Trump’s America Is No Weimar Republic – Bloomberg
Yet no amount of repetition will erase the enormous differences between the U.S. today and Germany 90 years ago. Not many people are left who remember the original Weimar Republic, born in 1919 after the revolutionary ouster of Kaiser Wilhelm II and condemned to death 14 years later with Hitler s appointment as chancellor. Last week, I asked one eminent American who was born in Germany in 1923 what he thought. It was a parallel that had crossed Henry Kissinger s mind more than once in the turbulent times of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His view today: Americans are nowhere near as alienated from their democratic system as Germans in the 1920s.
As a certified Weimar scholar (it was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation) I can think of at least seven reasons why that is right.
Let s start with political violence. Yes, we have seen too much of that in the U.S. this year, most recently in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin. And yet there is a huge difference between the chaotic scenes we have witnessed in those and other locations and the German street battles of the early 1930s.
Niall Ferguson is right about this. We’re not at Weimar or even at the 1965-75 levels of violence and utter stupidity in our politics. Social media makes it seem worse as every time some idiot sets himself on fire at a riot, it’s 24/7 in our faces. And yet, we could be approaching the elbow in the power curve of decay.