Secular Café: The US like Weimar-Republic Germany?

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The US like Weimar-Republic Germany? Jul 8th 2012, 08:54 Weimar America - AlterNet - Salon.com "Four major ways we're following In Germany's fascist footsteps", by Robert Cruickshank. The picture showed a teabagger activist who was wearing teabags. Quote: What happens when a nation that was once an economic powerhouse turns its back on democracy and on its middle class, as wealthy right-wingers wage austerity campaigns and enable extremist politics? It may sound like America in 2012. But it was also Germany in 1932. The similarities: 1. Austerity. German politicians have justified it by the galloping inflation of the Weimar Republic in 1923. Quote: Yet the austerity policies enacted after the onset of the Depression produced the worst of Germany's economic crisis, while also destabilizing the country's politics. Cuts to wages, benefits and public programs dramatically worsened unemployment, hunger and suffering. US austerity policies have mainly been on the state and local levels, but some recent budget deals are essentially national-level austerity. 2. Attacks on democracy. Quote: Austerity was deeply unpopular with the German public. The Reichstag, Germany's legislature, initially rejected austerity measures in 1930. As a result, right-wing Chancellor Heinrich Brüning implemented his austerity measures by using a provision in the Weimar constitution enabling him to rule by decree. More notoriously, Hitler was selected as chancellor despite his party never having won an election — the ultimate slap at democracy. German fascists, monarchists, and big businesses didn't like the left-leaning Weimar Republic and worked to undermine democracy. Attacks on US democracy have to be less overt, but they are happening. 3. Enabling of extremists. Quote: Well before Hitler was made chancellor in 1933, leading conservatives and business leaders had concluded that their interests would be better served by something other than the democratic system established in 1919. In the 1920's, they supported lots of antidemocratic right-wing parties, though many of them did not like Nazism very much. But they eventually had to make a deal with the Nazi Party to get into power, and Hitler then displaced them from power. 4. Right-wing and corporate dominance. Quote: One of the the most prominent German media moguls in the 1920s was Alfred Hugenberg, owner of 53 newspapers that reached over a majority of German readers. The chairman of the right-wing German National People's Party, Hugenberg promoted Adolf Hitler by providing favorable coverage of him from the mid-1920s onward. Major German corporations such as Krupp, IG Farben and others spent money in the 1920s and early 1930s to support the rise of right-wing political parties, including the Nazis, as part of a strategy to undermine democracy and labor unions. Even if Hitler had never taken power, that strategy had already achieved significant returns on their substantial investment. In the present-day US, the likes of the Koch brothers and Fox News do something similar.

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