When all else fails them to explain their failures in majority governance, particularly the drubbing of ObamaCare, Democrats trot out Germany’s pre-Hitler Weimar Republic collapse reasons: the commoners just don’t understand the enlightenment and react from irrational fears, and proportional representation minority parties undermine the better sense of enlightened democrats.
Los Angeles Times’ uberliberal Tim Rutten demurs from saying the US has fully entered its Weimar phase, while saying we’re nearing it.
When people's mistrust of their elected officials and the parties reaches these levels, there is little for political leaders to do but take counsel from their own anger and anxieties -- and, these days, the popular mood fairly seethes with both those things. Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics, yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din.
In one of his magisterial explorations of German politics between the wars, the historian Ian Kershaw mused that "there are times -- they mark the danger point for a political system -- when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing."
It would be reckless not to insist that this country and its politics remain, in crucial ways, far distant from Weimar. It would be rash, though, to pretend that the distance remains as great as it once was.
On the other hand, traditional puckish liberal Mickey Kaus is more on point, our politicians weren’t hamstrung by procedures, they listened and rejected ObamaNonsense.
Needless to remind, but we do not have proportional representation; our Democrats control the White House, have an overwhelming grip on the Congress, and froze out Republicans. Needless to remind, we don’t have large, violent Nazi or Communist parties, nor are our corporate interests pre-WWI royalists. Needless to remind, we’re in recession but hardly bankrupt, paying impoverishing WWI reparations, or suffering the Great Depression.
We do have, instead, defenders of Constitutional protections, economic sense, centrist opposition to transparent corruption, and preference for improvements in individual choice over statist schemes. As Krauthammer notes:
[Democrats, instead,] understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid, and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.
Hardly Weimar, except for those liberals who, themselves, are exposed as opposed to our Republic’s democracy.
Oh, there is this reminder, burning money then and now:
