Weimar America, Revisited

Summary

Podcast Summary: History As It Happens

Episode: Weimar America, Revisited
Host: Martin Di Caro
Guest: David Abraham (Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Miami; Author, The Collapse of the Weimar Political Economy in Crisis)
Date: September 19, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Martin Di Caro and historian David Abraham examine the oft-invoked comparison between contemporary American democracy and Germany’s Weimar Republic, which collapsed amidst polarization, political violence, and the eventual Nazi takeover. Together, they probe both the utility and the limits of this analogy, considering the causes, characteristics, and consequences of democratic erosion, past and present. The discussion moves from Weimar’s historical context to modern American politics, culture wars, populism, the role of political violence, and the evolving definition and relevance of “fascism.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Weimar Analogy: Why the Comparison, and Where It Breaks Down

• Emergence of the Analogy: Many Americans see echoes of Weimar Germany’s collapse in the country’s current hyperpolarization and democratic backsliding.
  • “These were some of the causes of the collapse of the Weimar Republic... Some Americans today feel their country is on a similar path, or at least share scary similarities with that dark chapter in German history.” (Martin Di Caro, 01:40)
• Checklist Approach to Fascism: Abraham notes some academic attempts to catalog fascist attributes for comparison but cautions against simplistic analogies.
  • “Fascism is not the best description of the current moment, because sometimes two differences might make a whole lot more difference than a dozen similarities.” (David Abraham, 16:06)
• Rise of Executive Power: Parallels are drawn between Weimar’s emergency decrees (Article 48) and contemporary efforts to consolidate presidential control in the US.
  • “The rise of the executive...the Trump administration effort to create a unitary executive... That's one important similarity.” (Abraham, 16:54)

Factors of Stability and Collapse in Weimar and America

• Weimar’s Mixed Foundations: The republic had periods of apparent stability—growing exports, improved wages, and a legal tradition—not just constant crisis.
  • “There was stability in several ways, at several levels. The German economy...was not so dire. Wages had by the late 20s exceeded the pre-war level.” (Abraham, 21:45)
• Legitimacy Crisis: Both Weimar Germany and the US have struggled with public trust, legitimacy, and polarization.
  • “There was a legitimacy crisis. But... we've had shocks in this country... Trust in institutions, legitimacy is at a low point right now.” (Di Caro, 24:25)
• Comparative Political Traditions:
  • Weimar Germany did possess a legal and constitutional tradition, despite lacking long-standing liberal democracy. (Abraham, 19:23)
  • The US is more unused to legitimate political instability—its postwar dominance bred complacency, now unraveling. (Abraham, 24:25)

Political Violence: Then and Now

• Weimar's Lethal Politics:
  • “The Weimar Republic was a very violent place...There were assassinations early in the Weimar period. The victims...were primarily...in the middle.” (Abraham, 33:25)
  • “At the end of the 20s...the radicalization and hollowing out of the middle...took place.” (Abraham, 34:11)
• Contemporary Parallels and Differences:
  • The US lacks regular paramilitary street violence but recent events, like federal agents in unmarked gear and the January 6 riot, hint at dangerous trends.
  • “We don't have paramilitaries running around today, but we do have ICE agents without identification...wearing masks, taking people off the streets.” (Di Caro, 34:41)
  • “That is not the rule of law. That is a frightening thing.” (Abraham, 37:16)

Role of Elites, Institutions, and the Hollowing of the Political Middle

• Party Shifts and Polarization: Weimar’s multi-party center collapsed, squeezed by extremes; the US two-party system now sees diminishing cross-party moderation and institutional loyalty.
  • “There are fewer conservative Democrats and almost no liberal Republicans anymore.” (Di Caro, 27:36)
  • Abraham stresses the GOP has radicalized, but the Democrats haven't moved comparably leftward. (26:50)
• Who’s to Blame?: Trump as both symptom and cause:
  • “The 2016 Trump surprise victory was a function of no one having paid attention, no leaders having paid attention to those problems.” (Abraham, 29:18)
  • Economic dislocation and cultural insecurity (trade, immigration, COVID) provided fertile ground for populist backlash.

The Mechanics of Democratic Breakdown

• Weimar’s Collapse and Executive Power:
  • “German leadership were not trying to preserve democracy...chancellors...ruling by emergency decree.” (Di Caro, 43:55)
  • Use of the “state of exception” and emergency powers to circumvent or paralyze democratic checks—“Sovereign is he who declares the state of exception... Trump is sovereign when he can say that there is a drug war... de facto declarations of a state of emergency.” (Abraham, 45:03)
• Judiciary as Bulwark (or Not):
  • Weimar’s higher courts largely pre-1919 monarchists; in modern US, tension between district courts upholding rights and a Supreme Court favoring executive power.
  • “District courts seem to be upholding the rule of law, and the Supreme Court seems to be upholding the President's powers.” (Abraham, 46:39)

Is Trumpism Fascism? Definitions and Boundaries

• Debating the F-Word:
  • Abraham resists the label “fascist” for Trumpism, arguing that classical fascism arose as a reaction to a revolutionary left, which America hasn’t had.
    • “The core of fascism is the merger of conservative and right-wing groups with a mass populist movement.” (Abraham, 49:39)
  • Project 2025 and similar current right-wing projects are “just hardcore conservative,” but sometimes employ fascist-style behaviors around power and adversaries. (Abraham, 48:33)
• National Rebirth? (Palingenesis):
  • Roger Griffin’s theory: Fascism as an ideology of rebirth. Abraham contends this is absent in Trumpism—MAGA invokes nostalgia, not forward-looking transformation.
    • “Fascism had a modernism to it that Maga and Trump don’t have...This is making America great again. It’s a nostalgia.” (Abraham, 50:54)
• Is Fascism Historical or Perpetual?
  • Abraham sees fascism as historically contingent: a product of interwar Europe’s traumas.
  • “For a long time...fascism [was] part of the reaction to the Soviet Revolution... I would reserve the term for right wing and populist merger that takes place in the aftermath of an attempted left wing advance. And we did not have that left wing advance in the United States.” (Abraham, 52:02)

Understanding the Present Moment and Historical Responsibility

• Erosion of Norms & Totalizing Politics:
  • “What really concerns me...people looking at their fellow Americans as enemies and how politics has become totalizing. Everything is looked at through a political lens. That is not healthy for people as individuals and it is not healthy for our society.” (Di Caro, 54:44)
  • “What we thought of as the American way of life, where you get along with your neighbors...is not the norm historically.” (Abraham, 55:27)
• Lessons from Weimar:
  • Majoritarian systems and two-party stability are not guaranteed.
  • The collapse of democracy requires the withdrawal of belief and participation from moderate forces, leaving it vulnerable to extremists.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Analogy Limits:

  • “Sometimes two differences might make a whole lot more difference than a dozen similarities.” (David Abraham, 16:06)

• On Executive Overreach:

  • “Sovereign is he who declares the state of exception. So Trump is sovereign when he can say that there is a drug war. So I’m going to bomb boats in the ocean or deport all these people because it’s an invasion.” (Abraham, 45:00)

• On Political Violence:

  • “That is not the rule of law. That is a frightening thing.” (Abraham, referring to masked, unmarked federal agents, 37:16)

• On the Core of Fascism:

  • “The core of fascism is the merger of conservative and right-wing groups with a mass populist movement.” (Abraham, 49:39)

• On Trumpism & Nostalgia:

  • “This is making America great again... it’s a nostalgia. When you hear Maga... the individual listening can project whatever they want onto that idea when America was great again in your own mind.” (Abraham & Di Caro, 51:32-51:34)

• On Modern Totalized Politics:

  • “Everything is looked at through a political lens. That is not healthy...it is no surprise that there is violence, and not just violence, but people shrugging their shoulders or celebrating the violence.” (Di Caro, 54:44)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:40] – Introduction of the Weimar analogy and present concerns
• [10:46] – Abraham’s academic background; initial Marxist perspective on Weimar
• [16:06] – Key differences between US and Weimar; rise of the executive; checklist approach to fascism
• [21:45] – The relative stability and strengths of Weimar Germany in the 1920s
• [24:25] – Legitimacy, shocks, and trust crisis in US and Weimar
• [33:25] – Political violence and hollowing of the political middle in Weimar
• [34:41] – Paramilitaries, ICE, and “rule of law” in the US
• [43:55] – Weimar chancellors ruling by emergency decree, presidential power parallels
• [46:39] – Judiciaries, legal traditions, and threat to rule of law
• [49:39] – Defining fascism, merger of mass movement and conservative elites
• [51:32] – “Making America Great Again” as nostalgia, not modernist rebirth
• [54:44] – Dangers of totalizing politics and erosion of social bonds
• [55:27] – Historical norm: living among the like-minded, loss of American “luxury” of political coexistence

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Conclusion

This episode provides a nuanced and historically grounded discussion of the Weimar–America analogy, warning against oversimplified comparisons while highlighting real dangers in the erosion of democratic culture, legitimacy, and institutions. Professor David Abraham unravels both the structural and contingent causes behind democratic collapse, probes fascism’s historical meaning and modern misuses, and assesses the state of America’s political fracture in 2025. The conversation ends on a sobering note: loss of shared civic life and mutual trust signal not imminent fascism, but a profound and worrisome shift in American democracy.

Transcript

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[Martin Dicaro]

Her story History AS IT HAPPENS September 19, 2025 Weimar America Revisited.

[Political Commentator]

We will never be able to solve.

[David Abraham]

All the other problems, including the violence.

[Political Commentator]

Problems that people are worried about if we can't have a clash of ideas safely. People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.

[David Abraham]

Violence which affects so many different people of so many different political persuasions is an affliction of America. Let's have trial by comb. They were peaceful people. These were great people. The crowd was unbelievable. And I mentioned the word love. The love, the love in the air. I've never seen anything like it.

[Martin Dicaro]

Hyperpolarization, political violence, right wing elites dedicated to destroying democracy. These were some of the causes of the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The final nail in the coffin coming in January 1933 with the rise of Hitler. Some Americans today feel their country is on a similar path, or at least share scary similarities with that dark chapter in German history. Does the comparison work? That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin Dicaro.

[David Abraham]

The Rise of the Executive Whether government by Emergency Decree Article 48 in Weimar Germany, 1930 and after the Trump administration effort to create a unitary executive where the entire executive branch is under the president's direct control. You can see that in his efforts to not just fire people, but to bring to heel, you know, the Justice Department, as he likes to say, is his legal staff. It's not an independent entity.

[Martin Dicaro]

What a couple of weeks. What a year. What a trying decade it's been in America. Our situation seems so dire right now. A corrupt and lawless administration led by a man who once incited a mob to attack Congress, the cratering of public confidence in institutions including mine, the news media, hyperpolarization, demonization of the other, such as immigrants who are kidnapped off the streets and from their jobs by masked federal agents and political violence. The Cato Institute published data on 620 politically motivated murders since 1975, excluding the 3,000 deaths on 9 11. Of those 620 murders, 391 were committed by people on the right, 65 on the left. And today we know that political violence remains a problem across the political spectrum, no matter the statistics, it affects all of us. Yet here is Vice President J.D. vance on Charlie Kirk's podcast, days after the political activist was murdered in Utah.

[Political Commentator]

This is not a both sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem. And that is the truth we must be told.

[Martin Dicaro]

So our situation seems so dire, our leaders so divisive, that the Collapse of the Weimar Republic, post war Germany's brief experiment in democracy without Democrats is often invoked by Americans looking to history to help them understand what is happening right now. The Weimar Republic, whose agonizing death happened gradually from about 1930, then suddenly after Adolf Hitler was levered into power in January 1933. Is this the right place to look? You heard me introduce this episode as Weimar Revisited, and that is because in January 2022 I did an episode with the same title with historian Christopher Browning, who argued then that Republicans loyal to Donald Trump were attacking the legitimacy of American elections in 1933. Germany's conservative and nationalist elites, who had been eviscerating Weimar democracy during a time of severe political paralysis, ultimately welcomed Adolf Hitler into their ranks in an attempt to control him while burying the hated parliamentary democracy. So again, what can we learn from this analogy? In what ways does the comparison fail? David Abraham is Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Miami School of Law. He is a specialist in European history, history and political economy, and has studied interwar Germany for decades. He is the author of the Collapse of the Weimar Political Economy in Crisis. Our conversation next. But hey, you know, there is a way for you to skip ads and get access to bonus content and the entire catalog of 500 episodes. Go to historyasithappens.com and subscribe. For $5 a month, you can support this podcast. That's historyasithappens.com let's explore the events that.

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[Martin Dicaro]

Welcome to the podcast.

[David Abraham]

Thank you very much.

[Martin Dicaro]

This is your very first time on the show, so tell us a little bit about your scholarship on this issue. The Collapse of the Weimar Republic happens to be the title of your first book on the subject some 40 years ago.

[David Abraham]

Yes. So as a graduate student and the son of Holocaust survivors, I had a particular interest in Nazism, how it came into power in Germany, not to mention all of the tragedies that it caused. Curiously, looked at from today, what is today called Holocaust studies, genocide studies did not exist at the time. So what one did, or what I did, was study German history, modern German history. And I did so at a time of what we subsequently called Neo Marxist social theory was on the ascendant in the mid-70s in particular, New Left Review, New Verso Publishers, the rediscovery of Antonio Gramsci and the entire interwar Marxist tradition were suddenly back on the graduate school syllabi. In that environment, I decided I needed to study not so much the horrors which a lot of people had already engaged with, but with the foundations of stability and the erosion of stability in democracies, liberal democracy, constitutional democracies that are at the same time capitalist regimes. Stability is acquired through compromise and interaction amongst different social classes.

[Martin Dicaro]

So at first you took a Marxist lens, correct me if I'm wrong, a Marxist lens to your study that fascism in Germany was what, a tool of capital or part of a coming war between. Well, I'll let you pick it up from there.

[David Abraham]

That's a little simple. I mean, there was a popular thread of radical I wouldn't call it Marxist because it's not structurally analytical, but there was a popular thread on the left that the German elites, big business, banks, others, wanted the Nazis and so they gave them large sums of money and arranged for them to walk in the door and take over. Not that simple. The Weimar Republic was a constitutional liberal multi party regime with advanced social welfare state advanced for its time. It emerged, however, in the aftermath of very costly World War I, lots of deaths, lots of very unhappy veterans. So it was a period that was both promising and frail or fragile. I wanted to understand through Essentially, but not exclusively, a Marxist lens, a Marxist perspective. How a system like that could be stable as it was for a dozen years and then collapse and open the door to the disaster that followed.

[Martin Dicaro]

We'll get into just how stable the Weimar Republic was. But I am interested in your remark about the nature or the origins of Holocaust or genocide studies. I'm not a historian, but I have read quite a bit about this subject and the historiography as well. And I did find it fascinating how it took decades for this field of study to blossom really in Germany first. Right. When the German public finally came around to seeing the enormity of the Holocaust and the full intent, the full scale of the Holocaust. Right.

[David Abraham]

Well, it was many, many decades. I mean, to begin with, Germans, by and large after World War II, considered themselves the victims, the victims of ruthless Soviet barbaric warfare. All of that in quotation marks, of course, as well as a British vengeance that led to firebombing Dresden and, and things like that. So the Germans considered themselves the victims. And because of American and other interests in containing the Soviet Union, we were quite happy to quickly reintegrate West Germany into what became the NATO alliance. And that gave them West Germans in particular, further opportunity to bury or ignore their own past. And it really took many decades, beginning in 1968 with the student rebellions of 1968, but really, I would say into the 80s before that kind of serious confrontation with the past took place. At the same time in East Germany, the regime there, the communist government there, thought that by defeating fascism they had kind of washed their hands of the past. And so they didn't have to deal with it either, and didn't really for decades.

[Martin Dicaro]

And under Soviet ideology, no victim group was supposed to be singled out as special. Right.

[David Abraham]

That is also true that the class nature of society. So there was a category in East German analysis of Jewish anti fascist victims and. But it was their opposition to Nazism which defined them as foes and victims of the regime, not their ethnic or religious identity.

[Martin Dicaro]

All right, so let's dive into this comparison now. The collapse of the Weimar Republic. It is fresh in many people's minds because of the hyper polarization of American society today, the assault on our democratic values and norms. Some people feeling we're in the twilight of American democracy and the political violence in our country. The latest incident, the horrifying murder in broad daylight of Charlie Kirk learning new.

[David Abraham]

Details about the suspected killer. His family members say he recently became more politically active.

[Martin Dicaro]

Authorities have released a new footage of the suspect in the Moments after the shooting, you can see him jumping down from the roof.

[David Abraham]

We are now in a watershed moment for what I call the era of violent populism in America.

[Martin Dicaro]

Channel all of the anger the we.

[David Abraham]

Have over the organized campaign that led.

[Martin Dicaro]

To this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. You know, David, I have spent a lot of time on my show over the past four and a half years trying to steer people away from rummaging around the 1930s for answers to our current dilemmas, because there are a lot of problems with these comparisons. But I still like to deal with comparisons and analogies anyway, because we can show where the holes are and then say, okay, this is what you shouldn't learn from this. At the same time, we must always learn about the Third Reich. There is much to still learn to this day. So let's start at 30,000ft. I'll stop talking and let you, the expert, take it away here. What are the problems with this comparison? America 2025 and the Weimar Republic, to.

[David Abraham]

Begin with, no two cases are ever identical. There are qualities of a government, of a regime, and one can compare those qualities. So certainly during the first Trump administration and at the start of this one, serious people, serious scholars, took kind of checklist approach. Here are a dozen or so attributes of fascist regimes based primarily on Italian fascist and German Nazi experience. Here's where we are today. What is similar, what is different? That's one approach to it. But at some point, in my own view, fascism is not the best description of the current moment, because sometimes two differences might make a whole lot more difference than a dozen similarities. Beginning, for example, with something that's very important today and was very important at the end of Weimar, too, the rise of the executive, whether government by Emergency Decree, Article 48 in Weimar Germany, 1930, and after the Trump administration effort to create a unitary executive where the entire executive branch is under the president's direct control. You can see that in his efforts to not just fire people, but to bring to heel, you know, the Justice Department, as he likes to say, is his legal staff. It's not an independent entity. So there's the attempt to bring the entire executive branch of government under the Chancellor or the president's hold. Then there is the effort to make the parliament or the Congress subservient to the executive, where we're seeing that. I mean, the Republican Party has just rolled over and played dead. They decided, I guess, after losing twice with genteel conservatives, they had no future unless they had some kind of charismatic, tough Guy and Trump is that person. So the Republicans in Congress have completely abandoned any independent politics. So you have that important similarity. You have an attack on the judiciary, then you add an atmosphere of political violence which you just referred to.

[Martin Dicaro]

Yeah, I really want to dig into the violence aspect because the Weimar Republic was a, a very violent place, more so at certain times than others. It had a period of relative stability. One aspect of this or one piece of the analogy that is compelling to people. You know, it starts with a question, how does a democracy die? How does a democracy actually collapse? So people looking at how the Weimar Republic fell to pieces, which was not a long lived democracy, it happened in a country that did not have a liberal democratic tradition. And they're comparing that to our situation today. If, for instance, American democracy is hollowed out from within, if we have say in our country conservative elites who welcome into their coalition a bohemian corporal who they underestimated, it proved impossible to control Donald Trump. Now, I'm not comparing the two men, of course, just the two situations. Why don't you pick it up from there?

[David Abraham]

Okay, so let's start with a couple of major differences. I think it's not quite fair to say that Germany had no liberal tradition before the Weimar Republic. It had a very legal, constitutional, legal regime. It had what we would call due process. Rule of law was very important even in imperial Germany. So it's not as if they were starting from zero in 1919.

[Martin Dicaro]

That's a good point.

[David Abraham]

But it is true that there was an extremely costly war. There were millions of fatalities in that war, returning veterans who had very little. And then in the inflation that followed the war to 1923, lost what little they had. Those of us who are not young anymore will remember that after Vietnam there were large numbers of damaged. I use that term for its psychological as well as its physical meaning. Veterans and the United States people who had been in Vietnam and came back demoralized, broken, angry. But that pales in comparison to the post World War I situation. In addition, the victors in World War I demanded a lot from Germany in the way of reparations. It was a tough go. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, Germany had the world's largest and most significant social democratic party, very strong trade union movements, liberal, legal and constitutional folks design the Weimar Constitution. Even though it was paying all these reparations, it did receive very large sums of loan money from the United States, which quickly, quickly rebuilt German industry. The losses in the war subsequently became part of a modernization effort. So I don't think one should buy the image of The Weimar Republic as a kind of half dead duck waiting for the second half of death to set in.

[Martin Dicaro]

I think you're right. You know, Zara Steiner made this point in one of her two volumes on the interwar European period there that at some point in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, if you had said to somebody all this is going to be gone in a few years, they would not have believed you actually. Because there was some stability there.

[David Abraham]

Yes, I think that's important. There was stability in several ways, at several levels. First, the German economy, which has always been one of the most export based economies in the industrial world. A third of everything Germany produced in the interwar years was exported. Germany's share of world exports actually increased throughout the decade. So the economy was not so dire. Wages had by the late 20s exceeded the pre war level. There were positive signs. On the other hand, there were also some strong warning indicators. Politically, what in the trade are called bourgeois parties or middle class parties, ranging from moderately liberal to harshly nationalist and conservative, were not able to build ongoing loyalty and win elections regularly. There was nothing like the two party consensus that described American politics from at least the progressive period at the start of the 20th century until quite recently. So there was indeed the lack of experience in a multi party system with stable coalition building. There was not the overall ideological consensus that describes the United States.

[Martin Dicaro]

And there was a legitimacy problem. Even during the so called golden years of the Weimar Republic, it still lacked legitimacy in the eyes of many people. And not only the so called front fighters or the following generation who were angry about German defeat in World War I, who actually didn't fight in the war. In some ways it was even worse for them from a psychological standpoint, which is interesting. Maybe the front fighters weren't so keen on going back to war after experiencing the trenches. It was the second generation who hadn't experienced the war that were just as militant, if not more. Not to digress about that.

[David Abraham]

You're right about that.

[Martin Dicaro]

Yeah. So there was a legitimacy crisis. But you know, again, not to overdraw the comparison, we've had our shocks in this country. Not something like the first World War in Germany, the defeat and then the hyperinflation of the 1920s. But we have had the so called forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the abandonment, real or perceived, of a whole generation of veterans who are struggling now. Right. We've had multiple economic crises, the crash of 08 and we had the COVID one. We've had an opioid epidemic and for a lot of reasons we can't get into here. Some of it is social media, some of it is just long running trends in American society. Trust in institutions, legitimacy is at a low point right now.

[David Abraham]

Well, I would agree. I would also point out that we're not used to them. Right. So France is in its Fifth Republic, right? It had three post World War II political constitutional arrangements. Even during the 30 glorious boom years that the French always talk about. Italy has had who knows how many governments in the last half century. The United States is not used to that. Since World War II, the United States is the dominant force around the world. We did not have problems, right? We had the luxury of considering inherited problems like the exclusion of 10%, namely African Americans from most of society. And for much of politics, it took 20 years after World war war ii, but we were able to begin to address it. So that in many respects you can only talk about the United States as a liberal democracy since the civil rights and voting rights acts of the mid-60s, which now are slowly being repealed. And people actually talk about. You mentioned the late Charlie Kirk. You know, he, he said that this 1964 Civil Rights act was a mistake. We have seen in the last few years attitudes toward the settlement that marked America's period of greatest greatness. We're seeing the erosion of that. I mean, there are people in the republican party, but not only there, who never fully accepted FDR and the social welfare state, social safety net. Some parts of the American economic elite and the Republican party are into trumpism for that. It's hard to compare the communist revolutions, attempted revolutions of 1918, 1919 with DEI and feminism. But you have people on the right in the United States today who treat it as if it was a threat to the very being of the republic. So you see some of these same impulses, but in the case of the United States, we have, as you said earlier, we, we've had a long running stable two party system at the same time that we were the most dominant country in the world. And so it seemed easy.

[Martin Dicaro]

And there's been a hollowing out in the middle in our country. Now we still have the two party system, but within each party they've been hollowed out. And the extremes are.

[David Abraham]

Let me object to, I object to that. I don't think the democratic party is in any way extreme. You know, Europeans say the United States is the two most conservative, conservative large parties in the world, the Republicans and the Democrats, you know, both of whom are well to the right of your average European Christian democratic or social democratic party when it comes to domestic economic and welfare issues. I don't think that's right about radicalization. The Republican Party has certainly radicalized, even compared to the Nixon years, let alone the Eisenhower. But the Democrats haven't radicalized. They rejected McGovern in the mid-60s. They rejected Bernie Sanders 10 years ago.

[Martin Dicaro]

I should amend my statement. What I was trying to say, and this is probably a more precise term, is that the center has given way in the United States, that there are fewer conservative Democrats and almost no liberal Republicans anymore. But I do agree. I think what happens is that people, especially people who spend too much time online, conflate the fringes of the far left with the mainstream Democratic Party. I don't think the Republican Party is a normal political party anymore. I think the Trump administration is, as you were saying, anti liberal. They don't give a hoot about free speech. We can see that this week when they're talking about cracking down on liberal groups that are supposedly fomenting terrorism and are somehow responsible for what happened to.

[Political Commentator]

Charlie Kirk, this festival festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream. A lot of people are very worried about how we got here in the first place. And you have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and J.D. vance, they're gonna go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no. We're gonna go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.

[Martin Dicaro]

Maybe a point that's important here to make, that's relevant to this discussion is in the Weimar Republic, which was not a two party system and multiple parties, it was the parties, plural in the center, that lost ground to the far left and the far right. So some people today say, or ask, is the Trump administration, the Trump movement, a symptom or a cause of our problems? And I would say both. A lot of disillusioned Americans gave him their vote in 2016 because they were fed up with the establishment. But in his second term, I think he is definitely a causal mover, if you will, driving our country in a more illiberal direction.

[David Abraham]

I think you're absolutely right on both facets of that point. If you look back at the 2016 elections, and actually, if you start looking already during the later years of the Obama presidency, there was no articulated defense of the American working class whose factories had shut, people who were making a union wage making things, but whose children were working at Walmart or trying to get some kind of computer job. There was a definite decline in standard of living and in standard of security. And the security part is important because it brings us to the immigration question, too. The sense of a loss of control. Loss of control over work, loss of control over affordability. And then with COVID of course, loss of control over health and personal choice and things like that. You had Trump and Sanders, but not Hillary Clinton, both saying things like nafta, the loss of jobs to Mexico, the loss of jobs to China, rich getting richer, the working class getting poorer. The Democratic Party had shifted. We see it now. It seems obvious at the time, the Clinton faction within the Democratic Party was denying it. You know, they were talking about, you know, lifting the glass ceiling for professional women and things like that. At the same time that the massive portions of the American working class were not doing well and they ignored it. You know, Hillary Clinton never campaigned in Wisconsin. It's quite astounding. Not only did I oppose nafta, I stood on picket lines with workers in opposition to this disastrous trade agreement. Secretary Clinton supported NAFTA instead of creating jobs. NAFTA cost those jobs 850,000 jobs, including over 26,000 jobs here in Pennsylvania. So there were things festering that started with the crisis that Obama inherited, but got worse and worse. So, yes, you're right. The 2016 Trump surprise victory was a function of no one having paid attention, no leaders having paid attention to those problems. And now historians do two things. They look at long term structural transformations, and they look at what happened between 6am and 6pm on a given day. And, you know, they don't always overlap nicely. You know, you can attribute Harris's defeat to the clumsiness of the Democratic Party, to hiding Biden's health issues, to her own unpreparedness. The macro analysis is what then unfolds. You have the rise of these libertarian gazillionaires who somehow make an alliance with people who think that transgender college swimmers are destroying their lives. They got a hold of the rudder and they're now steering the ship.

[Martin Dicaro]

Yeah, there are these issues or culture war controversies out there. They're not phantoms. And there are some problems with how some Democrats or liberal activists talk about these things. But, yeah, they're not the existential problems they're often made out to be. They're often distractions, in my view. But, you know, about my point about the hollowing out of the middle in the United States, in society, away from the parties. What we're seeing now, and this is probably reflected more online, each side sees the other as an existential threat to our country. And that's not new in American history, by the way.

[David Abraham]

Right.

[Martin Dicaro]

And we saw that during the Weimar years when the brown shirts were clashing with left wing paramilitaries and the streets. The Weimar Republic was a very violent place. Right? Not just the street crime. There were assassinations.

[David Abraham]

Right, There were assassinations early in the Weimar period. The victims were primarily, I mean, leaving aside the street fighting, but the prominent people who were assassinated were in the middle. Walter Ratanow, for example, who was one of the major industrialists who was able to, to keep business interest in the fold, partly for the sake of Germany's foreign policy interests, but he was able to keep them in the fold at the very beginning of the Republic. Of course, there's the major murder of Leibknecht and Luxembourg and a part of the repression of the communists. You know, whether there would have been a Russian, Soviet style revolution or not, from looking at it from standpoint, in 1918, by 1920, that was clearly not going to happen anymore. That was over and people voted, by which I mean both voters and interest organizations of business and of labor moved toward the middle for a while. Then at the end of the 20s, beginning, let's say in 1930, that the radicalization and hollowing out of the middle that you describe took place and got worse in the case of the United States.

[Martin Dicaro]

And we don't have paramilitaries running around today, but we do have ICE agents without identification, whoever they are, federal agents wearing masks, taking people off the streets.

[David Abraham]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, those who do think that we are entering a fascist form of governance in the United States point to things like that. Let me go back one step and then come back to what you just said. The example of DEI and transgender issues may seem purely cultural, but there's larger versions of that which we see in the immigration arena, namely, oh, all you liberals talk about human rights and people from Guatemala and in the case of Europe, people from Afghanistan and Syria, you know, have just as much right to try and improve their lives in Ohio, let's say randomly, as anybody else. And so borders should be soft and open. But that's a material thing as well, right? I mean, that is a way of saying that, you know, if you can't control your own borders, you don't have a country. That contention makes sense to a lot of people losing the ability to decide who out there who is not one of us might be allowed to come in and become one of us. That's central to the idea of sovereignty. And I think the Democrats not that they were radical or move to the left in any way. I think they just missed that. And at the same time that they missed it, it was useful to keeping labor costs down in the country. That's not a culture war issue. That's deeper than that.

[Martin Dicaro]

Let's go back to the paramilitary violence in the Village Republic. We're not really seeing that in the United States today. I mean, every once in a while you'll see an antifa video, video pop up here or there. We did have January 6, 2021, but I don't know. Yeah, so I mean, I'm not trying to make light of our problems now, but the brown Shirts, at one point the ss, they were banned from public demonstrations. And then there was a deal struck with Hitler, I think this is in 1932, that if you agree to go along, the result of the next election will lift the ban on the brownshirts. This was the late Weimar chancellorships. Well, Hitler never went along with the results of the election, but the ban was lifted anyway. So that was one instance where it looked like the Weimar Republic was trying to save itself. David but for the most part, the right wing paramilitaries, the government looked the other way, didn't it?

[David Abraham]

Well, as the supposed center of the former center moved to the right and the Social Democrats remained strong, the workers movement remained strong. And to be able to defeat them, to be able to change the rules of the game to the advantage of big business interests and other interests, required finding a base of mass support. And the Nazis were able to aggregate, put together a base of mass support which then could provide the mass support that the Social Democrats and workers groups had provided during better days. The violence that you referred to, you know, parties had militias. The word militia you hear a lot in the United States. We don't see any really big militias, but you do see certain things and you put your finger on one of them. I mean, the ice pulling people off the street, having officers of the law who, who do not identify themselves, who drive unmarked vehicles, wear no identification, cover their faces. I mean, this is not the rule of law. You know, I mean, they may say, oh well, this is what the attorney general has told us to do. But that is not the rule of law. That is a frightening thing.

[Martin Dicaro]

So I have the first book I always reach for whenever I do anything about the origins of the Third Reich, and that is Richard J. Evans. Superb, The Coming of the Third Reich. I have his conclusion open here. He said, the legacy of World War I included political violence on a massive and destructive scale in Germany and helped persuade many nonviolent and respectable people to tolerate it to a degree that would have been unthinkable in an effectively functioning parliamentary democracy. Evans goes on to say a number of key factors, however, stand out from all the rest and factors in the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The first is the effect of the Depression. The Great Depression, which he says radicalized the electorate, destroyed or deeply damaged the more moderate parties and polarized the political system between the Marxist parties and the bourgeois groups, all of which move rapidly towards the right. It's hard to picture Adolf Hitler getting into power without the Great Depression.

[David Abraham]

No, it's not a straight one to one sure cause and effect. It is true that the obstinacy, the determination of the Social Democratic Party, which remained the largest party in Germany for the period where there were free elections, they refused to sacrifice. Amongst the most fascinating things that I read in my research were the debates inside the Social Democratic Party and the trade union movement 1931, 32 into 33. And maybe it was stupid, maybe it was politically disastrous, but they refused to sacrifice the gains that they had made on behalf of working class Germans, working class people, trade union members as the depression got worse. So to the extent that they were in the parliament, they managed to continue funding unemployment insurance, for example, at a time when, when the government was broke. They managed to continue health insurance at a time when there was no money for it. They would not give up the gains that they had made in order to keep allies in the Catholic Party and in the People's Party, German People's Party, with whom they had been allied in better days. That obstinacy contributed to the center right moving further to the right. I've looked at the archives of most of the major industrial and economic organizations in Germany in the Weimar years. They were never pro social democracy, of course not. But the turn against the Weimar system itself was something they undertook because this onerous welfare system was sitting on the pillars of a liberal democracy. And to get rid of that social welfare system, they realized they had to get rid of the liberal democracy. And they couldn't get rid of a popular electoral democracy without an electoral majority. And that's where the alliance with the Nazis matures in 1932.

[Martin Dicaro]

That's right. We have to remember that no party was capable of getting a 50, 50% majority in the Reichstag. It would have been impossible given everything that was going on in the number of parties in the country. The Germans, the Nazis, I should say the Nazis got about 37% in the July 32elections. That was their high watermark. Right?

[David Abraham]

That was their high water mark. Then they fell back down. And the Social Democrats, you know, were in the mid 30 percentage range. And the communists too, of course, that's a whole different, different issue, the inability of socialists and communists to work together. But, you know, add another 15% and together, as we saw in France during the Popular Front, if all of the anti fascist people get together, they will have a majority. That's what happened in France, at least. It worked for a few years and then fell apart. And then the war started. But in Germany, the bitterness of the right toward the left, the movement, as you just quoted from Evans of the center right, further and further to the right until the obvious partners became the Nazis. And the first thing they did is crush the left. This is a concern of many who look at President Trump's denunciations of left wing groups and left wing parties and how they need to be banned, crushed, defunded, whatever.

[Martin Dicaro]

So to my earlier question, really the question that is the framing of, for this conversation, how does a democracy die? And can we learn anything about the collapse of the Weimar Republic? The people who welcomed Hitler into their coalition In January of 1933, they obviously were not interested in preserving democracy, a parliamentary democracy. Now, that might sound obvious, but we have to acknowledge that for at least three years, German leadership were not trying to preserve democracy, including Reich President Paul von Hindenburg himself. Himself, he dismissed three chancellors in seven months. There was political paralysis that had to be broken. They were trying to figure out a way to end the paralysis in the country to do away with Weimar democracy. Not to save it. Not to save it.

[David Abraham]

Their defense after 1945 of people like Popp and Bruning was that they were trying to save. Radical surgery, presidential decrees, extreme executive power, in order to preserve, of course, they called it the country, not the regime or the system, but to preserve the country.

[Martin Dicaro]

That's not what they said at the time. Papen said we'd have Hitler in a corner squealing in no time. But all these chancellors from 1930 on, beginning with von Bruning, they were ruling by emergency decree.

[David Abraham]

Yes. Which is our president said he would like to do, or would do, depending on what quotation is you dig up.

[Martin Dicaro]

Yeah. So here is the parallel or non parallel. We don't have emergency decrees in our country, but we do have executive orders and an attitude and actions, a mindset and their behavior. The Trump administration is trying to govern like they don't have to answer to Anyone?

[David Abraham]

Yes. Well, let me go back half a step in what you said. They do argue for state of exception, right? Emergency decrees.

[Martin Dicaro]

That's right.

[David Abraham]

They're always the National Guard.

[Martin Dicaro]

Everything's an emergency. Yeah.

[David Abraham]

Los Angeles, Washington. The famous right wing and Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmidt defines sovereignty as the power that declares the state of exception. So sovereign is he who declares the state of exception. So Trump is sovereign when he can say that there is a drug war. So I'm going to bomb boats in the ocean or deport all these people because it's an invasion. Right. The drug problem is an invasion. These are in effect, declarations of a state of emergency. That is what is hovering now around the calls after Kirk's killing. Somehow there's a massive left wing threat combining crime and lunatic leftist or whatever the phrase of the day is. That's a call for state of exception, which the rule of law gives way to the call for order. And he's the man of order.

[Martin Dicaro]

Yeah. The treatment of immigrants and foreign college students has been a disgrace. It's been illegal, it's been anti constitutional or unconstitutional. And in the United States, we have a court system that we hope will defend against this type of thing, but that's not a guarantee. The Weimar court system, I'm not up on that at the moment, but I do know within six months after taking power, the judiciary under Adolf Hitler from January 1933 was thoroughly Nazified. We did have a rule of law society that was no longer a rule of law society in a short amount of time.

[David Abraham]

Right. So there is some similarity here as well. The upper courts in Weimar Germany consisted of people who've been recruited before there was a republic. Monarchists, in other words, and was very, very conservative throughout the 20s and into the 30s, in spite of which they were later purged by a younger cadre of of Nazi judges. The lower judges in the Weimar period were fresh pioneers of republican legality, or what we would in the United States call liberals. That's what we're seeing now. Right. The district courts seem to be upholding the rule of law, and the Supreme Court seems to be upholding the President's powers.

[Martin Dicaro]

Well, they already gave him immunity last year. That was one of the most disgraceful Supreme Court rulings in American history, as Sean Wallens explained on this podcast. So. So we can begin to wrap up here, although on this subject, it's always hard to wrap up. There's so much to get to. But about the fascism stuff. For the longest time now, I've been arguing that Donald Trump is not a fascist based on the definition I happen to subscribe to that is informed historically and based on the conversations I've had on my show. Although I just did have a conversation with another historian who said Trump may not be a fascist himself, he has no ideology. But in this second administration, there are people, and they're not household names, who do subscribe to a set of ideas or behaviors. If you want to use the Paxton route and define fascism more by behavior rather than ideology, whose views and their actions are more than tinged with a fascist or neo fascist outlook around Trump, who are important people in his administration, do you agree with that?

[David Abraham]

Well, I think it's absolutely true that there is no border, no fixed border between what we would call right wing conservative and fascist. So Project 2025 in many respects is just a hardcore conservative project. But it has these elements of domination and control behaviors, as you say, that we see manifested in the approach of the FBI leadership, Justice Department leadership, which is not just conservative. It is an approach to the use of power against identified adversaries. And they're clear about that. They don't even bother to talk about lawbreaking. People in the Justice Department, in the FBI say it's fine to use the Justice Department to go after adversaries, whether there is a legal case against them or not. That's a core violation of rule of law, democracy.

[Martin Dicaro]

Since I have you here, what is David Abraham's definition of fascism?

[David Abraham]

Oh, that's. That's a tough one, particularly since I don't think that the Trump authoritarian regime is fascist. And the reason I don't use that definition is because of the role of war and depression in and above all the growth of the far right out of a defeat of a powerful left right, whether in Italy or in Germany. It all begins with a defeat of far left. And that we haven't seen in the United States. I would say the core, the core of fascism is the merger of conservative and right wing groups with a mass populist movement.

[Martin Dicaro]

How about palingenesis? Roger Griffin makes the argument that fascism is a political ideology, not just a set of behaviors. A political ideology that has at its mythic core the idea of rebirth, national rebirth, almost at an anthropological level, remaking humans, remaking men in a new mold. A rebirth. It's forward looking. It looks to the past, but it also looks ahead.

[David Abraham]

Yeah, so I don't think that's present in either MAGA or Trump. Right. This is making America great again. It has. We haven't discussed this. It has the racist ethno nationalist element that it shares with fascism. But fascism had a modernism to it that Maga and Trump don't have. I mean, Italian, even more than German, you know, is a very modernist. Mussolini was a, you know, look at the architecture, the literature, the arts. Even in Germany as well, there's a modernism there. Airplanes, there's no. There's no modernism in Maga. This is making America great again.

[Martin Dicaro]

It's nebulous.

[David Abraham]

It's a nostalgia.

[Martin Dicaro]

When you hear Maga, whoever you are, the individual listening to that can project whatever they want onto that idea when America was great again in your own mind. I mean, I think that's part of the brilliance of that rhetorical usage by Trump. David, do you believe that fascism is not a perpetual political phenomenon, meaning it really only existed in a certain time and place, under certain conditions in the interwar period of Europe?

[David Abraham]

Well, for a long time, scholars in my field and adjacent fields considered fascism part of the reaction to the Soviet Revolution of 1917 and the World War I. And without the communist threat and without all of the destruction of and death of World War I, there wasn't fascism. There were lots of other bad things, but it wasn't fascism. I would reserve the term for right wing and populist merger that takes place in the aftermath of an attempted left wing advance. And we did not have that left wing advance in the United States. And so I wouldn't use the term fascism, but that's not the most important thing. Yeah, of course. The important thing is what is going on here there. Fascism was both modernist and anti modernist. So for example, on the women question, you know, there was a lot of talk about women as mothers, mothers of the nation, having kids, but there was also a major influx of women into the labor market under, certainly in Germany. Magus so far seems to be more conservative on that, more reactionary on that. You know, people being put in their place. So you can see it with minorities, black people should be quiet or disagreeable. This whole trad wife stuff that I was not paying attention to until very recently, but apparently there are millions of people who are paying attention to this notion that women should go back home.

[Martin Dicaro]

Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated picture. The Weimar period was one of sexual and artistic experimentation. And that really comes out in this fantastic TV show that I've been watching the past few years. Babylon Berlin, Great show. You see that, that liberalism there, so. And it was avant garde as well.

[David Abraham]

Jazz, all of it.

[Martin Dicaro]

Music, gender, sexuality. When the Nazis took over, they were not interested in that kind of Modernism or future looking or experimentation.

[Libsyn Ads Advertiser]

Right.

[Martin Dicaro]

They had a different kind of, of modernist take when it came to art and sexuality and homosexuality. Although Hitler strangely seemed to tolerate his lieutenant's gay lifestyle.

[David Abraham]

There's a kind of homoeroticism in the Trent that they cultivated. But, but you're right, I mean, it was a. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it was a reactionary modernism. Yes, a reactionary modern tools of modernity. And the cause of reaction.

[Martin Dicaro]

I was referring to Ernst Rohm. Hitler knew Ernst Roh was gay and he tolerated it for a while. Final remark here, David Abraham, and thank you for your generosity. Whether America today is similar or not similar to Weimar, we're bad enough where we are and what really concerns me, among many things, people looking at their fellow Americans as enemies and how politics has become totalizing. Everything is looked at through a political lens. That is not healthy for people as individuals and it is not healthy for our society. And it is no surprise that there is violence, and not just violence, but people shrugging their shoulders or celebrating the violence.

[David Abraham]

What we thought of as the American way of life, where you get along with your neighbors and your people at work, whether you share political views with them or not, is not the norm historically. Historically, people live in communities of the like minded, whether that's derived from their social and economic standing. I mean, America is, you know, a pretty segregated country if you look at census data. We don't live amidst people who have different economic and educational backgrounds. We live in very segregated communities if you look at the census data. But in most countries, in most places, people have associated with the like minded. They have not left their politics aside in order to be apolitical members of, of communities. That's a kind of luxury that America enjoyed for a long time. It had something to do with America's dominance in the world. We all benefited from America's standing. You looked at the Congress. The difference between Democrats and Republicans was also minor because we dominated the world. That may be gone. And it may be gone for a while. It may be gone forever. It's certainly gone now.

[Martin Dicaro]

On the next episode of History As It Happens. A UN commission concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, the latest chapter in a murderous campaign against Palestinian society. Yet political elites in the US and Germany, to name two, continue to defend the Jewish state against all criticism. Why? That's next as we report History as it Happens. Make sure you sign up for my free newsletter, go to substack and search for History As It Happens.

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