Let’s back track to this bad boy:
“Don’t you fools get it? The system is rigged! Vote third party!” Uhh, can we talk about the inherently self-contradictory nature of that line of thinking for a second? If you know that the system is rigged against you by your oppressors, then why are you fighting them within the system that they rigged? That’s like agreeing to fight a shark in the water, or a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt on the ground. They’ve got the electoral system all shored up in their favour, and as long as their propaganda engine is functioning, they’ll continue manipulating the way mainstream America thinks and votes no matter what political insurgencies you try to pull off.
Actually, no, there are clear examples of transformations of the political machine that were accomplished through the system. Whether we want to talk about a suicidal upper house in NZ or the demise of rotten boroughs and the resultant political order is almost beside the point: there is at least one change that was considerably more total. I can understand that 1930s Germany is an uncomfortable topic for anyone who believes in deep state (on account of its failures to, well, either set the socio-national mood/agenda¹ or reign in a broadly electoral groundswell²) but to ignore it here?
The basic narrative of the NSDAP, with which I am sure you’re familiar, is that they attempted a putsch (a violent revolutionary takeover), weren’t really heavily punished for this (some died but Hitler was given a cursory jail sentence) and then existed as a minor party until the Depression at which time they were able to combine an electoral machine, propaganda and violence to put their man in the driving seat by 1933. The Nazis then used the framework of Weimar society to abolish other political parties and develop a racial state (which Germany had not been prior to the Third Reich).
Alongside the structures of the state, the party institutions created a bureaucracy in parallel and eventually the whole thing ended up in WWII. At which time the war effort was eventually subsumed by the party’s concerns with its genocidal policies (especially the Holocaust and, most infamously, the Shoah³). Hence it is clear that the Weimar state had been reduced into something completely Other even if there was no revolution as such nor total demise of its institutions (which posed a problem post-War when it came to reconstruction).
Now, there are some problems with this comparison. Sure, the NSDAP were an electoral force but street violence was a part of their processes and so was a holistic approach where they had charities, unions and children’s associations. Also, Hitler only ever became Chancellor because the other major anti-establishment party (i.e. the KPD) were also doing well so the establishment turned to Hitler when they got desperate.² That seems to be a critical facet of the Third Reich’s usurping power as I think it’s fair to say there is a consensus that people were turning away from the NSDAP toward the end (Goebbels certainly thought so⁴). On the other hand, you do have to have clout to be where the desperate turn.
The bigger problem, perhaps, is that Weimar Germany was not a stable society, even if it was a stabilising state, and that it was also substantially more democratic than the US has ever been. Fortuitously, you seem to believe that the US is in a period where the normalcy of its society is under threat. In real life, it isn’t (like every other human ever you are simply reading too much into hypernormal processes⁵) but you think it is so you can’t take the unstable society of the Weimar and say it dismisses the critique. To those people who are a bit more cautious in meaning-seeking, the instability of Weimar was a very important thing to remember about the NSDAP’s electoral success. However, it was an unstable society because scepticism of democracy was normalised. Democratic regimes ultimately rely on faith and the more sceptical people there are, the closer one gets to a critical mass where the sceptics are right because enough of them exist. Notice that the faith based nature of democracy is only concealed in open societies hence even those who think American society is still solid must surely accept Weimar as a “lesson”.
The differing levels of democracy between Weimar and the contemporary US is more problematic. Except, wait, the deep state is irrelevant. Think about it. Every single person that has an agenda that makes up the deep state is still a person. And it is blindingly obvious that political thought changes through time even if institutions are a little different. Imagine Johnstone in 1970’s Cold War America? Her views on Trump jr. rely on a presupposition that there was no Russian hysteria last year. We might doubt that any American would ever argue that Russia is as friendly as Britain, but Cold War America was all about dat Russian Hysteria. Institutions and the parameters of normal society that they help establish influence individual politics but fad and fancy (which have little to do with institutions) exert a powerful pull over individuals and through them the agendas of the deep state. Similarly, the commercial demands placed upon Corporate America means that they can’t ignore fad and fancy either. Hell, they even have a buzzword for this: Corporate Social Responsibility. This rather levels the traditional military-industrial complex all on its own, and hence it requires a fancy for less military expenditure and the industry was broken a long time ago (see: Detroit) despite the hypernormal promises of Trump. Or, put another way, the US is democratic enough even if you’re keen on calling it a Corporate State… because it is also a Corporate Society.
So, tell me more about how fighting within the system is nonsensical.
¹ Moritz Föllmer, ‘The problem of national solidarity in interwar Germany’
German History. 23, no. 2, 2005 (ISSN: 0266–3554), pp. 202–231
² If you believe Ian Kershaw its problem was that the Nazi agenda (the Hitler Myth) steamrolled the elites that gave the Nazis power in backroom deals. Those aren’t actually necessarily undemocratic but seem to belong to what you think the deep state does (it’s just that it’s possible for anti-establishment positions to co-opt and then usurp the deep state by working with it).
See: Ian Kershaw, ‘The “Hitler Myth”. Image and Reality in the Third Reich’ in David Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945. London, Routledge, ISBN: 0415082390, 1994, pp. 197–215.
³ Nazi Genocide is broader the Holocaust, which refers exclusively to the murderous parts of Nazi genocidal policy. The Shoah refers to the aspects of the Holocaust that were about murdering Jews.
⁴ He’s pretty pessimistic in his diary, I mean.
⁵ People see patterns where there are none every day: we quest for meaning so we find it even where there is just chaos.