Tea with Adolf

Frank Rich: "Don’t expect the extremism and violence in our politics to subside magically after Election Day — no matter what the results. If Tea Party candidates triumph, they’ll be emboldened. If they lose, the anger and bitterness will grow. The only development that can change this equation is a decisive rescue from our prolonged economic crisis. Not for the first time in history — and not just American history — fear itself is at the root of a rabid outbreak of populist rage against government, minorities and conspiratorial 'elites.'”

Not surprisingly, the Times moderators would not publish this comment on Rich's column:

Since Frank began with Carl Paladino's embrace of a reference to Adolf Hitler, I was reminded of how much the current tea party "populism" resembles German populism between the world wars.

The socio-economic situations then and now were similar. Both the 'tween-wars Germany & today's U.S. were suffering through dire economic times. The European nations who defeated Germany made Germany pay reparations for the first world war. It appears we will be paying our own "reparations" to China because of our profligate borrowing.

Beginning in 1929, all of Europe & the U.S. began to suffer through a Great Depression; the situation is Germany was even worse. Unemployment doubled & the parties began bickering about the cost of unemployment benefits. We are now suffering through the Great Recession & the parties are bickering about unemployment benefits.

After the first world war, Germans lost faith in "establishment parties" & sought answers from outliers. The government could not hold things together. Similarly, tea partiers have formed their own loose "anti-establishment" groups & are fielding candidates who would not pass muster in the established Republican & Democratic parties. Paladino, of course, is the poster boy for the dismal tea party candidate parade. Meanwhile, popular approval of the American Congress is at an all-time low.

Germans accused the Weimer government of betraying their nation by signing the Treaty of Versailles. Today's tea partiers think our government is illegitimate; they think the President is not even an American, and they know he is not "one of them."

In Germany, radicals like Hitler promised the people they would return Germany to its pre-World War I glory. In this country, tea partiers & their candidates vow "to take our country back." Just as Hitler was militaristic, so are today's tea partiers, carrying guns to political rallies, forming militias in the Hinterlands, & looking for leaders like Sarah Palin & Sharron Angle who pepper their speeches with incendiary words & phrases like "lock-and-load" and "target" and "bulls-eye" and "revolution." The entire right wing is obsessed with the Second Amendment, as if that were the only amendment that mattered. At the same time, many right-wingers see the military as the best solution to every foreign problem. John McCain is hardly the only conservative singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." In both 1930s Germany & the modern U.S., many people view jingoism as sensible public policy.

Germany had a significant ethnic minority to scapegoat, & Hitler encouraged the centuries-old bigotry against Jews. Though he was not religious himself, he borrowed from Martin Luther's playbook (Luther became a horrible anti-Semite) & named a Lutheran anti-Semitic bishop to head the German church. We have quite a few minorities to choose from, and the right enjoys scapegoating them all. The other day a Fox "News" host said, "All terrorists are Muslims." As far as I know, he still has his job. While it's unacceptable to specifically scapegoat black Americans & Jews, the tea party is not immune from doing so. Much of the animus against President Obama is based on his race, and talk-show pundits like Glenn Beck & Rush Limbaugh make racist statements about him.

In Germany, big money interests secretly funded Hitler's Nazi party. (Many of those financial backers came from Europe & the U.S.) In this country, the Supreme Court has just made secret funding of politicians legal, and we're seeing the effects in this election.

Tea partiers like to paint Hitler mustaches on President Obama. But it seems much more apt to apply little brush mustaches to their own upper lips. Although the causes of the economic crises in Germany & in the U.S. were different, the early political responses appear to be much the same. Most important, the attitudes of the so-called populists of both eras are identical. We should worry.

Update: the news of Angela Merkel's speech on the failure of multiculturalism, linked here & below, suggests another layer of connections between then & now.