Why Weimar?

Sandy Levinson

Not for the first time, some readers have objected to my analogizing contemporary American politics to Weimar. Do I really believe that we have a Hitler in our future, for example? The answer is no. So why not find a "nicer" analogy, perhaps Paul Krugman's "banana republic" or something similar? One reason that Weimar is the best analogy to discuss is simply that the greatest social theorists of the early 20th century, Max Weber, Franz Neumann, Otto Kircheimer, and, yes, Carl Schmitt, all addressed the situation facing German after World War I. Weber died before the Weimar Republic fully developed, but his writings on German politics, and his fear about plebescitarian politics, were certainly prescient, as former Chicago Law School Dean and Stanford President Gerhard Casper argued about three years ago, when he talked about the caesarist aspects of our presidentialist system.

As it happens, I spent the day today celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Social Studies program at Harvard, in which I was a tutor during 1967-68. The essence of that program is an intellectual confrontation with the greatest social theorists of the past, including Weber (and Adam Smith, Marx, Durkheim, Tocqueville, and Freud). No analogy is perfect, obviously, whether it is to Munich, Vietnam, or whatever. No one should think there is a one-to-one correspondence between the United States in the 21st century and Germany following defeat in a catastrophic war (which became, of course, the prelude to an even more catastrophic war). But it is whistling past the graveyard, I believe, to pretend that there are no similarities at all, and, as already suggested, the advantage of looking closely at Weimar is precisely that it drew the attention of unusually acute social analysts. To repeat once more, anyone who can read Schmitt's critique of the Weimar Parliament without thinking of the contemporary United States Congress, particularly the egregious Senate--E. J. Dionne, a graduate of the social studies program, was a speaker today and noted that he would actually favor abolition of the Senate (something he has said in one of his columns for the Washington Post)--is simply deluding him/self. No one could possibly take the Senate seriously as a "deliberative body," for precisely the reasons brilliantly set out by Schmitt. And, I must say, Schmitt's analysis is far deeper (and more depressing) than that set out by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their accurately named The Broken Branch, where they ultimately plead for a return to civility by members of Congress. That is like pleading for a return to Madison's notion of civic virtue as set out in the Federalist Papers. It's never going to happen because of fundamental transformations in the society, which began literally within a few years of the adoption of the Constitution (i.e., the rise of the party system, which Madison in 1787 simply saw as a recipe for "factionalism") and continuing on today with the ever-further-development of what Marx recognized as the dynamo of a capitalist economy that would destroy stable cultures and polities that stood in its way. That's the meaning of globalization. And none of these thinkers could have foreseen the development and implications of modern mass media and networks like Fox who have no compunction about employing and building up the power of fascists who exemplify a pure will to power.

Come to the Caberet....
Posted 10:33 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]