<https://louisproyect.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/screen-shot-2021-01-10-at-2.12.27-pm.png>
Long before Trump became President, I noticed that some on the left were
confusing contemporary America with the Weimar Republic in 1920s
Germany. In 2010, I commented onan interview
<https://louisproyect.org/2010/04/20/weimar-germany-and-contemporary-america-any-parallels/>that
Chris Hedges did with Noam Chomsky that encapsulated this misreading of
history. Hedges starts off:
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I
called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are
striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the
parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not
that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the
Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and
Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which
the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
As I have always tried to do when encountering a blinkered take on
Weimar, I introduced some economic data:
To start with, the economic situation during the late Weimar
Republic was far worse than today in the U.S. In 1932, there were 5
million unemployed German workers out of a total population of 66
million, an unemployment rate of 30 percent–twice what we are
suffering in the U.S. today. Also, keep in mind that unemployment
insurance, which had been introduced in Germany in 1927, was the
victim of fiscal austerity after the 1929 market crash. All public
funding was suspended, which resulted in higher contributions by the
workers and fewer benefits for the unemployed.
After Trump was elected in 2016, the Weimar analogies increased
dramatically for obvious reasons. Trump was widely perceived as the
second coming of Adolf Hitler (or Mussolini) and as such it was
incumbent on the left to study what happened in Germany in order to
prevent another 1932. Both Ted Glick and Harold Meyerson tried to scare
voters into pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton by bringing up the
Weimar bogeyman. Inmy reply
<https://louisproyect.org/2016/07/14/misusing-german-history-to-scare-up-votes-for-hillary-clinton/>,
I took exception to their notion that Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy
had anything to do with the German Communist Party’s insane ultraleft
policy that equated the Socialist Party with the Nazis. I added that if
there was any analogy, it was with the SP’s centrist politics that lost
the votes of workers in the same way that Hillary Clinton’s continuation
of Obama’s pro-Wall Street presidency made it possible for Trump to
demagogically attack her Goldman-Sachs speeches. It was doubtful that
either Glick or Meyerson had given much thought to SP policies in the 1920s:
Like the Democratic Party, the German Socialists cut deals with the
opposition rightwing parties to stay in power. In effect, they were
the Clinton and Obamas of their day. In 1928, the Socialists were
part of a coalition government that allowed the SP Chancellor
Hermann Müller to carry out what amounted to the same kind of
sell-out policies that characterized Tony Blair and Bernard
Hollande’s nominally working-class governments.
To give just one example, the SP’s campaign program included free
school meals but when Müller’s rightwing coalition partners demanded
that the free meals be abandoned in order to fund rearmament, Müller
caved in.
full:
https://louisproyect.org/2021/01/10/no-america-has-not-entered-the-weimar-era/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#5384): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5384
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79578629/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
