Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreWeimar America?
Despite the many difference between Weimar Germany and present-day America, there are worrisome similarities.
Sep 22
READ IN APP No two periods in history are identical, of course. In choosing this particular title for today’s post, I don’t mean to suggest otherwise.
There are many differences between interwar Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and the United States today. Germany lost a war, and afterwards parts of it were occupied for a time. Far-right forces set about propagating the claim that those humiliations resulted from a stab in the back by enemies within. Weimar Germany also experienced a bout of hyperinflation and mass immiseration.
Both of these developments fueled the rise of the Nazi Party and the emergence of a one-party dictatorship under a leader revered as a deity and wielding absolute power. Subsequently, Germany descended into a political catastrophe that culminated in the Shoah—let us not forget the non-Jewish victims of that horror—and an even more disastrous war, followed by a partition that lasted for more than forty years.
None of these events is on the horizon in the United States today.
Nevertheless, Weimar Germany is an instructive example of how quickly democracy can collapse, even in an economically advanced, highly literate society with multiple political parties and a rich civil society. That happened amid increasing political polarization (political adversaries were no longer people with whom one could reasonably disagree: they became enemies to be silenced), the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and surging political violence—at a pace that was astonishing.
Now to our own present.
Even during Trump’s first term (1.0), few if any commentators predicted that American democracy might be nearing its end. Today, that scenario has become so commonplace as to be banal. During Trump 1.0, people didn’t discuss which countries they might flee to if American democracy were to collapse and give way to full-blown authoritarianism. Now, think about how many times you’ve been part of such conversations in just the past few months and how many stories you’ve read about Americans exiling themselves in, say, Ireland, Canada, and Portugal.
The lament that Americans in mid-life or beyond it are the first generation in the nation’s history to doubt that their children will enjoy a standard of living comparable to theirs has become a cliché. This apprehension has many sources. Median wages have been stagnant (an increase of 0.6% per year on average) for more than four decades. Outsourcing and automation have led to the loss of 4.7 millionmanufacturing jobs since 2000. Economic inequality has increased for most of the last sixty years. And now, AI threatens to replace human labor in one economic sector after the other.
What is new, however, is the extent to which adult Americans now wonder whether their children and grandchildren will live in a democracy. Not only has this apprehension taken hold, it has become part of mainstream discussions and expert opinion. Not only has the pessimism about American democracy increased within a remarkably short time, it runs deep. An August poll revealed that 57% of Americans—80% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans—feared that democracy in this country was at risk.
Trump 2.0 is just months into his second term and we have already witnessed events that would until recently have been dismissed as implausible, even impossible. Here are some examples, in no particular order:
· The president has federalized the National Guard and deployed it to major American cities—not just as an exceptional step but as what threatens to be a prelude to others, based yet again on wild claims about the breakdown of law and order. Trump himself has intimated that he’s just getting started.
· He commuted the sentences of fourteen January 6 rioters and pardoned all others convicted of offenses, calling their punishment “a grave injustice,” never mind that the people in both categories had tried to storm the Capitol.
· He has stated that television networks that criticize him could be deprived of their broadcasting licenses and has appointed as head of the Federal Communications Commission a loyalist whose statements suggest that he can be counted upon to act on this idea.
· Trump has called on red state governors to redraw House electoral districts to help the GOP gain additional seats in the 2026 midterm elections. Texas has already begun to act on his directive. (We should take no comfort from moves by Democratic governors who do the same in response.)
· Trump has deprived Congress of its authority to determine tariffs as part of a theory of the “unitary executive,” which undermines the separation of powers, a defining feature of the Constitution.
· He has framed the murder of Charlie Kirk not as the act of a lone gunman but, even before any investigation was complete, as a conspiracy of the “radical left,” a categorization that could lay the groundwork for additional assaults on civil liberties.
· SCOTUS, for its part, has weakened that particular principle of the Constitution further by refusing to uphold lower court rulings against the President’s expansive conception of executive authority. When the administration has asked the Supreme Court to rule on challenges made in lower courts against executive overreach it has won on 18 occasions and lost only twice.
As unsettling as these moves by the President are, what’s far more disturbing is the rapidity with which civil society has bent to his will.
Some of the country’s biggest law firms were cowed into offering vast sums—nearly $1 billion—in free legal advice to his administration.
Major universities, threatened with the loss of federal research funds, have agreed to various intrusions into their autonomy and have agreed to fork over vast sums, with Columbia’s $200 million settlement in July as the most egregious example. UC Berkeley has handed over the names of 160 professors and students as part of the government’s investigation of antisemitism, which the Trump administration has defined capaciously, on its campus.
The media has, in important instances, been cowed. Paramount agreed to a $16 million out-of-court settlement after Trump accused its flagship news program, 60 Minutes, of editing an interview with Kamala Harris during the presidential election, supposedly to favor her. When the comedian Stephen Colbert skewered Paramount’s decision, CBS announced the cancellation of his show. The network depicted the move as “purely a financial decision” but its timing raised eyebrows. Whatever the real reason, Trump was delighted by CBS’s decision. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.
The Washington Post, acting on the wishes of Jeff Bezos, its owner and the founder of Amazon, decided not to endorse a candidate during the 2024 presidential campaign. More recently, the Post fired columnist Karen Attiyah for making supposedly inappropriate remarks following the killing of Charlie Kirk. ABC suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmel on the same grounds. Judge for yourself—here and here—whether what Kimmel and Attiyah said justified what was done to them. (The good news: Kimmel will be back on the air, starting Tuesday.)
Both decisions came amid Trump’s tirades against a press he claims has been commandeered by the radical left. His accusations were supplemented by a statement from the Department of Homeland Security that blamed the liberal media for fostering the “demonization” that set the stage for Kirk’s murder. DHS also demanded that “media and the far left…stop the hateful rhetoric directed at President Trump.”
Large corporations have likewise been cowed by the President, realizing that defiance would lead to retribution from the White House. The anti-Trump phase of Elon Musk, a naturalized citizen born in South Africa, proved short-lived once the President began denouncing him and even refused to rule out deporting him.
In short, important elements of civil society, widely seen by scholars of democracy as critical to a healthy democracy, have given in to Trump with virtually no resistance. Harvard, under its courageous president, Alan Garber, is the exception that proves the rule, though it too has complied with some of the administration’s demands.
The more Trump’s poll numbers drop—a mid-September survey by The Economist and the polling agency YouGov showed that his disapproval rating reached 57%—the more intense and sustained his attacks will become on people he perceives as political enemies and the more likely he will be to use a political crisis—another assassination of a right-wing activist, violence between city residents and National Guard troops—to declare an emergency, invoking the unitary executive theory to justify further restrictions on free speech and public protests. And he will do so with the approval of GOP legislators who, with few exceptions, have shown themselves all too willing to do his bidding.
Seen in this light, the theory that an economic downturn could prove to be Trump’s undoing may underestimate his skill at shaping the political narrative and redirecting public attention.
Given the political trends I have just summarized, the 2026 midterm elections could, as the British scholar and political commentator Timothy Garton Ash warned recently, prove to be a make-or-break moment for American democracy. But given Trump’s record of denying the validity of election results, how certain can we be that he will accept GOP losses in 2026 as part of the democratic process rather than as yet another attempt at vote-rigging by a radical left bent on derailing his efforts to “Make America Great Again”? And how confident can we be that the feckless Democrats in Congress will cease acting like deer caught in headlights and develop a coherent, effective strategy to challenge Trump?
The comparison between Weimar Germany and Trump’s America can be faulted on several grounds, but not to an extent that rejects all parallels. Furthermore, Weimar democracy had a mere fourteen years to sink roots. American democracy, by contrast, has had more than two hundred years to consolidate itself but has nevertheless become vulnerable, within a matter of months.
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© 2025 Rajan Menon
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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