American politics have become so polarized and poisoned that bogus claims and calls to imprison opponents are cheered on. Such terms as fascist or socialist are thrown around with little regard to their definitions; these words are used as cudgels to attack one’s political opponents.
Amid the noise, serious historians are saying that democracy is in real trouble. They point to former President Donald Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election which, in turn, spurred Republicans loyal to Mr. Trump at the local and state levels to run for secretary of state – an office that oversees voting – in battleground states.
Moreover, new details emerged about the lengths to which some GOP officials went to subvert the 2020 results. Republicans in seven states forged Electoral College certificates and sent them to the National Archives.
For his part, President Biden invoked the legacies of Jefferson Davis and George Wallace to chide Republicans who oppose his party’s voting system bill. Mr. Biden’s speech provoked an expected backlash from senators who did not appreciate the comparison to some of the ugliest racists in U.S. political history.
Beyond these highly partisan battles, one historian sees parallels between our current problems and the fall of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s brief democratic experiment that was torn to pieces by competing factions of the far right and far left.
“I think as long we’re focusing on the crisis of democracy, parallels between the German crisis and the fate of Weimar have some extraordinarily eerie similarities and trajectories with the situations we find ourselves in,” said historian Christopher Browning, an expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust whose work has won the National Jewish Book Award three times.
“I think where the error is made is that people jump to an easy equation of Trump to Hitler or Republicans to Nazis,” said Mr. Browning, who does not refer to Mr. Trump as a fascist. He prefers to describe Trumpism as illiberal populism.
To listen to the full interview with Mr. Browning about whether the fall of the Weimar Republic is relevant to the fight over American democracy today, download this episode of History As It Happens.
