What happens when a
nation that was once an economic powerhouse turns its back on democracy
and on its middle class, as wealthy right-wingers wage austerity
campaigns and enable extremist politics?
It may sound like America in 2012. But it was also Germany in 1932.
Most
Americans have never heard of the Weimar Republic, Germany's democratic
interlude between World War I and World War II. Those who have usually
see it as a prologue to the horrors of Nazi Germany, an unstable
transition between imperialism and fascism. In this view, Hitler's rise
to power is treated as an inevitable outcome of the Great Depression,
rather than the result of a decision by right-wing politicians to make
him chancellor in early 1933.
Historians
reject teleological approaches to studying the past. No outcome is
inevitable, even if some are more likely than others. Rather than
looking for predictable outcomes, we ought to be looking to the past to
understand how systems operate, especially liberal capitalist
democracies. In that sense, Weimar Germany holds many useful lessons for
contemporary Americans. In particular, there are four major points of
similarity between Weimar Germany and Weimar America worth examining.
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