America’s Current “Weimar Moment” is Greatly Exaggerated

The current lamentable federal government shutdown—for which I think there is enough blame to go around—has precipitated a flurry of “not me but thee is the Nazi” accusations from both Ted Cruz’s and Harry Reid’s sides of the Congressional aisle. Such back-and-forth character assassination, alas, has become recurrent in recent national American politics, starting in the 1990s during the Clinton impeachment fight and continuing under George W. Bush and Barack Obama and the recriminations over two Mideast wars.

On a somewhat higher intellectual level, an example is John Judis’ new jeremiad in “The New Republic”: “Welcome to Weimar America: The Shutdown Standoff is One of the Worst Crises in American History.” Judis thinks we may be on a fast track to becoming an American Greece where Neo-Nazi members of the Golden Dawn party unashamedly read passages of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the Greek equivalent of the Congressional Record.

While Judis’ screed may be an accurate reflection of current extreme political anxiety in the U.S. on left as well as right, it strike me—at least in terms of the historical analysis it offers—as more a symptom than an accurate diagnosis of the problems it decries.

Judis begins by telling readers that American democracy is rooted in political theories going back to Aristotle’s “definition of the nation state” and John Locke’s theorizing about “a social compact among peoples.” The only trouble here is that Aristotle functioned in a world of polis (city state) vs. empire, not “nation states,” and Locke—that stout defender of individual rights—would have had no idea what Judis’ trendy multicultural notion of “a social compact among peoples” means.

Judis proceeds to what is now becoming a new favorite liberal invective against conservative Republicans, i.e., that they are modern-day spawn of slavery defender and “father of secession” John C. Calhoun—who happened to be a staunch Democrat. In other words, if Senator Ted Cruz (whatever one thinks of him) is not a Nazi, he nevertheless is allegedly related politically to reactionary Calhoun. This analysis stretches historical analogizing far beyond where it ought to go.

Then Judis informs readers that the roots of our modern political malaise really stretch back to the late 1930s when a conservative Republican-Southern Democrat coalition coalesced in Congress. There is truth in this, but he then adds that World War II weakened this coalition when, to the contrary, it became stronger—not weaker—during and immediately after the War. This political shift—tinged with nativism—had among its casualties (which Judis fails to note) Holocaust victims and Displaced Persons for whom Washington, particularly the Congress, showed scant sympathy throughout the 1940s continuing with the passage of the McCarran Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

Then Judis prescribes a number of curative nostrums including campaign finance reform and the end of partisan Gerrymandering of Congressional seats. Perhaps these have some merit. But he cites California as an example of how redistricting should be done when, in fact, the Golden State’s current Congressional district map is about as far from being “nonpartisan” as it ever has been.

Perhaps there are indeed troubling signs of strain in the current American social compact that have some similarities with Weimar. Increasing social atomization (for example, the retreat into “bowling alone” and video games), growing income disparities, and ideological polarization come to mind. But the American judiciary—unlike that of Germany under Weimar—is still a bulwark for minority rights against racism and other forms of prejudice. And Judis’ overheated rhetoric about an imminent Weimar apocalypse is not a contribution to the kind of historically informed, civil discourse that we need more of to protect and preserve our democratic Republic.

Abraham Lincoln—a Whig conservative and then an antislavery Republican—would not have appreciated his party being equated with the Calhoun-inspired Confederacy or with the majority of Northern Democrats in the wartime House of Representatives who voted against the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. See Spielberg’s “Lincoln” for a pretty accurate portrayal.

Of course, today for complicated reasons, the vast majority of African Americans—in a great reversal—consider the Democratic party rather than the Republican party the guarantor of their interests. It is only fair to note, however, that as recently as 1964 a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act.