Back in 2016/17, when I was living in Washington, resistance was in the air. Resistance was not futile, but it turns out to not have been enough – so here we are. As history is again teaching us, in moments like these we risk falling into any one of a variety of traps. [One trap, which I am working to avoid in this opening paragraph – even as a principal purpose of this blog post is to share some extraordinarily apposite historical material – is to be too quick to draw the H—– or the Na– analogy……]. Complacency can be a trap (see the quotes below from Sebastian Haffner…). So, too, (as we learn from the same historical example…..) is unstrategic resistance – it plays into the hands of those who see accelerating polarization as the way to open up doors to personalized authoritarianism that had so far remained closed.

But, as we also are learning yet again, in times of crisis a nostalgic call to go back to the way it was cannot trump the peddlers of rage. As Antonio Gramsci understood, the crisis is precisely that “the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” As readers of my Working with the Grain blogs know, my longstanding, Quixotic quest has been to try and give some shape to the “new”. (See, for example, here and here.) This effort continues; I have much new work to share in coming weeks and months. Today, though, I can’t resist sharing some gleanings from eight years ago that, yet again, serve for me as wake up calls. The photograph that leads this blog (….it can be a source of morbid amusement to play with possible captions…….) is new. But as you can see here (where you can also see the original photograph…..), the text remains the same……

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[July, 2018/October 2016]: Eighteen months into the Trump administration, I continue to be startled at the way so much of the Republican establishment has settled into a ‘politics as usual’ comfort zone, along the lines of ‘we may not like him, but many of our voters do, so for now we’ll go along’.    In the spirit of George Santayana (‘those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it’) here are a few extracts from three classic books on early 1930s Germany. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote this piece in October, 2016; I’ve updated the first para, everything else remains unchanged.)   I begin with some contemporaneous observations (written by 25 year old Sebastian Haffner in 1939:

“At first the revolution only gave the impression of being a ‘historical event’ like any other: a matter for the press that might just possibly have some effect on the public mood. There was no revolution on January 30, 1933, just a change of government….. The general opinion was that it was not the Nazis who had won, but the bourgeois parties of the right, who had ‘captured’ the Nazis and held all the key positions in the government……. At the time, while I experienced the sequence of events it was not possible to gauge their significance. I felt, intensely, the choking, nauseous character of it all, but I was unable to grasp its constituent parts and place them in an overall order. Each attempt was frustrated and veiled by those endless useless discussions in which we attempted again and again to fit the events into an obsolete, unsuitable scheme of political ideas…….  How infinitely stupid the attempts at justification, how hopelessly superficial the constructions with which the intellect tried to cover up the proper feeling of dread and disgust. How stale all the isms we brought up. I shudder to think of it. …. Daily life went on as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background….” – Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A memoir (pp. 104; 136-7)

And here is a more scholarly description of some aspects of the process from Richard Evans: “Voters were not really looking for anything very concrete from the Nazi Party in 1930. They were, instead, protesting against the failure of the Weimar Republic. Many of them, too, particularly in rural areas, small towns, small workshops, culturally conservative families, older age groups, or the middle-class nationalist political milieu, may have been registering their alienation from the cultural and political modernity for which the Republic stood……. While conventional politicians delivered lectures, or spoke in a style that was orotund and pompous, flat and dull…..Hitler gained much of his oratorical success by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear. He used simple, straightforward language that ordinary people could understand, short sentences, powerful emotive slogans…..[General] Schleicher now [January 1933] saw a Hitler Chancellorship as a welcome solution: ‘If Hitler wants to establish a dictatorship in the Reich’, he said confidently, ‘then the army will be the dictatorship within the dictatorship’…” Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, pp. 265; 171

And here is an extract from Ian Kershaw: “Hitler was, in fact, in no position to act as an outright dictator when he came to office on 30 January, 1933. As long as [President] Hindenburg lived, there was a potential rival source of loyalty — not least for the army…… ” [BL: Then, as I summarized in an earlier post, came the burning of the Reichstag……and Hindenburg’s death in mid-1934]….. “…By summer 1934, when Hitler combined the headship of state with the leadership of government, his power had effectively shed formal constraints on its usage…. Conventional forms of government were increasingly exposed to the arbitrary inroads of personalized power. It was a recipe for disaster….” Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A biography.

Eighteen months after life had seemed normal,  disaster was well underway……