Don't Know Much About History

Ignorance is strength indeed when progressives peddle their Trump/Hitler narrative

Michael Beschloss: The historian as ideologue and threat to “our democracy”

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Note: Now that the comrades are recycling their lame Trump-is Hitler charge, I thought it worthwhile to repost this rather brilliant article of mine from 2022. Pride is a sin, I know, but really I think I can be forgiven for taking a victory lap as the Bratgirl and the Dems perform what may be charitably described as a controlled flight into terrain, shrieking that Trump is a fascist as they go down in flames. Am I a prophet or what?

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Roiled by the ultra-mega-MAGA threat to democracy, the progressive fever swamp has disgorged a large cohort of self-identified experts on fascism, intent on explaining how the Republican Party is just like the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, and why November 8, 2022, will be as frighteningly portentous a date as January 30, 1933.

Nothing new here: Back 2007, Naomi Wolf took a break from writing about her middle-aged vagina to publish a book whose thesis was that George W. Bush and his cronies were Nazis—not figuratively but literally. And of course, the term fascist Amerika goes back to the Sixties and the late, unlamented New Left. But today the charge has gone mainstream in the Democratic Party and the broad Left.

There’s a problem, however: All these progressive experts on fascism know little or nothing about the actual history of Nazism, including the way in which Hitler and his party came to power.

Take for instance Mathew Dowd, former Republican campaign strategist, now a Pelosi-hugging never-Trumper. Not long ago he pointed with alarm to the GOP’s focus on inflation as a campaign issue, reminding us that the Nazis too rode the issue of inflation to power, That, Dowd claimed, is how the Germans lost their democracy. After piously denying that he was equating Republicans to Nazis, he went ahead and did so anyway:

[It] certainly sounds very familiar to what happened in Germany, which is a bunch of citizens, Adolf Hitler gets a third of the vote, nobody thought it could happen there. They went along because he said he would solve the economy and fix inflation.

Now there are several things wrong with this comparison. First, the inflation crisis to which Dowd refers occurred in the period 1920-23, at which time Hitler was an obscure radical right-wing politician down in Bavaria, whom few people took seriously. He and his Nazi Party achieved power a decade later, in January 1933. Second, by 1930-31 there was no democracy left for the German people to lose. Third, Hitler was not democratically elected. He was appointed chancellor (prime minister) by President von Hindenburg, with a cabinet made up mostly of non-Nazi conservatives. In short, Dowd had no idea what he was talking about.

Mathew Dowd is not a historian but a political apparatchik and bloviator, so his ignorance comes as no surprise. The same cannot be said for Michael Beschloss, who’s a well-known historian of the American presidency with a large following on Twitter and a gig on NBC News. You’d expect a guy like that to have a basic grasp of the history of Nazism, even if it’s not his area of professional expertise. But no. Sad to report, when he offers analysis of this moment in American political history, Beschloss sounds a lot like Naomi Wolfe:

Fifty years from now, if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press—which I’m not certain of, but if that is true—a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

Dude! You seriously need to chill!

It may be argued that Beschloss’ Ph.D. trumps my own M.A. in history—but facts trump credentials, and the facts are on my side. I happen to be familiar with modern German history, including the Nazi era, and I’m here to tell you that all these Trump-is-Hitler, Republicans-are-Nazi screeds are as fraudulent as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The course of events leading to the Nazi seizure of power may briefly be summarized as follows. Germany’s defeat in World War One triggered the abdication of Kaiser William I, the collapse of the imperial regime and a socialist/communist revolution—this drama being played out in 1918-19. With the Kaiser gone, the leaders of the relatively moderate Social Democratic Party proclaimed a German Republic, appealing to the High Command of the Army for support. To this the Generalität agreed, not out of enthusiasm for republicanism but to prevent the worst—a communist seizure of power—from happening. Once the revolutionary threat had been bloodily suppressed, the Republic was formalized, its constitution being drawn up in the city of Weimar (February-August 1919).

The circumstances of its birth were to prove fatal to the Weimar Republic, as it came informally to be called. In the eyes of many Germans, it was indissolubly linked to defeat in war, the humiliations of the 1919 Peace Treaty—“the shame of Versailles”—and the calamities of the immediate postwar period, especially the 1919-23 inflationary spiral. Die Inflation wiped out the savings of the thrifty German middle class, engendering a sense of insecurity and discontent that was never to subside. Politically, only the Social Democratic Party—Germany’s largest—professed a whole-souled devotion to the Republic. The Communists and the parties the Right were either equivocal in their attitude or implacably hostile to the republican regime. Even more ominously, certain key groups—the state bureaucracy, the judiciary, many intellectuals, the officer corps of the Army—regarded the Republic with distaste and looked forward to a day when something akin to the defunct imperial order could be restored. Thus in the Republic’s terminal crisis it received little or no support from those quarters.

It was against this background that Adolf Hitler launched his political career.

For a time in the mid- to late 1920s it appeared that the Republic had stabilized. Inflation was mastered, the economy improved, German diplomats made progress on the key issue of war reparations. But the old resentments festered. The provisions of the Peace Treaty, particularly the effective disarmament of Germany and the loss of territory in the east, were grievances on which practically all Germans agreed, and they were associated in many minds with the regime that had acquiesced in them. All might still have been well, however, if the Great Depression had not hit Germany with the force of an earthquake. Between 1929 and 1933, the economy contracted, unemployment skyrocketed, millions of Germans experienced real privation. The credibility of the Republic was shattered. Repeated elections failed to produce a stable parliamentary majority, the political process succumbed to paralysis, and a series of short-lived governments, reliant on presidential emergency powers, failed to master the crisis. Democracy in Germany was dead.

Hitler well knew how to exploit this situation. After an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1923, followed by a brief period of imprisonment, he built up his National Socialist German Workers’ Party on a basis of “legality.” It was of course a sham legality, election campaigns being accompanied by large-scale, organized street violence, intimidation of the opposition, even assassination. By these means the Nazi Party became the largest party in the Reichstag (parliament), though it never commanded a majority. Hitler’s path to power was paved by a series of deals with the conservative political parties of the Old Right, enabling them jointly to present President von Hindenburg with a solution to the political impasse: a coalition right-wing government including the Nazis but not dominated by them. To this the old gentleman agreed, appointing Hitler as chancellor (prime minister) on January 30, 1933.

The conservatives thought that they had co-opted Hitler; in a government dominated by them his own radicalism and the unsavory features of the Nazi Party would be tamed and tempered. But the old guard proved no match for the Führer and his henchmen, who in a matter of months had sidelined them and commenced the “coordination” of German politics and society—effectively, the subjugation of all formerly independent institutions to Nazi Party control.

From the foregoing account it will be seen that neither Donald Trump nor the Republican Party bear any real resemblance to Hitler or Nazism. Nor can it be said that the state of America today replicates that of Germany in the period 1918-33. The causes of the crisis that culminated in the Nazi seizure of power went back decades, even generations, and they were deeply rooted in German politics, society and culture. To some extent, indeed, they can be traced back to the dawn of modern German history, when Frederick William, the Great Elector, laid the foundations of the Prussian-German state.

Given the decay and corruption of American higher education, it can be taken for granted that not one in a hundred of the Hitler shouters who blather about the Trumpian/Nazi threat to “our democracy” is familiar with the historical background sketched above. Probably they don’t know much more about their own country’s history. Mathew Dowd may be a fool and an ignoramus, but he can’t be blamed for that. With Michael Beschloss, the case is different. He should know better—he does know better—but as a typical product of the postmodern academy, Beschloss prioritizes ideology over history. And that poses a serious threat to “our democracy.”

See also my earlier articles on Nazism and fascism:

What Is Fascism, Anyway? • Designer Fascism