The Suffocation of Democracy

[DemocratSinceBirth]

As a historian specializing in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe. I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states—in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/

[Liberal In Texas]

1. Good read at link

Kind of long but interesting.

[Trust Buster]

2. Excellent article. Well worth clicking on the source to read it entirely. Thank you.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. I am going to let the author know I enjoyed it.

[Trust Buster]

4. Thought it was a book review but could not find the book on Amazon. Has it been released yet ?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. It doesn't read like a book review and why would the author review his own book ?

[Trust Buster]

6. I just thought that, since it was on The New York Review, it was a book review.

[DFW]

7. I regret to have found myself in agreement with so much of this article.

Here in Germany, it was considered a national crisis when the far right AfD went over 10% in popularity. In the USA, the similarly minded Republikaner (German for "Republicans," and the name of an actual neo-Nazi party that started in the 1980s, and, thankfully, fizzled about 15 years later), seem to want just about everything the fascists of the 1930s wanted, and have adapted to 21st century technology to maintain themselves in the mid to high 40s.

Rather than murder their opposition outright, and thereby risking a backlash they can't control, they are now suffocating democracy slowly. Browning correctly identifies Mitch McConnell as one of the arch-villains. His cynical denying Obama the right to nominate a Supreme Court justice (one who was eminently qualified), while working to rush through Kavanaugh (who was blatantly unqualified) shows his real power, behind the scenes of the noisy buffoonery of Trump and Pence.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. Trump might be the only president who didn't believe in liberal democracy.

[lunasun]

8. Kick good post