Democracy is a fragile flower, as we learn again and again. Among the many failed democracies of the past century, few held more promise than Germany’s Weimar Republic, and none collapsed into greater horror. Its story can be told in two ways: as a drama of decadent excess and tragic flaws, or as an elegy recalling noble promises betrayed by treacherous enemies. Eric D. Weitz’s “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” falls squarely into the second category.
Weitz, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, praises the republic’s achievements and condemns its murderers: the right-wing businessmen, army officers and civil servants who handed the country over to the Nazis. Together, the respectable and the radical right nourished the toxic lie that Germany lost World War I because it was “stabbed in the back” by leftist democrats. Still, the Weimar of this book is not a prelude to Hitler, who barely puts in an appearance.
Weitz dispatches the political and economic history of the republic briefly and conventionally, describing its birth amid the trauma of German defeat; the incomplete revolution that created a model democracy but left it to be administered and defended by its enemies; the frightening 1923 hyperinflation that shattered middle-class trust in the government; and the fragile stability that lasted until the United States stock market crash of 1929 triggered the cancellation of American loans, a financial crisis, mass unemployment and dictatorship.
The republic’s mistake, Weitz argues, was its failure to dispatch its conservative enemies at the beginning. . . . Although Weitz enumerates conservative misgivings, especially from the churches, he equates fears of debauchery with opposition to democracy. Yet new freedoms could frighten even those who welcomed them. With his belief that “Weimar did not just collapse; it was killed off,” he plays down the self-destructive passions unleashed by democracy. People repelled by sexual freedom or by the brutal candor of Expressionist art were not necessarily Nazis, but they were ripe for the picking.
(From Brian Ladd’s NYT review of Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, by Eric D. Weitz.)
Of course I don’t think movement conservatives in this country need to be "dispatched," but I do think that their entire program must be vociferously repudiated and that we have to understand that there is no compromising with them if we have any hope of restoring our democracy.
I’ve often spoken before about the Weimarization of American society. There are important differences between then and now, but most Americans truly underestimate how fragile their political situation is. The important thing to understand is that with movement conservatives we’re no longer dealing with reasonable people committed to the rule of law and the democratic process. The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln and T. Roosevelt. There might still be some decent traditional Republicans in Congress, but they have no influence and no future.
Only a few liberal and moderate Democrats understand think they can no longer negotiate and compromise with the Republicans. Harry Reid said this week,
“I strongly believe that when we can put our differences aside, even
Harry Reid and Rush Limbaugh, we should do that and try to accomplish
good things for the American people.” If he really believes that, and I
think he does, he will continue to just get pushed around by the bully
right. Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of Pete Stark’s remarks were an unnecessary attempt to play nice with people who don’t play nice. Pelosi should have said nothing or just said Stark has a right to his opinions.
Stark’s remarks were over the top with his "amusement" phrase, but the important thing is not what he said but the fact that he’s standing up and fighting. Her congress has an 11% approval rating. What does she think she has to lose at this point? Does she and Reid really believe that playing nice instead of coming out fighting is going to get them anywhere? The only important thing now is that these Dems show some fight. We’re no longer in a normal situation; we’re in Weimar. Either Reid and Pelosi don’t understood that or they are so complicit in this corrupt system that they are allies of those who want to squash those who want to fight against it.
Trying to be play nice is the fatal mistake decent people make when they deal with movement conservatives. The right is not interested in compromise or in working for the common good. It wants to dominate the system, and it seeks to do that by any means possible–including appearing reasonable. It’s important for them to appear legitimate, to hide their deep agenda behind the appearance of decency and reasonableness, and to do every thing it can to delegitimize anyone who opposes them. They want to keep you talking in your living room to keep you distracted while their cronies come in the back door to steal everything in your kitchen pantry. They want to keep you confused and feeling ambivalently, because a confused and ambiguous people offers no effective opposition to them who are clear and focused on their objectives.
And now when someone like Chris Dodd finally stands up in opposition to the crony telecoms, Harry Reid won’t support him?! Reid, apparently, wants to keep talking in the living room while the looting goes on in the kitchen. The movement conservatives rightly perceive him and those in Democratic Party like him as Neville Chamberlain types, not because they won’t stand strong against Islamic extremists abroad, but because they won’t stand up against conservative extremists here. So they’ll keep pushing knowing that sooner or later he and his party will cave.
We ought not to be surprised. It’s predictable according to the universal Weimar logic, which grabs a society that has become confused and decadent, and which is driven by no other motivations except the crudest and most instinctual. Every society, whether decadent or not, is driven by crude, instinctual motives, but healthy societies feel a sense of shame regarding their most egregious manifestations.
A decadent society unfetters all the traditional restraints regarding sex, power, and money. The movement conservatives don’t think themselves decadent because while they wallow just as much as anyone else in the first, they feel shamed by it when they are caught. But they feel no shame about their extravagant indulgence in the second two. And whatever the society suffers (and it does suffer) because of a shameless lack of sexual restraint, it is nothing compared to the dangers it suffers when there is no shame about unrestrained greed and lust for power.
Is there any good news these days? Just something. Dodd’s move cheered me a little, and now Biden is joining him. Barak? Wherefore art thou?
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