I’ve pointed this out elsewhere, but if I’m going to have something of a megaphone, this needs to be endlessly pointed out. What is happening is not normal, and the more we normalize it, the more they win.
We are in the late Weimar. Some 248 years was a good run, but this is no longer a democracy, and the sooner people realize that, the better.
This is not hyperbole. And fuck off with “we were always a republic.” So was Rome until exactly this inflection point. Learn some fucking history.
I’m not an expert, so I would be pleased to be educated to the contrary by someone who knows, but I think a key difference here is the structure of U.S. federalism versus the Weimar federalism in which Hitler came to power.
Here in the U.S., both the state governments and the federal governments derive their authority directly from the sovereignty of “the people”—either the people of each state, for state governments, or the people of the entire nation, for the federal government. Here, taking over the federal government does not necessarily entail taking over the governments of the states (federal supremacy notwithstanding—and there should still be reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment).
In Weimar Germany, however, the states, I believe, were really administrative units of the federal government, so that taking over the federal government was effectively taking over state governments, too.
And we haven’t always had a federal government as strong and as broad in its assertion of authority as we have had until January 20, 2025. In some sense, what Trump is doing is pushing back to a pre-Civil War federal government—although I expect an aggressive assertion of federal power over matters traditionally understood to be within the realm of the states to be coming: it will be the right-wing revenge tour, for all of the ways they have always bemoaned how the federal government forces them to be nice to people, with antidiscrimination laws and the like. They see that as tyranny, and will turn it around and try to force the rest of us to be white supremacists.
But I think now is the time for us in the U.S. to remember the adage that all politics is local, and to redouble efforts at our cities, counties, and states.
One of the things that happened with Germany post WWII was devolution to the states, partially to avoid this again, partially because, well, they were occupied. It was so weird to me when I’d get change in the '90s still reading Bank Deutscher Laender sted Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
I lived in Stadtkreis Hameln, Y’all have heard of this. The Pied Piper led kids into the Weser … you just know it as Hamelin. I had to go over the Oberweserdampfshifffahrt to get to Gymnasium daily from Haverbeck. The three f’s are not an error. German nouns are fun.
Why am I focusing on Germany? Well, it’s a useful model. No one thought the Weimar Republic could collapse so fast, and, I mean …
This is bad. There’s precedent, and it’s not good. This is alarming. And I keep saying that because it keeps being true.
Germany wasn’t really fully formed at that point. They had the Alsace and parts of Poland (this is to be expected given the Prussian origins). The wars forced Germany into the shape it’s in now, which is not an excuse the U.S. has to offer.
We’re apparently considering Canada and Greenland as the Sudetenland?
I see no way around the country breaking apart. This is too far, too fast. Cascadia may result. Once California, Oregon and Washington (let the irony sink in) are uninterested in being part of the country any longer … there’s no longer any bulwark against endless GOP domination. That’s why we wait until polls close on PST before making national calls. If you’re just going to do it on Mountain, that’s a thoroughly uninteresting result. Arizona’s the only wild card there.