The Coming of…Nothing
Thoughts on Fascism in America
I’m currently reading, and enjoying, Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich. As one might imagine, it’s about the coming of the Third Reich, as in fascism, as in Nazis, as in the Dark Continent, as in Hitler. While I find Evans’ writing easy, I’m a bit impartial towards the way that he tells the history of the rise of the Third Reich, how Germany came to be itself in 1933. He’s not a narrative historian in the spirit of David McCullough, one of my favorite historians, but his book is informative nonetheless.
Particularly, because it gives the reader the chance to ask some questions they perhaps never thought about before.
Why exactly did the Wiemar Republic, Germany’s first republic, fail so terribly? How is it that Hitler could possibly have come to power, especially if he was actually quite incompetent? Why didn’t fascists come to power in more nations during the Great Depression — like America, for instance?
In the same way that racist, sexist, and big have simply lost their umph, calling someone a fascist just isn’t as sexy anymore. Particularly because, there are many people who don’t understand what the term actually means, the implications of that word, and notably why it’s not an accurate portrayal of reality in America.
The truth of the matter is that it really can’t happen here.
Not under the present conditions, in the present system, even with the great semblance political polarization we have today. In fact, it didn’t even triumph when America was at her absolute worst during the Great Depression.
Sure, interesting characters like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin came into view, and zany contrivances like the Business Plot emerged, but no fascist ever took power. And if they had been able to, one wonders if they would have survived the democratic machine that is Washington.
A fascist government first requires a weak government, a weak political system, an ideal, and bad timing. America has none of these things.
Wiemar Germany, however, was an incubator for a fascist government.
I don’t mean to propogate the conceit that the Third Reich was inevitable, however, given the conditions of the Republic between 1918 and 1933, it’s easy to make a case for it.
The Wiemar Republic was rife with factionalism and no political uniformity, full of radicals, and over almost two decades it saw twenty different governments. They endured military coups and vigilantism. Furthermore, these people all had different ideas about what Germany should be — this is how dissatisfied they were with the Republic at the time. This was not Democrats and Republicans debating whether or not to fund a border wall, or universal healthcare, or pass tax reform. Nay, it was a debate over monarchism and communism, conservatism and liberalism (in the most European of sentiments). Either/or, not in addition to. The Left was swallowed by the Communist Party who sought to undermine the Capitalist system within the Republic, to overthrow the bougiouse, without realizing that they themselves were the bougiouse; the Right were dominated by conservatives and Nationalists, who wanted to go back to the Goold Ol’ Days of the Bismarckian Empire:
When Germans referred to ‘peacetime’ after 1918, it was not the era in which they were actually living, but to the period before the Great War had begun (Evans 73).
Those are the sorts of ideas I mean. They were not merely hoping to get some piece of legislation passed, but rather to totally restructure the Reichstag itself.
And then there’s the timing of it all. Just as the Wiemar would have likely gained its stride, in 1929, the Stock Market crashed and the whole world stumbled, Atlas Shrugged, the sky seemed to begin falling. It hit Germany perhaps the hardest. Germany was not only at the bottom of the barrel, they were not only scraping up the little crumbs that occasionally appeared in corners, instead they were beneath the barrel, fighting over earth and nothing with the worms. The impact of Versailles war reparations on the emergence of the Nazis is sometimes overstated, but it is true that it was a significant component in the collapse of the Wiemar system.
Germany in its ambition, believing that it would win the Great War, spent at their heart’s content, under the impression that they would negotiate the seizure of numerous resource-rich districts across Europe.
Compound an enormous debt, reparations, and massive inflation, and you arrive at an untenable interest rate.
These are the distinct causes of Wiemar Germany’s slow descent towards total collapse. It did not have to be the Nazis who came to power. It could have been some other group, like the Communists for example. However, fascism of some form or another would have arisen, which is to say a centralized dictatorship driven by pure ideology. In the presence of weakness, even a figure of marginal strength will take hold of the system and squeeze.
We have none of these things in America. Not right now. Germany had all of those things all at once. It had a history which stressed authority and a strong central government; America was founded on a fight between how weak the government should be. Perhaps we should only fear today because between the two parties that kick the White House back and forth, the bureaucracy has only ballooned, the people having become more dependent on the government by virtue of its sheer size. In Germany, when they tried democracy, they didn’t know how to respond, so they tore themselves apart. At various points throughout American history, we have seen political disintegration, we have seen the country literally split in half — however, we mended again. We have not always allowed our politics to become like our religion; Evans notes:
Politics were not just the staple diet of conversation among the elites and the middle classes, but formed a central focus of discussion in working class pubs and bars and even governed people’s choice of leisure activities (17).
Furthermore, while there are those who try and take the moment to pronounce a socialist coup or beckon that Capitalism is on its way out, our Republic has survived for 242 years — theirs survived for barely 15. The Third Reich itself lasted for a pithy 12. Were a dictatorship to emerge in the United States, it would likely disintegrate in a quarter of the time, perhaps for the same reason that one could rise: the size of government is so immense, it would be an incredible feat for a dictator to grab hold of every one of its parts; and this is to say nothing of the individual states, which could simply disassociate from the Union; this also says nothing of the numerous countries which would immediately side with the citizens of the United States as opposed to the dictatorship. In 1919, Germany was without allies and surrounded by enemies on all sides; the United States, despite what one may think, still holds a number of allies who would come to her aide if such a dire hour should strike.
Anyone who is afraid that America is entering the opening chapters to its great Fall, in the Gibbonsonian tradition, should alleviate their anxieties. We should only fear when there remains no one at all has values, beliefs of which they will debate. We should only fear when violence is not condemned by anyone. We should only fear when we begin to forget that George Washington was president, and not merely a general. One may believe that all the signs are here, but I urge the reader to consider: do you really believe it could happen here?
