Weimar America: The Threat Is on the Left
For years now we’ve heard that even moderately conservative Republicans are “far right” and deserving of the “Nazi” label. And Republican presidential candidates routinely are tagged with the “Hitler” label. The only time the label is removed is when the left finds it useful to contrast “good” Republicans with bad. So, for example, the onetime Hitler aspirant George W. Bush became “statesmanlike,” sort of, when it became useful to contrast him with the new boogeyman, Donald Trump.
A more subtle form of this labeling comes in the form of comparing our current situation to that of the Weimar Republic — Germany’s first attempt to create a constitutional democratic republic similar to our own, instituted after World War I in 1919. Despite high hopes, the new republic was troubled throughout its short life, riven by radicalism on both the left and the right, catastrophically failing in the end, and giving way in 1933 to Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship.
When “Weimar America” is brought up, it’s usually by leftist academics or by journalistic “thought leaders.” No, they say, we’re not comparing Mitt Romney or even Donald Trump to Hitler, we’re simply saying that the “far right” is on the march, that the conditions are right for a takeover by “dangerously anti-democratic” forces, already “well-entrenched,” galvanized by “Republican demagogues.” If we don’t marshal a “resistance” — a tendentious term if ever there was one — then we could lose our democracy just as poor Germany long ago lost its own. Get out your “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes, Auschwitz looms.
A lifetime ago I wrote a doctoral dissertation dealing with the political police in Weimar-era Bavaria, an institution that served as one of the direct antecedents (perhaps the most important such antecedent) of the Nazi’s primary tool of oppression, the “Secret State Police,” famously known as the Gestapo. I devoted the better part of a decade to understanding how conditions in the Weimar Republic set the stage for the emergence of Nazism as a political force. And while I moved on many years ago from these academic pursuits, I’ve retained at least a semi-professional interest in the history of the period.
On this basis, I’m prepared to assert, with absolute confidence, that Nazism doesn’t lurk whenever the Young Republicans gather on a college campus, or when women march to protest against abortion, or even when (gasp!) various prominent conservatives gather at Mar-a-Lago. ICE and the Border Patrol are not likely to break out the black uniforms and the deaths-head cap badges any time soon. The comparisons made have about as much connection to reality as the “Nazi porn” of years past. No, “Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS” isn’t hiding behind the mask of a conservative woman protesting when her daughter is forced to play volleyball against a biological male. (READ MORE: Men in Women’s Sports Is Becoming a Major Political Issue)
A Brief History of the Weimar Republic
There is, however, a comparison to be made between the America of 2024 and Weimar-era Germany. Some 13 million men served in the Imperial German Army of World War I, some 2 million of whom would be killed or die of their wounds. Figures for the wounded who survived were around 4 million.
But most significantly, at the beginning of the war, the army had a professional officer corps of some 30,000 (out of a total size of 800,000), and, over the course of the war, the officer corps rose to perhaps 400,000 men. Many of these officers, of course, would be numbered among the killed and wounded, and no reliable figures exist for the number of officers serving when the Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918. But the number was assuredly in the hundreds of thousands.
And then, crushingly, the Versailles Treaty forced a reduction in the German army to just 100,000 men, only 4,000 of them officers. At a stroke, it rendered massive numbers of German officers unemployed and, at least in terms of their chosen profession, forever unemployable. Make no mistake, for every officer veteran who’d had all the war he ever wanted to experience, who had, in the German phrase, his “nose full” of the army, there were just as many who were deeply embittered by being turned out on the street.
Additionally, there were many thousands of teenagers, rising officer cadets, who’d wanted desperately to make an army career, and now saw this stolen from them, partly by the Allied powers, but more by, in their view, the cowardly leftist politicians who’d agreed to a craven peace. Bear in mind that in the Kaiser’s Germany, few professions carried more prestige, and more psychic and material rewards, than membership in the officer corps. At the pinnacle stood the full-time professionals, but the university class of educated civilians likewise treasured their status as reserve officers.
Versailles tore this all away, leaving thousands of bitter young men. Young men who would later gravitate to dozens of different competing radical right-wing groups, including, but scarcely limited to, the nascent Nazi Party.
In the years immediately following the war, these groups would generate a wave of terrorism aimed at political leaders associated with the peace treaty and with efforts to make the new republic a success. Successive assassinations of prominent Weimar political and economic leaders traumatized the nation, and these, typically, were carried out by groups such as the infamous “Organization Consul,” composed of ex-officers and officer cadets.
One doesn’t have to delve deeply into academic histories to gain an appreciation of this period. Instead, let me recommend a novel from a few years back, Arthur R. G. Solmssen’s absolutely wonderful A Princess in Berlin. It’s eminently readable and yet utterly trustworthy from a historical standpoint.
Why is that relevant today?
What then, you’re now asking, does this historical excursion have to do with the potential dangers to our own constitutional republic? We haven’t, after all, downsized our military dramatically, we haven’t dumped thousands of unhappy young officers on the streets. Quite the contrary. Our professional soldiers may have their grievances, but nothing even remotely resembling the anger of former German officers in 1919.
But look in a slightly different direction. Although there’s nothing resembling a reliable number, we know anecdotally that there are thousands of recently minted PhDs, or aspiring PhDs, particularly in the heavily left-wing humanities and social sciences, who are either unemployed or underemployed. Those who’ve latched on to academic work are frequently so-called “adjunct professors,” paid a pittance, scrambling from job to job to make ends meet, regarded with indifference by more senior tenured faculty and with contempt by many of their students.
Look a bit further in this same direction. There are thousands, many thousands, with undergraduate degrees of questionable utility, many of them in such intrinsically silly disciplines as “gender studies” and the like. So long as the burgeoning DEI industry continued to, well, burgeon, they had well-paid prospects in HR departments across the land. Now, as the pushback against DEI sinecures gains momentum, their prospects look increasingly grim. (RELATED: The High-Water Mark of Woke Corporate Activism)
This is a matter of immense practical importance for this cohort. While our economy continues to outperform other countries, including the major economies of Western Europe, there are significant pockets of stagnation. STEM graduates likely have little to worry about, and even humanities and social science graduates can do well so long as they make an effort to develop useful analytic and communication skills and are willing to work their way up through the system.
It’s not just a matter of income itself. To take a currently salient example, jobs at the lower end of the scale, or those that are transient, usually come without benefits, above all, without health benefits. The Uber driver or the adjunct professor likely find themselves deeply fearful of a health crisis, a fear that can readily transmute into anger at “the system.”
However, the most important issue may be one of self-respect. We’re looking, after all, at a generation that was sold a bill of goods, sold on the notion that a college degree, or even more an advanced degree, would confer not just a good income, but also status. We’ve spent the best part of the last half-century promoting the notion that college is the path to being “somebody,” while the trades and crafts are the province of the “nobodies.” This is deeply, powerfully, profoundly wrong, and now, however hesitantly, we’re beginning to correct this monstrosity.
So there we are. Thousands upon thousands of young people, the so-called “best and brightest” sold a bill of goods and are now faced with a world utterly at odds with what they were led by their parents and teachers to expect. It’s a situation not dissimilar to that faced by thousands of ambitious young officers in Germany as the Weimar Republic came into existence. Many of those young officers, of course, were hardened veterans, inured to killing, temperamentally and philosophically inclined to the political right — Nazis in the making.
Our embittered cohort, however, has been marinated in Marxist platitudes and popular left-wing absurdities. It’s not for nothing that we read that a good portion of coeds at the University of Michigan identify as LGBTQ and whatever. They’ve become the foot soldiers in all sorts of silly causes — “Queers for Palestine,” to offer but one example. (RELATED: Survey: Half of Women at University of Michigan Identify as LGBTQ)
We can comfort ourselves with the notion that they are more inclined to occupy buildings on a college campus or block a thoroughfare than they are to roll out machine guns and armored cars, as radical Germans did in 1919. But we shouldn’t take too much comfort in this. We’ve experienced, after all, the street tyranny of Antifa and the corrosive anarchy of “mostly peaceful protests.”
Worse, and very much in line with what happened in Weimar Germany, such young people form a seedbed for greater violence. The most shocking aspect of the recent assassination of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, shocking beyond the event itself, has been the outpouring of sympathy and support for the alleged assassin. (RELATED: Luigi Mangione’s Cognitive Dissonance)
When I lived in Germany in the 1970s, I was astounded at the degree to which the country’s university student population, while not willing to become terrorists themselves, were broadly and sometimes fervently sympathetic to the murderous rampage of the Baader-Meinhof gang of assassins. And much of the outpouring of support, then as now, came wrapped in the form of half-baked “progressive” pieties.
In 1922, after the assassination of businessman and political leader Walther Rathenau, the latest and most dramatic of a series of assassinations of Weimar Republic stalwarts, German Chancellor Joseph Wirth stood before the Reichstag and delivered a passionate condemnation of the assassins, culminating with the phrase: “There is no doubt, the enemy stands on the Right!” “Der Feind steht rechts!”
Surveying our current climate, pondering both the differences and the similarities in our present situation to the Weimar Republic, listening to haters, some in high places — looking at you, Elizabeth Warren — one can’t help but conclude that, as we look to a new political era in 2025, the enemies of our constitutional republic stand, not “rechts,” but “links.” They stand on the left, and those of us who love this country must stand against them.
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James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions and on Kindle Unlimited.
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