the scenes, of a incipient Fascism: spying, break-ins, enemy lists, corruption by the Executive Branch of the FBI, CIA, blackmail…campaign interference…Nixon, historian Rick Perlstein tells us, knew America was in decline, and that not surprisingly, he was the only one who could deal with that trauma. And even before the Watergate drama unfolded, Nixon had, without any forewarning to allies, foreign or domestic, taken the U.S. off the gold- backing- the dollar-standard which had stood since the days of the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. That event, announced in August of 1971, would more than any other single economic one, symbolically at least, lead to the vast sea of speculation, the financialization of the economy and the development of deriviatives, and to this day the international market for speculation in currencies is the largest daily one at $7.5 trillion dollars a day according to a Reuters report in October of 2022. And one can also look back on that decision to go off gold as one of the most authoritarian decisions any President has ever made.
And in an echo of the Weimar “Stabbed in the Back” story, did not, in the eyes of the U.S. Right, we suffer a domestic version inflicted on our troops by the great war protests, draft dodgers and Draft card burners, and their associated decadent, degenerate life styles, the full equal of Babylon Berlin in the 1920’s - of sex, drugs and rock and roll? The parallels between Nixon’s Silent Majority and the attitudes of Weimar Germany’s middle class towards its left are significant and fully registered in his - and their - route of McGovern in 1972.
I would never maintain that the degree of economic trauma in the U.S. from 1971 on, ever came to match the depths of suffering either in Weimar Germany or in the former Soviet Union; the levels of the worst of U.S. unemployment during the stag-flation of the 1970’s and the immediate aftermath of the housing bubble bursting in 2008-2009 never approached the levels of 1929-1933, the peak years being 1975 at 8.5%; 1981 at 9.7% and 2010 at 9.6%. (Granted the methodolgy behind those numbers leads to understating unemployment, some say substantially.)
Yet the unemployment numbers don’t tell the full story of the shifts away from the old industrial economy, the vast entry of women into the work force, the rise of the service sector and financial sector, all unfolding throughout the 1970’s-1990’s, so that the story overlaps with changing gender roles, the sexual revolution and that vast upward distribution of wages and wealth which Time Magazine covered in their September, 2020 report on a Rand Study which said some $50 trillion went from the bottom 90% to the top 10% between 1975-2018, marking in my mind the lasting effects of the very rocky transition from the old New Deal Order (peaking with LBJ’s Great Society days) to the Neoliberal Order, still with us but peaking in the late 1990’s under Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan. Here’s the link: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
The dicotomies in the fates of various portions of American Society are enormous: the top 10% are not suffering from drops in lifespan like the aging white males (and women) from the lower middle class and working class are, the “deaths of despair” resulting from alcoholism, suicides and spreading to the young with their own forms of addiction. It’s very hard to grasp these differences, because the background noise from economists from nearly all parts of the political spectrum is that as the Economist magazine reported, the US has seen the longest stretch of growth in Western economic history: from June 2009 until March, 2020, broken by the onset of Covid.
From this perspective, I didn’t join the center-left in despising Trump’s Innaugural Speech’s reference to “American Carnage.” If you look at the top 30% of earners, everything is fine, but the further down one goes, to the bottom 50-60%, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that nearly half of all families didn’t have the savings - even just $400 - to meet a mundane economic emergency.
But the pain and the stresses are not all financial, although they are certainly that for so many, even if unemployment is “the lowest in 50 years.” Currently, the official number is just 3.7 % in December of 2023.
I want to mention two works among many that don’t show up often in discussions of the economy, or the rise of Herr Trump and his movement of Right populism, to put a perhaps too polite label on it. I’m just catching up to Nicolas Lemann’s 2019 work “Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream.” It begins in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the trouble it causes in the old American auto firms. Lemann brings it down to the letters GM sent to their smallest dealerships as a result of the once Giant automaker’s pending bankruptacy, sent often to just solo dealer operations: they get the marching orders from Detroit that they are to close by such and such a date with detailed instructions but no compensation to dispose of the inventory, the property…just to be gone. It comes like a thunderclap to an owner on the South Side of Chicago. Lemann does a beautiful job of tracing the owner of D’Andrea’s Buick’s communal and institutional ties to his neighborhood, Chicago Democratic Party politics, civic organizations and the traditions of loyalty that have held Chicago together through the 20th century. It’s a pitch, and a strong one, that these old traditional ties between family, church, the local party ward leaders, and stable businesses were worth it, held the society together, and that under the new economic order, what I call Neoliberalism, and Lemann calls its “Transaction Man” - the social order not only won’t be the same, it may well disolve.
Lemann also sheds good light upon the never settled controversy over the causation for moving the country to the Right since at least the Goldwater-Wallace-Nixon-Reagan dance of policy positions. For example, try separating the pressures of race and racism from the housing dynamics of the mid-1960’s through the busing controversies. He’s talking about the technique of “block busting” in a particular white ethnic neighborhood in Chicago, where unscrupulous real estate speculators, white, spread rumors in the white neighborhoods that a couple of black families are moving in - and you better sell now for whatever I offer - thus setting off a stampede forcing working class whites to move to more expensive neighborhoods, while at the same time subdividing the sold houses or adding onerous terms to the mortgages they sell on them to the hopeful black family. Did American society ever come up with a solution to this nefarious tactic, which was used throughout the East and Mid-Western cities? As far as I know, it did not; no one ever took on the powerful real estate industry’s worst actors in the practice. (This is a bit of a different story than that of Federal Housing agencies and banks “redlining” practices to deny black families mortgages in white neighborhoods, and Jesse Jackson’s campaign to get banks to stop the practice).
Set this story alongside the one, well known on the economic left, of the collapse of an entire region’s industry, 1977-1982, the steel industry of the Mahoning Valley, described in George Packer’s 2013 book called “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.” Here’s the physical layout of a region that some have compared to the Ruhr in Germany:
“From the 1920’s until 1977, twenty-five uninterrupted miles of steel mills ran northwest to southeast along the Mahoning River: from Republic Steel plants around Warren and Niles, through the U.S. Steel plant in McDonald and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube blast furnaces on Brier Hill. to U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works right in the middle of Youngstown, and on down to the sprawling Sheet and Tube plants in Bampbell and Sruthers.” (Page 42).
And here’s the secondary fallout from the plant closings. Between 1975-1985, an estimated 50,000 jobs were lost in the Valley and Youngstown became infamous for the hundreds, then thousands of insurance related fires that were set - annually. Yet according to an academic at Youngstown State College who studied the cascading downward spiral, “‘the idea that this was systemic didn’t occur.” And despite the city losing 45,000 in population between 1970-1990, going from 140,000 to 95,000.
Packer adds a sharp edge to that last idea, what had to be ignored to maintain that the problem wasn’t systemic:
It was happening in Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Buffalo, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, St. Louis and other cities across a region that in 1983 was given a new name: the Rust Belt. But it happened in Youngstown first, fastest and most completely, and becuase Youngstown had nothing else, no major-league baseball team or world-class symphony, the city became an icon of deindustrialization, a song title, a cliche. ‘It was one of the quietest revolutions we’ve ever had,’ Russo said. ‘If a plague had taken away this many peopole in the Midwest, it would be considered a huge historical event.’ But because it was caused by the loss of blue-collar jobs, not a bacterial infection, Youngstown’s demise was regarded as almost normal. (Packer, Page 52. “Russo” is John Russo, a professor of labor studies at Youngstown State University and a former auto worker.)
And no one dared call it American “carnage.”
Packer says that Professor Russo would get calls every six months or so from Time or Newweek reporters, asking “‘if Youngstown had turned the corner yet?” Packer adds with appropriate sarcasm: “Apparently it was impossible to imagine that so much machinery and so many men were no longer needed.”
Aside from these dramatic shocks in concentrated regions - the old Rust Belt industrial cities - in whose counties Trump did well enough to win the Electoral College voes in 2016 in key swing states, they have been aggravated by additional factors which make it even harder for the “abandoned” to re-invent themselves free of political resentment. Hence the take of political scientist Bruce Cain (Stanford Univ.) commenting in Thomas Edsall’s very pessimistic take on the mood of the country on January 10, 2024: “A ‘National and Global Maelstrom’ Is Pulling Us Under”:
“‘…people judge the fairness of this political system by how they are doing in it. Downward mobility and the loss of political and social status leads to alienation from democratic norms and distrust in govenment. These factors,’ Cain continued, ‘work in tandem with social and political instability due to globalization, automation and social media. Much has changed in recent decades, such as the country’ more diverse racial and ethnic composition, job opportunities more strongly defined along educational lines and expanded gender roles. MAGA anger and anxiety about replacement stem from the simultaneous loss of social status, economic opportunity and political power due to these significant economic, social and demographic trends.”
I think in substantially similar ways, and focus, Lemann and Packer were beaten to the illness and the diagnosis by Richard Sennett, in his1998 book of 170 pages, “The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism.” It deals with the emotional repercussions of the great layoffs in middle management that washed over middle-aged, middle class men (especially) in the 1980’s and 1990’s, where the announcement by major old firms (Kodak, IBM, AT&T, GE…for example) of thousands if not tens of thousands of terminations often was greeted by a jump on Wall Street in the company’s stock prices. I’m going to offer a long quote from the last three pages of Sennett’s text, pps. 146-148, so that I don’t lose any of the power of his prose - or its insightfulness - and predictive power of the fallout among the workforce from the turbulence of Neoliberalism’s impact on internal corporate structures, and we can look back also to the days of the German Weimar Republic in the 1920’s, the Roaring Twenties, where German economic society was undergoing earlier and intense “modernization” pains - blended in with the toxic psychological stew from the fallout from losing WWI.
‘Who needs me?’ is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between risk and reward…and it does so through reengineering of institutions in which peple are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others…yet I had an epiphany of sorts in Davos, listening to the rulers of the flexible realm….they know that the great majority of those who toil in the flexible regime are left behind, and of course they regret it. But the flexibility they celebrate does not give, it cannot give, any guidance for the conduct of an ordinary life. The new masters have rejected careers in the old Enlish sense of the word, as pathways along which people can tavel; durable and sustained paths of actions are foreign territories… It therefore seemed to me, as I wandered in and out of the conference halls… that this regime might at least lose its current hold over the imaginations and sentiments of those down below…I have learned from my family’s bitter radical past; if change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than through mass uprisings. What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don’t know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy. (Editor’s emphasis.)
More than twenty years ago, Sennett has sensed the trouble to come, from left and right populists, from Sanders and Trump. Caution: I don’t equate the character of the two at all: Sanders has proven himself as true to democracy in our Republic, wherever he locates himself on the political economy spectrum. He is Dignity personified, in my opinion. Trump: well, he’s telling us who he is and what he will do as clearly as a January cold front after a heavy snow fall. American society has not been fertile ground for uprisings from the left, but the lasting (2015-2024) phenomenon of Herr Trump is closer to a “mass uprisng” from the Right, even if it is not yet a majority; under our Constitution and election rules, an uprising doesn’t have to win a majority vote, if it can capture the Electoral College, where the rural/urban tensions favor today’s Right. Sennett’s seemingly giving up on a mass left revolt matches what I have written about Simon Schama’s take in 1989 on the French Revolution: no longer needed, no longer wanted, and perhaps never needed. But Sennett’s last sentence takes us into today’s voters’ moods, the disillusionment with both party’s offerings, the already announced challengers in the Democratic Primary and the rumbles from major third party formulations not yet quite made formal. And yet Sennett has caught something else insightful, the “inner needs” transactions…but I’m afraid there is a destructive side to that in addition to the constructive one he hopes for “on the ground,” citizen talking to citizen about their inner needs. And that destructive side is that shrewd and calculating demagogues, “the best or worst of them,” can also be in tune with the inner needs of the crowd, or is it mob, electronically or physically, as on Jan. 6, 2021. And is that “inner mood” of the people constructive or destructive to democracy - as the demagogues have defined it, in 1932 or 2024? One cannot read a good biography of Hitler, as Kershaw’s is, both volumes, without realizing that he had a genius in being able to read so many average German’s “inner needs,” the worst, not the best devils inside them, to purge all the dissenting voices in the tumultuous Weimar Republic, the most politically mobilized society in the history of the West, and clear the way for a United Germany under one visionary leader - despite the savagery of his “inner” views, well announced in the two volumes of Mein Kampf and that 1926 speech Kershaw cites Hitler made in Hamburg. But as important as Hitler was, Kershaw reminds us that “what happened under Hitler took place - in fact, could only have taken place - in the society of a modern, cultured, technologically advanced and highly bureacratic country.”
Two of the Most Modern, Scientifically Advanced Countries in the Modern World… and the Urban-Rural, Secular-Religious Tensions which pulled them apart.
Americans are not well known around the world as a people who delve very deeply into foreign cultures, and our foreign policy adventures have paid a huge price for our willful ignorance. It’s a little better when it comes to Weimar Germany’s fate, and of course the appeal to generations of the greatest demon in Western history, Adolf Hitler. At one point in the early days of the History Channel it was mocked by the more academic types as the “Hitler Channel,” going over and over how “it” happened, but not in much depth: a traumatized people enthralled by a mesmerizing speaker. But as the warnings about a revival of the authoritarian Right have grown in both Europe and the U.S., spearheaded by academic Timothy Snyder of Yale, even mild mannered, middle class personified travel tour leader Rick Steves got into the “warning” mode with “Germany’s Fascist Story: Munich to Nurenberg to Berlin” in 2020. It was low key and well done.
What has attracted my attention as I grappled with the same “how could it have happened?” puzzle posed in this section’s heading, was a more neglected aspect of the forces which tore Germany apart, 1918-1933, forces that seemed to be working again in the United States since at least the rise of Right Wing talk radio in the 1990’s, if not earlier, and the growing confrontations/shutdowns in Congress which started with Newt Gingrich.
Germans have always been proud of their cultural achievments in music, literature and the arts more broadly, there being something special about that German soul, didn’t you know? By the later decades of the 19th century they had built perhaps the finest higher educational system in the West, especially noted for its bibical scholarship based on rigourous science, textual comparisons between ancient versions of the gospel, which triggered waves of reaction from “fundamentalists” in the U.S. who felt threatened when God’s word was seen to have been moulded and changed by various human authors over the centuries. And wasn’t that perhaps the first clue of how the American Religious Right would react to American Science in the last years of the 20th and first decade of the 21st century, on Evolution, fetal research matters, even carbon dating and of course, the whole notion of human caused Global Warming.
German higher education was so good that American college graduates flocked to its advanced degree programs, and they inspired our foundings of graduate schools at places like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. German advances in steel making, chemicals and engineering thrust the nation into the forefront of business technology, running neck and neck with Great Britain and the U.S.
But there was a certain defensiveness that went along with the achievments: Germany developed late as a unified country, and came late to the race for overseas colonies as compared to Britain, France, Belgium and even the U.S. At the time, in the last years of the 19th Century and the first decade of the 20th, much serious thought in the West was given to the fate of its capitalism without enough market outlets for its great productive capacity, which gave impetus to the search for colonies. The term “Imperialism” was in the air, and much debated, and became a special obsession of the left in general. Germany felt that without a navy to challenge England on the high seas, it couldn’t compete on a level playing field in the colonial “acquisition” game. It was a dangerous combination: the long and glorious German military tradition, since at least Frederick the Great (1712-1786), mated to German high scientific achievement, and barely contained by a weak democratic tradition whose main feature were Bismark’s concessions to head off the rising left of the German Social Democatic Party, the S.P.D., a much more militant party in its youth than in its “mature” days as the leading party in the Weimar Republic.
And yet, not all, probably even not most of German society was on this industrial-scientific treadmill, which in most of the rest of Western Europe went hand-in-hand with the rise of secularism, evolutionary and racial theories of society, and the high water mark of the left in various Parliaments - but yet well short of the majorities they hoped for. The rest of German society, however was stamped still with the “other side” of German history: being the homeland of the great Luther and the Protestant Revolt against the Roman Catholic Church in the early 16th century, and the wars of religion whose destructive high water mark between Catholics and Protestants was the Thirty Years War, 1618-1648.
This religious side of German culture, Protestant and Catholic alike, was the mental foundation for the German Middle class and its famous attributes: thrifty, hard working, inner driven small business people, traders and specialized craftsmen, and the dominant force in most German cities and rural areas, and seeing itself as being quite set off from the more modern and more famous industrial areas of the Ruhr, of the largest cities of Berlin and Hamburg.
And yet it was the urban industrial areas that seemed to call the tune - and the pace - of German life, as was the case in most of the industrial West, including the U.S. More than any high academic works I’ve read, serious amateur historian Philipp Blom has captured the mood heading into August, 1914 in his book “The Vertigo Years: Europe: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914” (2008) which one back cover reviewer called “a rich portrait of a world in the throes of technological and social change, from radioactivity to psychoanalysis.” (Telegraph, UK). His follow up volume, aptly called “Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 (2015) describes the wreckage of societies in the wake of WWI, and heading not for peaceful resolution of their many troubles but to Europe’s second “Thirty Years War, 1914-1945.”
It is fascinating for me to see the parallels between the cultural troubles in the Weimar Republic and the contemporary United States between the rural areas, the champions of conservative values pitted against the ultra-modern and therefore decadent urban areas - “coastal” areas in the U.S. - the BosWash corridor, NY City and Silicon Valley and of course, always the contemporary Right’s favorite whipping boy, the streets of San Francisco, home of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; in Germany, it is the nightlife and underworld culture of Berlin and Hamburg, the two greatest German metropolitian areas, well encapsulated, if a bit tamely, in the broadway show and later movie, Cabaret. During the intensifying years of the rise of the American “ultra” Right, especially their treatment of President Obama, I was recommending a quick course in where the US was headed: via the movie version of Cabaret. That’s the 1972 one directed by Bob Fosse, and starring Lisa Minnelli, Michael York, and Joel Gray, if you had forgotten: “they” - the AMC channel I am stuck with in my cable contract, don’t show it, preferring endless re-runs of Halloween gore, Rambo’s Revenge (although some strong clues there to the Right right, I admit and Bruce Willis movies for more charactercomplexity ). I was pushing Cabaret and also the cable series become a movie, Gettysburg (1993), representing my models of the fall of Weimar Republic and the U.S.’s descent into Civil War. For readers who want a fuller portrait of decadent Berlin, Mel Gordon’s “Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin” (2000;2006) might be closer to the reality, for better or worse, but it can’t match the pizzazz of a Fosse musical.
It’s hard not to miss the correlations in condemnations between the rising of the American religious Right in the 1970’s - not by coincidence the decade most academics, economic and cultural, say the U.S. economic miracle of 1945-1975 came apart in high inflation and high unemployment - and the rural and religious German Right towards their own urban “Sodoms and Gomorrahs,” of Berlin and Hamburg which, “by the way,” also happened to be the main bastions of the German left, the socialist (the SDP) and communist (KPD) parties. For those biblically inclined, “Babylon Berlin” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
In the U.S. it has also been the case that black urban ghettos in the deindustrializing areas of the country, mainly the Northeast and Midwest, came in for the same sort of racial and cultural demonization after their descents into high crime and drug dealing from the mid-1960’s right on through the 1990’s. Of course the characterizations came also with the charges from the American Right that their ghetto troubles are their own faults of weak family structures and lack of personal character, not the economic system’s or the racial attitude of the broader culture, much less a tendency in Western European culture to have boarded up the “other” - the Jews in their own urban ghettos. The same charges - laziness, on the “dole” of public handouts, echo through the debates in the Reichstag during the bad days of the Weimar Republic, reaching a crescendo in the political stalemate when unemployment assistance was most needed, during the Great Depression years of 1929-1932.
The Germany of the new Weimar Republic had one of the world’s most democratic political systems, “pluralism” writ large, with proportional voting leading to many parties having seats in the Reichtag. Yet it proved to be no solution to lowering the political temperatures, instead registering more the fragmentation of the political world than its ability to find compromise solutions to its most pressing problems. And that’s because Germany 1919-1932 could find no solution to its vast ideological gaps: between the religious Center, the middle class parties which showed the divisions between small producers/craftsmen, white collar civil servants and service economy salespeople - and the parties closest to the great German companies which dominated the industrial, publishing and financial sectors. The German economy was becoming more consolidated, more oligopolistic, during the years of Weimar, and farmers, as they were in the U.S. were getting the short end of the stick. And even among the center, Cathlics themselves divided between liberals and conservatives - just as they are in the US in “our days”
If Americans in 2024 despair over the choices our two major parties have on offer - and that’s what all the polling demonstrates - then consider the opposite side of the solution to American democratic discontent with just two majors: in 1928, the Weimar Republic sported 41 contesting parties in the election, “with six major and eight minor parties {winning} representation in the Reichstag.” ( Weitz, page 104).
The casual observer can get lost in this complexity, forgetting the higher altitude and historical view of political life in Weimar. The Right was the dominant force in the society and most often in the Reichstag. We remember the names of Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Franz von Papen, the ancient ones, and their political roles, their importance as symbols of the vanished Kaiser’s regime, but not the names of the leaders of Germany’s largest party, both in and out of public office, the Social Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s Party was playing a dual level, if not two-faced game. Although he detested Parliaments since his days growing up under the Hapsburg monarchy and the anarchy in the Parliament in Vienna, Hitler was firm in committing his party to publicly playing by electoral rules, and campaigning vigorously throughout the country as the 1920’s wore on. The Nazis were gifted at both propaganda and the mass politics which had emerged in Weimar Germany: parades, posters, masses rallied for speeches, intense advance preparations before Hitler would arrive…and committed to building political/social structures, most notably for youth - camps, scouts, hikes - to go with the 4.5 million S.A. Brownshirts who carried the flags in the marches and mass rallies. And were at the heart of the other “game” of politics in Weimar: street beatings, assassinations, private torture cellars…
And their vicious tactics were, if not liked, tolerated because their targets, the German left, socialists and communists, and their allies, the internationalist Bolshevick Jewish conspiracy, were the ones who had stabbed the German military in the back in 1918…agitating at home while the patriotic were dying in the trenches.
Thus, even though it was the most powerful parts of German society which were calling the economic tunes for invention and change, and the manic pace of life in a mass society, and next to America, Germany was the mass society par excellence, it was the German left and the cosmopolitans, the internationalists (always the Jews and the Bolsheviks, often linked together) who became the public scapegoats.
And from the Right, the intellectual Right, came the tradition of longing for a national unifier, a specially gifted leader who could overcome all the “fractures” that modern, scientific industrial capitalism actually brought into being. Hence the popularity of Oswald Spengler’s two volumes on “The Decline of the West.” It fit the mood of Germany after WWI, and introduced its own version of a benign German “socialism,” similar to the vision of the Nazi party: a unity devoid of Marxist class consciousness and stripped of “internationalism” that would focus on a unified, spiritually revived Germany under that one gifted leader. Had Rush Limbaugh based his tarnishing brush on this wavelength in trying to make Hitler and the Nazis “socialist,” it would have made more sense rhetorically; but the cruel historical outcome from the facts on the ground, which I have noted in three glaring instances, showed that this wispy socialism in the hands of the Nazis and the German Right led to the obliteration of the German left, not its triumph: the unions, the socialist party and the communist party were visited by the extermination of their leadership, the seizure of their assets, and the establishment of the first extermination camp at Dachau.
In covering this vast ground, of the tensions in Weimar Germany and the U.S. in the Trump Era, 2015-…???? between the march of advanced capitalist society, creative destruction and science driven, with disruptive consequences for a good part of society, as we have seen in my recounting of the total collapse of the old industrial base in the Mahoning River Valley in Ohio, 1977-1982 - with no societal response…I come back to the voice of Rush Limbaugh, sometime in the 1990’s.
Limbaugh, the man who worshiped American capitalism and especially it seemed, Apple Computer, which thrived on the best government subsidized science and research the company could find, did not believe in human caused climate change. He never ceased to ridicule those who felt the atmosphere/earth were warming - or that human activity was causing it. His approach took a strange turn, for me at least, when he stated, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s pretty close to the verbatim because his “riff” was so astonishing that I remember it clearly: that “God would never allow the great achievements of American business, hard working and civilization advancing, to threaten His Own Creation,” therefore we could relax and stop believing that global warming was real, much less that it posed a threat to our great economic achievments, the fruit of the “exceptional nation.”
There it was in a compact form: the great engine of change, capitalism, all good, no disruptions, and where even science proves the system’s pollution is adversely impacting everyone, then science must be mistaken in the face of what we know about God’s creation from scripture: the achievements of hardworking men are all good and thus from a thousand rural and suburban churches springs up a giant cry of affirmation: “Amen, Rush. This global warming is a liberal hoax. It’s a liberal ‘great lie.’”
And that brings us back to the very closing thoughts of the previous section, of Ian Kershaw’s view that “what happened under Hitler took place - in fact, could only have taken place - in the society of a modern, cultured, technologically advanced and highly bureacratic country.”
Visions and Nightmares of a Second Term for Herr Trump (and some comparisons to the fate of Weimar Germany, 1919-1932)
Readers might by now have noticed that I have avoided a firm definition of Fascism and I have done that deliberately, since the concept is historically determined and varies with the nation and culture under review. Yet I think that with but a few qualifications the one offered by author and journalist Chris Hedges back in 2016 in a Nation of Change Article that I cited in the opening image, and entitled “Trump: Dress Rehersal for Fascism,” is useful for our American reality, and becoming more so, month by month:
“Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of which are captured in Trump’s misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must be physically purged to restore the health of nation.”
I think this fits our second round of Herr Trump very well, especially the linkage of “moral renewal” and “vengeance.” I forced myself to listen to the entire two hours or so of Trump’s Veterans’ Day speech in New Hampshire in November of 2023. And while it is true that Trump seems to be steering our nation back into an “American First” mood, mirroring that which FDR faced down from 1938-1941 and thus criticizing Biden’s aid to Ukraine and making happy small talk with outrageous dictators in North Korea and Russia, and praising the lifetime head of China, it is also true that Trump never misses an opportunity to lavish praise on the US military. In one of the strangest speech segments I’ve ever heard, in that Veterans’ Day address, he was describing the pilots of Air Force One who flew him into Kabul Airport before the U.S. evacuation, coming in without lights and under heavy security precautions. Herr Trump was infatuated with the handsome and hypermasculine traits of the pilots, carefully chosen to fly the president around while continuing to stress how brave he himself was in taking that risky flight into a just semi-secure facility. And yet it’s clear also from his first term that more than a few high ranking American military officers were horrified by what they saw and heard. And it hard to imagine how anyone who has made it through the ultra-discipline of our classic military academies would not be horrified at the chaos of the administrative side of a Trump administration. Not so disimilar to the reactions of the Prussian aristocrats of the Germany military sizing up Hitler before he had come to power in January, 1933. They had grave reservations, gradually eased because he was making it clear he would give the generals all they wished for and more to rearm Germany and push it forward to be the most technologically advance fighting force in Europe.
As to the anti-intellectualism here and in Weimar Germany, which really helps explain the acceptance of the big lies - about how WWI was lost to the infamous “stab in the back” and the farce of the rigged American election of 2020, I’ve been living with that societal trait first hand over the past 20 years. It seems closely allied to the Religious Right and the fundamentalists who heavily lean on the Bible for their historical references for national decline and the chaos of Middle East politics.
But what really frightened me going back to the first decade of the new century was “debating” a Yale graduate who had gone Evangelical since graduation, disputing the geologic time scale, denying that carbon dating supplied reliable dating techniques, that aspect of the conversation being triggered by, of course, by a struggle over global warming and the reliability of ice cores to reveal CO2 levels going back hundreds of thousands of years. That and an ill-disguised sermon on the powers if not pleasures of gun ownership left me convinced that an enlarging proportion of the American Right was abandoning reason and science and yes, in the matters of gun ownership, common sense. To hear it out of the mouth of an Ivy League graduate was doubly troubling. Unless, of course, it was just a local exercise of what has come to be known as “owning the left” - a variant on yanking someone’s chain.
In the historical comparisons I’ve been mulling over, the role of religion in stopping, or better, failing to stop the rise of the Nazis, and in the contemporary U.S. the growing bond of the religious Right to Trump has taken up a considerable amount of my time.
In the Germany of the Weimar Republic, the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority formed a good part of the middle of German voters and their parties, as previously noted, and that religious power was the cultural cement formed over many centuries that made possible a good portion of the German tradition in the arts - and later, in industry. It definitely pushed strongly towards the Right, and made the Communist Party a political impossibility, and, in the same vein, the secular, urban and international propaganda of Germany’s largest party, the S.P.D, the Social Democrats, was thus as well out of bounds, despite both the Social Dems and German Catholics having undergone political (and cultural) persecution under Bismark.
Hitler was leery of taking on either of the Church establishments, and skillfully avoided head on clashes, rising to power based on his messianic unifying message, his plea to end German divisiveness and class divisions, and his open demonizing of Marxists and those Internationalists, the Jews. And when it came time to bring down the curtain on opponents, the trade unions, Socialist Social Democrats and the Communists went first, the Jews physically later although of course there was prominent Jewish leadership in both of the left parties.
And reinforcing the way the religious considerations broke in German politics, heavily middle class, small cities and rural in distribution, the great rural/urban - virtuous/decadent - religious/secular dicotomies not only drove up the political temperature, but they ended up reinforcing the basic conservative bias in overall German politics. If that sounds a bit too close to American contemporary politics for comfort, I agree, and the parallels are a bit frightening when considering possible future developments.
Picture by Dan Goldman/Associated Press from an January 17, 2024 Guest Essay by Thomas B. Edsall: “The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions.”
I think that the movement of the American Religious Right into a full embrace of Donald Trump is a troubling development, only getting stronger if the vote in the Iowa Caucuses this January 16th is indicative. It feeds the irrationalism of the contemporary political moment and combined with the strong Conservative/Right trends in American legal circles means that there will not be much focus on egalitarian wealth and income legislation despite the “populist” label. And Nature will have no standing rights within this regime in good keeping with the “Reagan Revolution’s” early appointments to EPA and Interior. While there might be some help along the economic vector over trade imbalances with China, business overall looks to become richer and freer from regulations of all sorts. If you believe that the bottom 60% of the population will benefit from those changes, then this is your ticket.
Thomas Edsall’s Jan. 17th (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/opinion/trump-god-evangelicals-anointed.html) “Guest Essay: The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions,” (Editor’s Note: to put it mildly) concludes with the following sentence: “…conservative Populism, with all its antidemcoratic implications, has taken root in America. What we don’t know is for how long - or how much damage it will do.”
Chris Hedges’ 50 minute long interview with author Jeff Sharlet on November 18, 2023, coming after Trump’s increasingly disturbing speeches, lays out the worries expressed in the Edsall column above in a deeply personal way, Sharlet having spent years reporting about the Religious Right, attending their churches and rallies, and is out with a new book, “Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” It’s pretty close to my own fears on where things are going, and my own questions as to how much convergence there is between the Christian Right, broadly defined to include Fundamentalists, Evangelicals and the armed Militia movement, and other lesser known, newly emerged armed groups on the far Right, some of whom we were introduced to during the attempted Coup/Insurrection of January 6, 2021. These worries of mine came out in a NY Times online comment about Edsall’s column, which did not focus so much on the religious views, but on bonding between Trump and the Religious Right, “the Transactions” between them, which we should not forget are taking place in a nation awash in 300-400 million weapons, most of them in the hands of the Right.
Here’s what I wrote:
William Neil
MarylandJan. 17
(It’s) almost as frightening as the street fighting in Weimar Germany between the Stormtroopers, the S.A. and the Communists, and to a lesser extent, the S.P.D, the Social Democrats who were socialists. A low level civi war between the left and right alongside the usual gridlock in the Reichstag, especially in the later years, 1929-1932, the Depression years when the need for unemployment relief was urgent. So far, we don't have sustained street fighting between organized political groups, but we have had glimpses of what may lay beneath the remainders of public decorum: Charlottesville, VA in the summer of 2017, an armed invasion of the Michigan State House on May 1, 2020 and then the Coup attempt at the Capitol Building, January 6, 2021. How will the hundreds of armed militia groups react, in a nation swimming in an ocean of firearms, somewhere between 300-400 million, if Trump loses again and denies it, or wins and the left turns out en masse in the streets to protest the detention/deportation camps? A lot depends on how far the Right has been able to convert the local and state police, the county sheriff departments, and the national guards, and then the federal troops most likely to be called out in times of mass civil disturbance. Reason is "out the window," and the left is not armed nor organized to fight, so draw your own conclusions if the uniformed police and military back the Right.
11 Recommend
My fears about this constellation of forces leads me close to the views of Canadian author Stephen Marche and his 2022 book “The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.” His view is that the differences between Red and Blue State America are deep and profound, and unreconcilable. Our institutions are failing us because they are ancient and we have been unable to reform our original Constitution to fit the social and economic contours of the world’s most modern country in terms of economic, technologic and cultural change. He sketches out various scenerios for a Civil War, none quite resembling the dramatic secession of the Confederate States after Lincoln’s election in 1860, but rather some more recent infamous standoffs between local armed Right citizens or cults and federal agencies - BLM, Park Service, Forest Service, some branch of the U.S. Interior Department - and then escalating into something beyond “local” the way the rally on January 6th, 2021 did. It’s easy for me to see how that could unfold and expand quickly under the rising expectations of the next Trump administration - or if he loses again.
And in my projection upon Marche’s various scenerios, the most likely one would occur under the mechanics (or will it be the chaos?) of rounding up some 10-13 million illegal aliens prior to deporting them. And how exactly could that be done - just on the sheer scale of it - the logistics: arrests, screening, detention centers and then physical deportation…deportion by what means: marches, trailer trucks, trains? If Trump is serious about this round-up on a grand scale, it will be easy to veer off into the arrest of all the “Marxists,” journalists and Deep State employees who have criticized him, demand proof of citizenship from them, and then use preventive detention until it’s proved - not new ground for a man who led the Obama birth certificate charade before he ran for president. This is a Stalinesque policy proposal that ought to worry anyone who has doubts about his first administration’s border policies, and in general how the prison system has worked under mass incarceration.
Power: Who holds it and the Confusion between Diagnoses and Remedies
It’s a full blown Presidential election year now as I write, between the complete Iowa caucuses and the coming New Hampshire primary. A citizen has to fight against the powerful undertow of shallow media “horseracing” to remind themself of the broader outlines of power and who holds it in the country, and how the two major unhappy parties relate to it.
I was reminded of this again while reading Nicholas Lemann’s “Transaction Man,” previously mentioned. What focused my attention was page 145 in the chapter entitled “The Time of Transactions: Rising.” That is, again, in Lemann’s broad view, the shift from an institutionally oriented American Society, solidified by the New Deal and having taken us into the last legislative actions against poverty in LBJ’s Great Society vision. Lemann cites once famous liberal historian Richard Hofstadter who places liberalism’s traditional focus on economics - specifically in countering the power of the large corporations ascendant since the late Gilded Age - as lasting only from 1890 until 1940 - a very early end date for economic reforms. After that, the liberal left concedes - that these powerful corporations had achieved economic abundance - and therefore head-on challenges to corporate power faded from American domestic politics: today, “‘liberals do not often find themselves in a simple antagonistic confrontation with big businesss, as they did in the past.’ They were moving on to other concerns: the environment, civil rights, feminism.”
Of course, left out of this rendering is the fierce corporate backlash to its declining profits, the regulatory squeeze coming in the 1970’s from these new movements, especially the environmental and consumer ones. It leads to the now infamous Lewis Powell memo he sent to the business establishment in 1971, given almost center stage in Kim Phillips-Fein’s book “Invisible Hands.”
And in fact, after the much disputed LBJ War on Poverty, always underfunded, competing with the Vietnam war, there was no deep economic reform theme to come from the left until Senator Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic Primary. Instead, since the Reagan administration it was the “Culture Wars” which consumed the most fuel in the American political furnace: battles legal and political over abortion, gender roles, feminism, same sex marriage, busing, mass incarceration/police violence/Black Lives matter, secular/religious balance, prayer in schools…
Although looking back from 2024 it’s hard to believe, despite a widespread consensus that the New Deal order in economics unraveled in the 1970’s with the dual demons of high unemployment and high inflation, that those troubles were settled by 19th century conservative austerity “remedies” applied by Fed. Chairman Paul Volker which sounded the death rattle for organized labor, many small and medium businesses, and any future egalitarian economic spark from the Demcoratic Party. Instead, the Republican Right, at the time still the Conservative Wing of the Party led by Reagan, began its attack on the role of the Federal Government in all aspects of American life except national defense, in which it was all good. Anti-regulatory, anti-OSHA, anti-EPA, anti-Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife, and in theory, anti-federal spending. And the counter-Revolution from the Right has only intensified its prosecution against the “Deep State,” where the emphasis is overwhelmingly on the administrative (the Right prefers bureaucratic) powers of the Federal Government, not the private sector economic powers which the Revolutionary Right demphasizes. And acting as if the American Insurance Industry, including especially the Health Care industry, was not a mighty bureacratic/administrative system itself. Thus the conservative orginalists on the Supreme Court are now directly attacking the delegation of environmental regulations and enforcement which the Congress has consistently passed along to administrative agencies, which of course, the Founding Fathers never intended. Of course they never contemplated an economic world dominated by such large corporations, oligopoly, and such a pace of “creative destruction” where technological change has a dramatic effect on living patterns, generational relations, and where the methods, if not the findings of science seem to be at odds with everything Fundamentalists cherish.
It’s more than a bit cruel, don’t you think, the contemporary version of the American Dream urging all citizens to get as much education and skill updating as possible, and yet the old defenders of that Dream amongst the Religious Right recoil at the educated coastal elites, Ivy League secular colleges, and deny full throatedly the findings of the science that is a good part of the educational aspects of that upwardly mobile Dream today.
And to add incongruity to cruelty, ponder the basic configuration of the Republican Right today, with its “fire-eaters” on the far Right from Gingrich to today’s House Speaker Michael Johnson and certainly Trump himself, as they go after the “deep state” bureacracy but not the vast concentration of wealth and income that their own ground rules for finance and tax reductions, 1980-2020, have enshrined? This is a Right Populism vastly inconsistent in its targets, despising organized labor, any egalitarian fiscal proposals in Congress, and intent fully through its legal arms to even further empower business freedom, wealth, and dare I say control over the political process? One only has to look at the business executives Trump summoned to the White House in January of 2017 to know who’s in charge of the economy. Changing the terms of trade with China may eventually help the bottom 60% , but in the meantime the risk is further confrontation with China, even as the major industries of the US benefit from further tax cuts and regulatory “relief.” No talk of labor law reform, a liveable national minimum wage, or any follow through on national health insurance. Nor of the housing crisis.
Of course, it’s been with lots of help along these decades from Centrist Democrats anxious not to offend allies on Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and among those effete, educated coastal liberals who earn in the top ten percent of the income spectrum and staff the higher levels of government, law firms, college administrations…and work in the vast realms of hyper-finance. These college educated learners were once firmly in the Republican Party; today, they are the backbone of the what’s left of the Democrats. These hyper-capitalist forces inside the Democratic Party - well summarized by the names not yet quite out of influence - Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Gene Sperling - and the general balance of forces inside the Democratic Party, including older black church going women, high achieving feminists who jumped to Elizabeth Warren in 2020 - put an abrupt end to the Sanders’ gambit in March of 2020, about as subtly as him driving him into a brick wall at 110 mph.
A good question without a final answer is : what is the core grievance of the rank and file Republican today who has embraced Trump? Is it cultural or economic, especially with those who do not have a college degree? I’ve argued that the economic pain of de-industrialization came first, although it is true that the cultural changes marched pretty much in time with the vast shifts in the nature of the economy. And the old economic liberalism of the New Deal, which Hofstadter said had peaked in 1940, not the mid or late 1960’s, has never come up with an effective set of policies to ease the pain of the changes which capitalism thrusts upon especially the bottom 60% of the population, never come up with an adequate response to all that we mean by Globalization and its justifying ideology of Neoliberlism.
Even such well versed capitalist partisans as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has conceded these failures as the main contributing factor to the rise of the Right and authoritarianism in the West. And the last time I checked, the important voice of Larry Summers is adamantly opposed to a national economic program regionally focused on Red State America. The best that has emerged is a slow diversion of public spending via Biden’s programs, but without any other institution building, much less public planning to go with it, like some version of a CCC or National Conservation Corps - as if there was not a deep morale problem as well as vast economic disparity among so many of our citizens today, hardly hidden as the drug addictions, suicides, deaths of despair pile up with no deeper response, economic or insitutional response - than treatment programs. For the Religious Right, the causes are individuals straying from the counsels of the Good Book, led astray by the liberal secular humanists vast hands, and there is no structural causal side in the nature of the economic world: rebuild yourself and get out there and compete, after all we’ve had full employment since Trump’s first term. And don’t forget the hordes waiting at the southern border to take your jobs away.
And this train of thought reminds me that one of the great debates on the left goes back to the rise of the Nazis during the Weimar Republic, and the extent which “big business” helped put them in power. My findings from the best of scholarship I’ve read is that while the party found some key sympathic individual business funders early in the 1920’s to keep it going (barely), as a whole, the most powerful forces within German business were very leery of this poorly educated Corporal with the Iron Cross who came from nearly the bottom of Austro-German Society, almost as lost as some of the main characters in Berlin Alexanderplatz - portrayed in both the novel and the movie. There was a strong sense on the very broad, and dominant German Right, business, aristocrats and the upper levels of the bureacracy, that they could manage Hitler, even after he ascended to the Chancellorship in January of 1930.
How wrong they were; they got what they wanted, a revived and powerful Germany, built on military rearmament, but also, more that they didn’t want: an economy then become dependent on constant expansion to function, an economy that must raid other nations for raw materials and even food stuffs. What they did not bargain for, or fully comprehend despite how many volumes Mein Kampf sold, that it was the central dream of Hitler himself, that there would be intensified race wars that Germany would have to win to find living space to the East. And German democracy, which the Weimar Republic brought so ambivalently in 1919 - it ended with the measures enacted in response to the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933.
Given this 1920’s history lesson on the relationship between business powers and democracy, just where is American business, its higher corporate realms, the crowning glory of Americans civilization, and where does it stand in relation to Herr Trump’s rise, and possible second term?
Was it terribly surprising to come across the following, from CNBC, dated January 18th, 2024, “U.S. Executives in Davos see a Trump victory in 2024, and no cause for Concern.” (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/18/davos-us-executives-see-a-trump-victory-in-2024.html). Let’s see what Jamie Dimon, banking executive extraordinaire, had to say about Trump, past performance and future expectations:
“Just take a step back, and be honest. He was kind of right about NATO. He was kind of right about immigration, he grew the economy quite well. Trade. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China,” said Dimon. “I don’t like how he said things about Mexico, but he wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues. And that’s why they’re voting for him.”
Of course, there is a difference between seeing the open sores in national policy as viewed from the populist Right base, and constructing policies to deal with them; Trump may want NATO nations to pay a fairer share of mutual defense obligations, but Trump is a fan, shamefully so, of Mr. Putin and his ambitious Russia, which is NATO’s gravest threat, starting with its attack on Ukraine in 2014. The tax reforms are not reforms at all, merely a continuation of Republican Right policy since at least Reagan. On China, where Trump saw the harm to blue collar workers and our industrial national security, there is no easy course between fairer trade and a head-on challenge to China’s bid for global supremacy, which our business elites, with few exceptions in the old manufacturing industries, urged upon the nation so heartily as symbolized by the Clinton Administration in the 1990’s.
My take away from this article is this. Far from assuming a unified public role in opposing the rise and re-election of Trump as a threat to American democratic traditions, and the Republic, and seemingly forgetting one prominent conservative’s celebration of the “end of history” at the end of the 1980’s with the triumph of democratic capitalism, American business is rationalizing away the Trump threat - they can live with him and his policies, which were in that first term, very good for business. (Those who had grave doubts did not speak for attribution in this article.)
Does this really surprise my readers, because I see this response in line with capitalism’s leaders in the US failing to accept responsibility for dealing with global warming in any concerted way, terribly divided between energy factions and unable to rally behind any policy programs that might turn the tides politically. And no mention in the Davos coverage of the global warming policies of Trump.
I’m going to close with a long quote from Michelle Goldberg, a regular NY Times columnist whom I’m often in tune with. She is struggling with the reaction of the left’s most intense Trump monitors, and with the general public, veering now towards exhaustion and resignation as the Trumpian steamroller keeps ploughing ahead. She too noted the acceptance of the “centrist plutocrats” at Davos. But she nodged me along to close with her thoughts and her recollections of that crucial decade of the 1970’s where the economic left failed to come up with a program to combat the economic troubles of the times, failures which also did in Jimmy Carter. She is correct, that there was an enormous national response to these failures to turn inward and to sample from all the various psychological remedies and cults which sprouted in the absence of a strong popular left economic reform movement. Here’s her take:
I keep thinking of the early 1970s, another period when broad-based, idealistic social movements had recently fragmented, with some turning toward a militant sectarianism while others withdrew from politics, seeking self-realization in lifestyle experimentation. “Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to ‘relate,’ overcoming the ‘fear of pleasure,’” wrote Christopher Lasch in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism.” It wouldn’t be surprising if people react to another Trump presidency in a similar fashion. (Already both psychedelics and polyamory are back in a big way.) The reboot of the Trump show would be a lot darker than the original. People who value their equanimity might decide it’s not worth watching.
I hope Michelle is wrong, and I honestly hope that the worst cases I have laid out in this essay don’t come to pass with Herr Trump and his second term, that the American public will come to its senses in time and realizes that the Republic will never be the same after a second Trump term - and therefore votes to keep him out of office.
And one last thought, a qualification to the conclusion of Nicholas Lemann’s otherwise fine book, “Transaction Man.” In the Afterword, Lemann pleads with the American public not to expect the decisive politics that might have marked earlier “watershed” American elections, ushering in a new “regime” like that of the New Deal. Instead, we are back to the compromises of our old political science friend from the 1950’s-1960’s, “Pluralism,” and further, an even more fraught Pluralism where decisive majorities are hard to find in a country with such a multiplicity of races and ethnic origins, growing more, not less complex. There is something to be said for this diminished view of our politics, but it overlooks something that stands out for me after doing so much reading about the Weimar Republic’s fate. Weimar was a modern political model of pluralism with proportional representation and even tiny parties getting some say in Reichstag votes. However, what Lemann misses in his formulation - true of Weimar’s fate and maybe our own - is this: democratic pluralism cannot function well, if at all, if the major parties in that pluralism have conflicting ideologies that all but rule out compromises decisive enough to begin to get at the society’s major problems. And that is, if they can even agree upon what the major problems are. The “replacement fears” of the Revolutionary Right are a mass of confusion, part cultural and part economic, and given the state of debate in our present discourse, that Right is not very likely to come to a humane compromise with Centrist Democrats over their resolution. And especially if the lead Revolutionaries see poltical chaos as their main ally.
As promised, more to follow on Gaza and the Middle East, the situation in Ukraine, both of which of course bend back into domestic American politics, heavily, and then last, but not least, the climate situation, where the above text gives at least a few comments if not insights on where the Republican Right wants to take us in the regulatory world.
Best to my readers,
William R. Neil
Frostburg, MD
PostScript
As if often the case when I get in full writing mode, I have “after-thoughts” about what I left out, and that’s the case just now. When I was lying in bed one morning thinking about my recollections of listening to so many hours of Right Wing talk radio, and where it was taking the nation, a phrase I had forgotten jumped into my head. “Rip their faces off.” Where did that come from? Well, from famous author Michael Lewis’ 1989 best seller: Liar’s Poker. I didn’t go back and re-read the whole book, that wasn’t necessary. I had come to it initially during my intense Wall Street finance essay period, in the first decade of the new century, and especially during the great financial crisis of 2007-2009. I found the Chapter with my notes, “Adult Education” which highlighted Lewis’ experience in a two month long training class with Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s oldest firms. The inspiration for the phrase was called the “Human Piranha” which was perhaps a slight exaggeration of his view of the business they were in - and human nature in general - which was usually expressed in a stream of profanity loaded with “F—-words, which his students got along with his practical business acumen. Like a visiting professor from Hell’s Kitchen. It’s hard to say whether what Lewis’ class was learning was more contemptuous of the lower ranks of their own firm’s operations…it was chiefly the trading floor lording over the sales floor, or over the naive customers they would be offering their products to. Lewis figured out, finally, that this was a very interesting world but no place for him, either the trading or the selling side he got shunted to.
I’ve gone on to read his other most famous book, “The Big Short,” (2010) and a less famous one about the evolution of Wall Street trading practices - “Flashboys” (2014). Despite some reviewers correctly noting that he tends to root for the underdogs in the financial speculative universe which governs much of American life, he’s no Muckraker like the famous ones from the late Guilded Age on into the early New Deal era. He’s a gifted writer above all, but as he has admitted in the wake of “Big Short,” what he intended as well with “Liar’s Poker,” that they be cautionary tales to young people to think carefully before jumping in to the promised land of Wall Street’s big pay, hoping that they would pursue different ideals - hasn’t worked. The responses of the young which poured into him in fan mail was exactly the opposite of what he hoped for: they relished the life portrayed in the “Adult Education” chapter and the books, and Wall Street had no trouble recruiting heavily during the 1990’s at the most famous Ivy League schools, including Lewis’ Princeton University - or MIT, Stanford and Trump’s alma mater the “Wharton School” at the Univ. of Pennsylvania.
And I couldn’t help but remember the spirit and the tone of his Salomon Brothers experience, the worldview of the Human Piranha, and realize that this was also the world view of Republican Right talk Radio that so indoctrinated America from the late 1980’s through to the present.
This is what I took away from the best of Lewis’ writing, and although he isn’t a left wing economic Jeremiah by any means, I think when we consider Herr Trump, this pretty much summarizes where he is and where we might be headed:
Because the forty-first floor was the chosen home of the firm’s most ambitious people, and becuse there were no rules governing the pursuit of profit and glory, the men who worked there, including the more bloodthirsty, had a hunted look about them. (This is the trading floor). The place was governed by the simple understanding that the unbridled pursuit of perceived self-interest was healthy. Eat or be eaten. The men of 41 worked with one eye cast over their shoulders to see whether someone was trying to do them in, for there was no telling what manner of man had levered himself to the rung below you and was now hungry for your job. The range of acceptable conduct within Salomon Brothers was wide indeed. It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people’ss behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive. (Liar’s Poker, Pages 69-71.)
And here’s is a fine article by Yun Li, at CNBC, on Michael Lewis looking back thirty years after Liar’s Poker, and reflecting on Wall Street today. I couldn’t help but think of Jamie Dimon’s comments about Trump when I read this:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/michael-lewis-three-decades-after-liars-poker-says-wall-street-is-worse-in-some-ways.html
Amazingly, also in retrospective now, Liar’s Poker was out years before the Clinton administration too office in 1992, and it seemed to have no impact on all the financial reforms that pushing away the remainder of the regulatory restraints left over from the New Deal. I wonder if Brooksley Born was the only regulator who read it?