Two Steps Forward, One Step Back:  Part II: Into the Abyss

By Charlie Barber
Contributing Writer
 
“Widening inequalities, coupled with a growing perception that big business and Wall Street are in cahoots with big government for the purpose of making the rich even richer, gives fodder to demagogues on the extreme right and the extreme left. They gain power by turning the public’s economic anxieties into resentments against particular people and groups. Isolationist and nativist, often racist, and willing to sacrifice overall prosperity for the sake of achieving their ends, such demagogues and the movements they inspire can cause great harm.” - Robert Reich

“Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity.” - Julien Benda

“[Hitler] had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property owning classes   were willing to forgive him almost anything.” - George Orwell

“...modern tyrants all stand above politics and, in doing so, demonstrate that they are all master politicians…They know…that politicians cannot afford to be hated.” - Milton Mayer
 
“...weakness, in its results, can be as devastating as any deliberate villainy.” - Anthony Berkeley  
 
Nazi propaganda of yesteryear has successfully convinced the world today that they “seized” power in 1933, but they did not.

The historical record shows that Hitler maneuvered his way into Germany’s Chancellorship by constitutional means.  In the words of one biographer, Alan Bullock: “Hitler did not seize power; he was jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue.” Only then did Hitler use the police power of government to crush all democratic opposition, and carry out the agenda he had laid out in Mein Kampf in 1924, a document scarcely anyone had taken seriously until it was too late.

The last government committed to democratic ideals, under Chancellor Heinrich Bruening, collapsed in 1932, and was replaced by “The Cabinet of Barons,” under Franz von Papen. That wasn’t enough for the German people. The historical record thus shows that the Nazis were merely filling a power vacuum in 1933 in which democratic government no longer existed as a viable alternative to order and stability.

A “Cabinet of Barons” has not yet occurred in the United States, but in creating a democracy only for a wealthy aristocracy, the Republican Party leaves ordinary people out in the cold, and prey to demagogues who have no use for democratic safeguards.

The August 2 debt ceiling deadline has brought a real crunch. More than two thirds of Americans now realize that in refusing to combine a raise in the debt ceiling with acceptance of President Obama’s suggested budget cuts, Republican and Tea Party Congressmen have put the entire U.S. economy in jeopardy. This jeopardy will extend to the world economies. In fact, damage has already been done to America’s reputation with international bond raters, regardless of any last minute scrambling by House Speaker John Boehner to mask Republican fronting for millionaires.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has done no better. On June 30, 2011, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced S. 1323, a bill to express the sense of the Senate that any deficit reduction agreement should require taxpayers earning at least $1 million per year to make a more meaningful contribution to the deficit reduction effort. McConnell and Senate Republicans, on July 13, made sure that even this mild sense of the Senate could not make it through that body against their filibuster tactics.
 
There are two fundamental forces driving politicians at all times. One is what they choose to believe, and the other is what their constituents want. Politicians often talk out of both sides of their mouths precisely because these two forces are so often in conflict. It is a rare moment when politicians have to choose between openly siding with their fund raisers and ideological partners, or the nation as a whole. This is one of them.

POLITICIANS now have to choose between the needs of their campaign contributors or the needs of ALL their constituents. Republicans,Tea Party advocates, Democrats, are in the limelight until November, 2012. They will seem to be voting in the nation’s interest, or that of a wealthy few. They can’t hide behind campaign slogans, with fiscal wolves at the door, anymore than could the men of Weimar Germany.

In Germany after World War I, middle and working class government was undermined and destroyed by wealthy, arch conservatives, deeply embedded in Weimar’s legislative, executive and judicial branches. Representing themselves as true German “patriots” from 1918 to 1929, these so-called conservatives did everything they could to destroy a government which included minorities [Jews], and sought to make a democratic government effective on behalf of ordinary people.

With the Wall Street Crash of 1929, wealthy reactionaries in Germany got their wish.  They got much more than they’d bargained for. With the Depression, Germans wanted quicker answers for unemployment and Weimar proved helpless as a democracy to provide them.

We now know what Hitler intended, but that was not nearly so clear in the elections that first brought the Nazis to minority power in the 1930 parliamentary [Reichstag] elections. In a 1940 book review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, George Orwell gives us a short sketch of the face of one of history’s most successful manipulators of mass misery and emotion:

“[Hitler’s] is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable   wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that this is how Hitler sees himself…He is the martyr, the victim…the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon…The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.”

While Hitler preached the dawning of a new day, and “respect” for constitutional methods, newly elected Nazis taunted and obstructed elected representatives in the Reichstag, turning parliamentary debate into a raucous and violent circus.
 
In the streets the Nazis terrorized ordinary citizens for political reasons the way that Al Capone terrorized neighborhoods and citizens in Chicago who questioned his approach to meeting market demands for booze, gambling and prostitution.

Weimar Germany thus turned into a constitutional dictatorship under the aging, aristocratic hero of World War I, President Paul von Hindenburg, known to be ineffective, but tolerated by moderates in the legislature, only because it seemed the better solution to rule by organized street gangs like the Communists or the Nazis.

Refusal by reactionary economic and political elites to behave responsibly had thus rendered middle class, parliamentary government totally ineffective in the face of economic disaster in Germany. Of course, that couldn’t happen in the United States.

Guess again!

The Debilitating Costs of War: Win, Lose, or Draw

In the 1920’s Germany was faced with appalling national debt, owing to losses in World War I, and obligations under the Versailles Treaty as a defeated nation. Nazis were not wrong to attack the Versailles Treaty as unfair, but they used that sad truth as a club to beat down the Weimar government, rather than help it cope with the Treaty.

In 2011 the United States faces huge national deficits owing to military responsibilities around the world, especially the Middle East. These are economic burdens, not of a defeated nation, but of the number one military power in the world. They are serious burdens nevertheless. When a FOX News reporter heckles President Obama about not being able to declare “victory” in Afghanistan, he simplifies a complex problem, and justifies the worst nationalistic instincts of Americans who have suffered directly and indirectly from this conflict. Such tactics may be great copy, but are bad news for reasonable discussion, which democracy must have in order to survive.

Wars are hell.  Even the ones which are won, like the 50 year Cold War fought by the United States against the Soviet Union. The moral and economic exhaustion of that conflict should be taken more seriously by pundits, if we are to understand why Americans turned so decisively from the nation’s interest to self interest in the 1980’s.

Elimination of Family Savings

In 1923 a hyper inflation wiped out savings at all levels of German society, but wealthy folks with tangible assets and international liquidity thrived, by paying off former debts in inflated currency.  The middle class was destroyed and reduced to poverty.   

In the 2008 Wall St. meltdown all levels of U.S. society suffered, but the middle class suffered disproportionately, compared to the wealthy, especially banking CEO’s who were able to convince the Bush administration that they were “too big to fail.”

Elimination of Jobs

The Great Depression of 1929, wiped out savings on both sides of the Atlantic. It created massive unemployment, the final nail in the coffin for the Weimar Republic, and the opportunity for which violent political opportunists had been waiting.

The Great Recession of 2008 not only wiped out savings in the United States that had survived the ENRON meltdown of 2001. It increased joblessness, already pushed to extremes by corporations bent upon cheap labor at any price. Ross Perot’s 1992 “giant sucking sound” - of well paying jobs leaving the country, and desperate illegal immigrants coming in at the invitation of certain businesses - has come true.

Anti-Government Propaganda and Behavior

It is worth noting that Hitler and the Nazis began their careers as anti-government fanatics, staging a violent attempt in 1923 to take over the Bavarian State Government in Munich - “The Beer Hall Putsch.” Only after defeat and a limited jail sentence for such treason did Hitler change his tactics and pursue a constitutional path to power. As we know, he never changed his real goal, the unlimited abuse of power.

The right wing in the United States, which has the Republican Party in its grip, glories in its contempt for government at all levels. All over the country, Republican Senators and Representatives, led by men and women like Grover Norquist, the Koch Brothers, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, respond to coordinated attacks on pensions, medicare, and tax increases, like a hunting dog to its master’s whistle.
 
As outlined in Part I, toleration of unregulated avarice has held sway in the executive branch whenever Republicans have held the White House since 1980. 

In the elections of 2006 and 2008, Americans voted responsible leadership into the House, Senate, and the White House, but in 2010 “greed is good” thinking made a significant comeback in Congress. Rationalization of corporate ownership of the United States also dominates the Supreme Court nowadays.

But surely the Weimar analogy goes too far.

In 1933 the U.S. Government undertook a series of reforms and experiments to make the economy and its government work for people - called “The New Deal.”

Yes, but those programs were carried out by the Democratic Party, and are the very ones under attack by the Republican Party in the nation’s capitol and in State Legislatures in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Jersey and elsewhere. 

The naked grasp for power over the Presidency by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, in holding social programs hostage to the debt ceiling, has damaged the fiscal reputation of the United States. This is just the the sort of thing that contributed to the undermining of confidence in Weimar Germany’s democracy.

If the rich and the cynical in Congress and on the Supreme Court succeed in their efforts to destroy the Obama Presidency, does that mean a drift towards blatant rule by a wealthy aristocracy—an American “Cabinet of Barons?”

Maybe not, but it would certainly lead towards the kind of chaos in which those with an itch for aristocracy instead of democracy love to scratch. Aristotle said it best years ago in his Politics:  “Men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold.”

But “keeping out of the cold” is all that most Americans want to do in hard times, and there will be hell to pay if our current leadership does not help them do just that.

I will explore the consequences of not paying proper attention to a nation’s needs in modern times in Part III:  “The Abyss of Violence.”

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