Trump’s Weimar Republic
WARNING: History does not so much repeat itself; it morphs into new, harrowing forms that come at us with a vengeance.
Take the Weimar Republic.
From April 11, 1919 on, after a national assembly was convened and a new constitution for the Deutsches Reich was written and adopted, the Weimar Republic — constituted by free elections and the rule of law — faced hyperinflation, political extremism, as well as contentious relationships with the victors of the First World War. It was a time of cultural anxiety and political polarization.
Unhappy, the people of Germany blamed the Weimar Republic rather than their wartime leaders for the country’s defeat and for the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
A plurality of Germans voted for the Nazi party and Hitler became chancellor in 1933 through a legal parliamentary process. Germans hoped — and Hitler promised — to return Germany to its former greatness. Make Germany great again!
Hitler capitalized on fear and frustration and declared that his law and order, authoritarian ideology would prevent Germany from decline; he threatened the judiciary and demonized the press. Hitler’s ideology was propagandized via a new technology, cheap radios — the Twitter of the period.
Hitler’s seizure of power (Machtergreifung) was permissive of government by decree without legislative participation. These events brought the republic to an end — as democracy collapsed, the founding of a single-party state began the Nazi era.
And the rest, as we like to say, is history.
THE INTERREGNUM: Enter the United States, a time of confusion, turmoil, and political polarization, a time when the ruling ideology is corporatism and the “invisible” — non-whites, the working poor, immigrants, and the LGBT community — are made to suffer.
The State has effectively turned its back on its citizens, which includes the middle class; we are the most sophisticatedly surveilled population in history; police are militarized.
Turbulence in the stock market. Stop-gap measures, continuing resolutions, to keep the government functioning at a minimum.
The GOP and Trump obsessing over Nunes’ partisan Russia probe memo — propaganda not fact.
And we’ve known from the start that Trump admires authoritarian figures — Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In his full-throated authoritarianism,Trump believes he is outside the law, a sacred and accursed sovereign, destiny’s chosen agent, the sole savior of a compromised nation.
As Charles Blow tells us in “Constitutional Crisis in Slow Motion,” “Donald Trump will destroy this entire country — its institutions and its safeguards, the rule of law and the customs of civility, the concept of truth and the inviolable nature of valor — to protect his own skin.”
We we are in what the Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, calls the interregnum, a period where we have lost faith in the ideas that buttress a political and economic system and yet to articulate an alternative, a vision for what should replace it. Discontent and anger are central, as is the suspension of normal governmental functions.
CONTRADICTIONS: Slavoj Šižek tells us that following a meeting with Nixon and Kissinger, Mao said: “I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think — not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.”
Critical conservatives “tend to obliterate the ‘contradictions’ inherent in the existing order which the [leftists] are ready to admit as irresolvable,” continues Šižek in Living in the End Times (2011).
Our interregnum, defined by the “cultural contradictions of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible — today’s capitalism increasingly functions as the ‘institutionalization of envy’…The truth we are dealing with here,” Šižek tells us, “is not ‘objective’ truth, but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.”
Trumpism, Donald Trump and his GOP hoard are not hiding this fact: the unleashing of their subjective truth is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed, which is what Lacan has demonstrated.
Republicans in Congress have for the most part circled the wagons around the president rather than abandoning him. They’ve generally downplayed previous criticisms and expressed indifference to new scandals, apparently due to a calculation that their own electoral fates are linked to his.
The left meanders, “ say one thing and mean another,” while the right enunciates a harsh and brutal subjectivity that, whether true to some and false to others, never mind — it’s still followed.
This is a dark interregnum, Trump’s Weimar Republic.
Additional Resources:
‘How Democracies Die’ Authors Say Trump Is A Symptom Of ‘Deeper Problems’ (STEVEN LEVITSKY: “…the primary way in which democracies have died since the end of the Cold War, over the last 30 years or so, is at the hands of elected leaders, at the hands of governments that were often freely or close to freely elected, who then use democratic institutions to weaken or destroy democracy. And we’re very hopeful that America’s democratic institutions will survive this process. But if we were to fall into some kind of crisis, surely it would take that form.”
Trump’s ‘Marching Orders’ to the Pentagon: Plan a Military Parade
Trump vs. Hitler and Mussolini
The Rising Risk of Nuclear War Under Trump
Trump tweets that memo ‘totally vindicates’ him in Russia probe
How Institutions Lie to You: Chris Hedges on Economics and Politics (2015)
