Why the Trump/Nazi Analogy is so Important

Daniel Bessner and Udi Greenberg wrote in Jacobin this week about the supposed perils of the furtherance of the Weimar Analogy as a framework to explain the rise of Donald Trump. Their explanation and meditation of the ways a state can defend its democracy is important to the Trumpian conversation. Nevertheless, they make key failings in their analysis of Weimar’s social-economy that trouble their broader argument. Bessner and Greenberg are seeking to provide a better context for Trump. While their attempt is interesting, they fail to recognize how the economic/social dislocation of the Weimar period precidates the rise of the Nazis. This particular blind spot is emblematic of a Marxist-friendly reading of history, and needs to be understood as the left reckons with what to do after Trump.

The essence of their argument is:

Trump’s support, after all, comes in large part from postindustrial dislocation, a socioeconomic condition completely alien to the industrial, class-based, and war-traumatized Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. More substantially, Trump’s ideology — if one can call a smattering of contradictory claims a coherent ideology — excludes some of fascism’s classic features. Trump, after all, rarely invokes the language of blood and soil, the transcendental and rejuvenating experience of war, or explicit opposition to electoral institutions and politics. Different concepts — authoritarianism, “ur-fascism,” or old-fashioned American conservatism — do a better job of explaining the Trump movement.

There is much to quibble with here. But I would like to focus on is their claim that Weimar society was “completely alien” to “post-industrial dislocation” as a socio-economic condition. The post-WWI German political economy was defined by the imposition of economic dislocation by the treaty at Versailles. As John Maynard Keynes recounts in Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919):

it was the policy of France to set the clock back and to undo what, since 1870, the progress of Germany had accomplished. By loss of territory and other measures her population was to be curtailed; but chiefly the economic system, upon which she depended for her new strength, the vast fabric built upon iron, coal, and transport must be destroyed.

Versailles’ dislocating policies induced Weimar hyperinflation, which later fueled Bruening’s hesitancy to halt deflationary fiscal policy in response to the depression. Politically induced economic dislocation was central to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler often railed against Versailles in his speeches, echoing the ways Donald Trump would rail against NAFTA. For example, in a 1933 speech to the Reichstag, Hitler said:

Payments in kind in such absurdly high sums of billions are inconceivable without menacing the position of the nations in domestic production. It is the fault of the Versailles Treaty to have inaugurated a period wherein arithmetical acrobatics are of economic insanity.

And here’s Trump describing NAFTA during one of his debate performances:

You go to New England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want, Secretary Clinton, and you will see devastation where manufacturing is down 30, 40, sometimes 50 percent. NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country.

As we have seen from the 2016 election, the success of racially based political pleas are often dependent upon social and economic dislocation. This was true in Weimar, and it is true now.

Bessner and Greenberg scoff at the Trump/Weimar analogy because of what it necessitates. As they suggest, the applicability of the Weimar analogy necessitates a militant defense of democratic ideals, a defense that has yet to broadly materialize. If Trump is the new Hitler, institutional America has succumbed to his rule quite quickly. The press is already having off-the-record conversations with him, tech billionaires are meeting with him, and Obama is ensuring that there is a peaceful transition of power. Therefore, the Weimar analogy can’t fit, because if it does, we’ve already lost.

Their prescription for the appropriate political response to Trump is largely economic. As they say:

If anything, Trump’s disturbing victory provides the Left with the opportunity to reject technocratic politics and the close collaboration between the government and economic elites. Rather than retreating into “militant democracy,” progressives should build viable coalitions, commit to distributionist policies, and address the needs of the many.

Coming full circle, this begs the question as to why Bessner & Greenberg don’t see the answer to Weimar in a similar context to their estimation of the present moment, which I view as the correct approach.

They don’t want to see Weimar as an appropriate analogy because the flailing opposition to fascism in the Weimar period wasn’t the neoliberalism of the center-left, as it was in 2016, but the hardened ideology of socialism.

As historian Robert A. Gates retells it, the Free Trade Unions — a labor-based interest group of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) — had an ambitious plan to counteract the deflation and stagnation of the depression: the WTB plan. It was an expansive public works program aimed at revitalizing German labor. Their proclamation at the beginning of their 1928 congress in Hamburg illustrates their reasoning within Marxist ideology:

In the period when capitalism was completely free, no other alternative to unorganized capitalism appeared conceivable than the socialist organization of the economy as a whole. For this reason it appeared hopeless and senseless to change anything having to do with the despotism of the capitalist system. Until the violent overthrow of the social order took place, everything would have to remain as it was — that was the prevailing attitude. Then it gradually was seen that the structure of capitalism itself was changeable, and that capitalism, before it is broken, can also be bent.

Unfortunately, the WTB plan was never adopted by the SPD as a portion of their political response to the rise of the German right. Fritz Naphtali — SPD’s financial spokesperson — explained the SPD’s reasoning:

I don’t believe that we can do very much, nor anything very decisive, from the point of view of economic policy, to overcome the crisis until it has run its course. When prosperity had developed so far, so disproportionately, and so unchecked as is now normally allowed under capitalist conditions — and as has occurred in recent years on a world scale — then it is hardly possible to stop the crisis during its actual progress. For then, the crisis with all its destruction of the value of capital, with its changes and shifts of purchasing power, is a means of correction which must necessarily be accepted.

This sort of anti-capitalist fatalism channeled by the Weimar socialists is in the same vain of Hillary Clinton’s failed anti-fascist campaign in that they were both dearth of a hopeful socio-economic message. It is no surprise then that the left, which is so quick to jump on neoliberal electoral failings, seeks to shift the context of Trump’s rise away from the Weimar period. Just as the 2016 revealed the glaring holes in the electoral effectiveness of neoliberal centrism, Weimar revealed the glaring holes in the effectiveness of “high castle” leftism.

We need to understand the context of Trump and apply the Weimar analogy to fully understand ALL of the flaws with left wing political orthodoxy. This includes BOTH the flaws of socialism AND neoliberalism. They are both at fault, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t move forward as one. We can be the progressive left that will drag the dislocated among us out of poverty. If history teaches us anything, it’s that we need a hopeful and aspirational economic message. We can at least agree on that.