What is the secret of Bernie Sanders’ success? Why is an aged firebrand attracting a fiercely loyal following among young Americans on college campuses and elsewhere? Could it be because of his self-proclaimed socialist beliefs?
America is in the midst of a fascist coup and in Germany in the early 1930s, while centrist parties proved impotent, German socialists and communists were the only force capable of stopping Adolph Hitler — at least until Josef Stalin set them against each other, facilitating Hitler’s rise to power. If America is to resist Trump, it needs someone far more radical than Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.
In the 1990s there was no shortage of comparisons between Germany’s Weimar Republic and post-Soviet Russia. Moscow lost the Cold War, but just like Imperial Germany in 1918, the loss was fairly abstract for most people: there had been no fighting on its territory and no occupation. On the other hand, the defeated power deeply felt its humiliation. The old regime crumbled and was replaced by a coterie of war profiteers. A severe economic crisis followed, accompanied by hyperinflation which destroyed everyone’s savings. Surely Russia’s nascent democracy will be followed by a militant dictatorship, the way the Weimar Republic in Germany gave way to the National Socialist regime.
History doesn’t repeat itself and even when it rhymes, its rhymes are often imperfect. In the early 1990s, the Soviet defeat in the Cold War wasn’t bitterly resented by most Russians. On the contrary, they rejoiced in the emergence of an independent new Russia and looked forward to living in peace with the West. Despite the economic crisis, the new market economy provided previously unimagined access to food products and consumer goods. The free market opened great opportunities to young people. Travel abroad, which had been greatly restricted under communism and which the party had been using as a reward for loyalty, was suddenly open to all.
That said, Russia has been moving steadily toward a repressive right-wing oligarchy. False memories of the Soviet past, along with the “stab in the back” legend about the collapse of the Soviet Union, flourish in the official media as well as on the internet: just read the nostalgic comments under every mawkish Soviet film on YouTube.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is channeling his inner Hitler by annexing Russian-speaking lands, funding right-wing parties throughout Europe, intervening in civil wars around the Mediterranean and constantly talking about rearmament. Much like Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, Russia is crawling with angry men with military training who have nothing going for them in their civilian life and who are only too willing to go fight in eastern Ukraine, Syria, Libya or the Central African Republic. Russia’s 1933 may still lie ahead.
Much more unexpected are similarities between Weimar and the United States. Yet, they are there and they go a long way toward explaining the rise of Donald Trump.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Washington began its endless war in Afghanistan and soon thereafter, in Iraq. Some three million personnel were deployed in those countries, half of them more than once. The U.S. military is a professional force, comprised exclusively of volunteers. This means that it is a self-selected group: they are more likely to be patriotic and disadvantaged.
The wars have not gone well. While the formidable U.S. military won every battle, victory in the wars proved elusive — especially since the Bush Administration, which started those wars, never spelled out its aims and therefore failed to define what would constitute a victory. In other words, the wars were not winnable by definition.
Nevertheless, a large cross-section of soldiers is bitter about losing them. They believe their sacrifice was squandered by politicians. Barack Obama bears much of the blame for this in their eyes, and even the “intellectual” warrior such as Jim Mattis criticizes Obama for not allowing his soldiers to win the unwinnable wars in his memoir. These embittered soldiers are remarkably susceptible to fascist propaganda: some one-third of active-duty personnel now report encountering racism and white supremacy in the ranks— a steadily increasing proportion.
Of course, bitterness was also a dominant emotion among U.S. military personnel returning from the previous American defeat in Vietnam. However, those soldiers were draftees and, moreover, they were coming back to functioning — and even thriving — communities back home. There were opportunities for those who wanted to reinsert themselves in the civilian world.
Now, they encounter depressed little towns wrecked by unemployment, poverty, despair and opioid addiction. Most young men and women who volunteer for the military are from a blue-collar background, and they are familiar at first hand with the blight that has decimated industrial jobs. In the goods-producing sector, the number of jobs today, more than a decade into the longest U.S. expansion on record, is still more than 10% below the 2001 level. They account for less than 16.5% of all private-sector jobs, compared to 21.5% in 2001. Since the depth of the 2008-09 financial crisis, only a little more than a million manufacturing jobs have been created; compared to 2001, there are now 3.5 million, or 22%, fewer such jobs in the US economy.
The Great Recession of 2008-09 was the deepest global crisis since the Depression of the early 1930s which gave rise to Hitler and national socialism. The crisis was not borne by different social classes equally. The poor in the fly-over country experienced it far sharper and for far longer than the prosperous coastal states, and in many communities, the recovery has not yet happened. In any case, the slump and its aftermath greatly exacerbated economic inequality — one reason why white working-class voters turned away from Obama.
Thus we have pretty much all the ingredients which proved so combustible in Germany: a large swath of the population who find themselves impoverished, embittered and resentful, and who are ready to blame economic and political elites for their predicament. We have a rabble-rousing narcissistic buffoon full of harebrained ideas, who channels this resentful and is only too happy to lie and cheat to rally his supporters. And we have embittered military veterans with stab-in-the-back notions organized in a mind-boggling variety of heavily armed brown shirt-like militias, who are the movement’s shock troops.
And we have the golden age of comedy, with a plethora of talented comedians poking fun at Trump and trumpism, who seem to have come out of Cabaret, a brilliant Hollywood film about the rise of the Nazis.
There are three likely scenarios for how 1933 will come to America. One is Trump’s reelection in 2020, which is when he will be fully unleashed. He has already purged the judiciary, the State Department and the intelligence community, and he will get rid of the remaining “Deep State” resistance. There will be an event comparable to the Reichstag Fire that helped Hitler consolidate power, and likely prosecution of Obama, Hillary Clinton, witnesses in the impeachment trial, leading Democrats in Congress and, last but not least, Republican traitors like Senator Mitt Romney.
This is a peaceful takeover scenario similar to Hitler’s rise to become a German chancellor, but there are two violent scenarios, as well. If Trump loses in November, he will use the remainder of his term to mount investigations by his Attorney General William Barr into “irregularities” and will refuse to leave the White House. This is when the right-wing militias, Bikers for Trump and mutinous military service personnel will come into play.
Finally, there is a possibility that another economic crisis will hit some time in the next year or so, regardless of who is in the White House. If the Obama-Trump financial bubble which keeps inflating to massive proportions finally bursts, the Great Recession will look like a picnic in the park by comparison. And, while the poor will suffer severely, reflecting the disintegration of American safety net, the upper-middle class will not be badly impacted: during the years of financial bubbles, upper-income households have become flush with cash — so much so that they have pushed the American savings rate up to 8% at a time when 40% don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense. The top 20% of earners save 12% of their income while the bottom 60% are dissaving (that is, going deeper into debt).
By giving the rich and the corporates a massive tax cut, demanding low-interest rates from his Federal Reserve chief and egging the stock market on, Trump bears a huge share of responsibility for the financial bubble that will eventually — and catastrophically — burst. However, Trump is also adept at tweeting blame — and his supporters will no doubt believe that the Democrats and immigrants are responsible for their economic hardship. That too could create conditions for a violent overthrow of the American political system under Trump’s leadership.
