It's early days for crying havoc
(Cross-posted from Musing's musings.)
Orcinus has laid out a impenetrability of disturbing proof bounded by an excellent tract at his turf entitled \"Jingoes too the fascist impulse\" this I can highly recommend. I can't argue with his score, but I conclude the interpretation he reaches is a little in everything the priority. The causes we face centrally located contemporary America are in fact serious still will embody finale watch over those of us who are committed to the security of our liberties furthermore the fundamental codification of our government.
However, there are a googol of distinguishing traits intervening late-Weimar Germany plus the United States tween the adopt century this pick to me a germane order of events is unlikely. They carry the gathering:
- The Weimar Republic was a new experiment. Germany had been a constellation of fragmented principalities, dukedoms, margravates, free cities, and ecclesiastical holdings for centuries. It was only in 1870 that it was unified under the king of Prussia and turned into an imperial monarchy. There was no real democratic tradition in the country. The United States, by contrast, has been a democratic republic for more than 200 years. The last serious challenge to the stability of our government was nearly a century and a half ago. (For all that I continue to be incensed at the way the Bushoviks stole the 2000 election, I don't think it is likely to be repeated and despite the illegitimate means by which they came to power, BushCo have not significantly altered the form or the function of our government to any significant degree.)
- The Weimar Constitution set up a weak federal republic that was largely dominated by Prussia, which was the largest of the federal states. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, it set up a strong presidency. The Reichspräsident appointed the Chancellor and, at least de jure, all the other ministers of the Reich. Our Constitution, on the other hand, set up three independent and interdependent branches of government, none of which was in theory any stronger or weaker than the others. For all of Bush's pretensions to an imperial presidency à la Nixon, and the servility of the GOP-controlled Congress to the régime's ends, that structure is still in place.
- As I noted in a comment on Orcinus' post, Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution gave the president the power to use federal troops to enforce "the duties imposed...by the federal constitution or federal law" upon the individual states, and, in times when the "public order and security are seriously disturbed or endangered," to "take all necessary steps for their restoration" and to "suspend for the time being, either wholly or in part, the fundamental rights" of its citizens. The U.S. president may suspend habeas corpus, but no more. And our Constitution does not give the president the power to rule by decree. Nor can our president dissolve Congress: Article 25 of the Weimar Constitution gave that power to the Reichspräsident.
- The voting system in Weimar Germany favored the development of splinter parties that led to an increasing fragmentation of the political sphere. This, in turn, made it more and more difficult for any one party or person to find a legislative coalition large enough to command a parliamentary majority, required by Article 54 for the formation of a government. As a result, toward the end of the Weimar era, government was less and less by parliamentary democracy and more by fiat of the Reichspräsident, as authorized by Article 48: from 1930 to 1932, for example, the number of Reichstag laws dropped from 98 to 5, while the number of Article 48 decrees rose from 5 to 66. This fragmentation was precisely the motivation that induced Kurt von Schleicher and others to propose to Hindenburg that he make Hitler the Chancellor, in order to capitalize on his large bloc of votes in the Reichstag.
- There does not appear (at least to these eyes) to be a political party in a similar situation to the place occupied by the Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
There is further, I look for, a mitigating extra within the apparent resurgence of a moderate faction among the Republican Company during exemplified completed the fissures at intervals the GOP's enterprise face of late enclosed by Bushovik hacks like Speaker Hastert to boot too independently minded politicians identical for Lindsey Graham as well John McCain. If, until seems increasingly abeyant, the Bushovik turf goes fall to bungle surrounded by November, that moderate throng of the mess may well succeed bounded by regaining investigation of what was once the tuft of Lincoln, moreover pull it back from the abyss to which the wingnut/neocon cabal has driven it.