BONUS Episode: Hitler Destroyed Democracy in Months. Will Trump Follow His Playbook?
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In this January bonus episode, Brad and Dan discuss the serious and humorous aspects of contemporary politics, including an in-depth examination of Timothy Ryback's article 'How Hitler Dismantled Democracy in 53 Days.' They draw parallels between the rise of Hitler and Trump's presidency while considering the precarious state of democracy in the U.S. They also explore light-hearted topics like the debate over Die Hard being a Christmas movie and grievances like the proliferation of electric bikes and the pitfalls of Instagram.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, our January bonus episode.
And subscribers, we're here.
We're ready.
We're going to talk about some serious and not serious things.
If you're not a subscriber yet, make sure and do so so you can listen to this entire episode along with our other bonus content, our almost 800 episode archive, our ad-free listening, and an invite to the Discord server.
So I'm here today with my co-host.
How's it going, Dan?
Good, Brad.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, as everybody probably knows.
It's good to be with everybody.
Good to be with you, Brad.
We're like recording in the, I guess it's like, it's not late, late evening, but it's dark.
So I feel like it's late, which just makes me kind of weirder.
So we'll see.
We'll see how this goes.
It's like six something year time, which is like an hour from bedtime for you.
So this is, this is a who knows what's going to happen situation.
I'm pushing it.
And I have to have that pre-bedtime nap now, you know, where like you fall asleep on the TV, like on the couch watching the TV like 30 minutes before you go to bed.
So we're cutting into that, man.
I can already see you watching TV and your daughter being like, Dad, get up.
I'm just resting my eyes.
I'm just resting my eyes.
I do that thing where like you've been snoring for 30 minutes and somebody comes in, you act like you weren't asleep, like you're fooling anybody.
I'm doing it.
I'm going to do the dishes.
Just give me a minute.
All right.
Well, we're going to begin today talking about something serious.
We're going to try.
And that is an article from The Atlantic, January 8th, by the historian, Timothy Ryback.
It's titled, How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days.
So, we're on the eve of Trump's inauguration.
I want to make some comparisons, talk about the similarities, the differences, and what to expect.
Well then, because we all need this, we're going to have a little bit of fun and we're going to do a late Festivus.
So we know we owe you Festivus.
And I still get emails, Dan, about cauliflower rice, quote unquote, a thing that does not exist.
It's words people put together.
They say cauliflower rice as if that's a thing or corresponds to reality somehow.
It does not.
And yet people still email me and show me, you know.
I still think that if you could learn to live with riced cauliflower, you'd be okay.
If you could just turn rice into a verb and be okay with it.
Rice is not a verb, and it is not an adjective.
It's a noun.
It's a thing that Asian cultures and others have been eating for thousands of years.
We do not need Janice or Becky telling us not to eat more carbs.
Just leave it alone, okay?
Thank you very much.
If you want to eat cauliflower...
I think cauliflower is delicious.
I'm just saying, don't call it rice.
Okay?
All right.
I'm glad you've brought all this up already.
So the last part of the episode will be none other than Dan Miller answering listener questions.
And so some of you put it in questions in the Discord, you've emailed them, and Dan is there answering and, as always, does an amazing job.
So let's get serious here for a second, Dan.
How Hitler Dismantled Democracy in 53 Days.
It's by Timothy Ryback, who's a historian who's been working on this for a long time.
He has a new book out about Hitler's rise to power, and he's written a number of other books about Nazism in Germany and Hitler himself.
He talks about the fact that it really did take just about two months, a month and three and a half weeks to basically dismantle Germany's very, very new and very struggling Weimar democracy.
You kind of go step by step about how this happened.
And so I think you and I can go back and forth today talking about things we noticed and things we didn't.
So you want to go first or you want me to pick one of mine?
Yeah, well, one sort of an overarching theme, and I'm going to go way back to my first philosophical love, the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
And we've talked about him before a little bit, but he had a lot of philosophical reflections on democracy that were influential for me when I was doing my doctoral work and writing about democratic theory.
But one of the things he pointed out is that democracy can destroy democracy.
He likens it to kind of an autoimmune response, right?
And this is what we see in this account with Hitler, which is a really fascinating account, a lot more detailed than I know it.
I think lots of people like me know that Hitler was democratically elected and used the mechanisms of government to be able to consolidate his power and so forth.
But this kind of step-by-step walkthrough really shows this.
And the difficulty with that, like an overarching difficulty, is the temptation is to try to protect democracy from that, which usually undermines democracy.
You get somebody who seizes power or, you know, a military junta somewhere that says, oh, we're just going to take control to preserve democracy, even though they undermine it.
So I guess the takeaway is how fragile democratic systems and institutions are.
But I want to start with something that it highlighted.
It said that Hitler picked up on the language in this new constitution that said that the government is the will of the people.
Now, no doubt what that's supposed to mean is something like, you know, something like John Locke would say that, you know, government is by the will or the consent of the governed, that a government is only legitimate if those who experience its laws and rules and so forth consent to that.
More contemporary theorists develop that and say that, you know, it should be participatory to some extent.
That's why you elect people and so forth.
The idea is...
That if you are subject to laws and rules and so forth, you have a part in drafting them.
And that's a kind of democratic vision.
And what he does is, in my view, this isn't in the article, but this is what I see, is sort of turn that into the kind of tautology that operates in populism or nationalism.
And just like you can hear the same statement with two inflections.
One, government is the will of the people.
Government is subject to the will of the people.
That's what it should be.
Or whoever has the government, whoever is the government, is by definition.
The will of the people.
That person becomes the representative of the people.
And that's the model of Hitler's authoritarianism.
That's the model of populism and nationalism when the leader is like the embodiment of the nation.
And that's very much what Hitler did.
And I think that that's the logic of this.
And the article goes on to talk about these laws that he wanted to pass that basically gave him autocratic power and so on and the steps he had to go through to do that.
But I think that's the phrase that really stuck out to me was government is the will of the people.
And how...
You can look at that two radically different ways.
And Hitler picks on or picks up on that ambiguity, that slippage in that language to kind of rationalize or justify what he was doing.
So that stood out to me.
And I thought that was really significant and significant parallels to what we see now.
Well, let me jump in on that.
And I should have done this before we got going.
But most of you know this, but let's just make sure we got it right.
We're in the very beginnings of 1933. It's January 30th.
He's appointed the 15th Chancellor of the Weimar Republic.
And as many of you know, there's a kind of parliamentary system in which Germany and many other European countries to this day have more than two parties.
Three, four, five, six parties might get votes and might actually get representatives in the parliament in any given election.
And Hitler's party, the National Socialists, they gained quite a few seats in the parliament, but it was by no means a kind of winning 90% of the vote or 80% of the vote.
It was not a mandate.
It was not anything like that.
And they did not have- It was a, I think it said 37%, right?
37% of the vote just in his party.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so the seats amounted to 37% of the legislative body.
And let me just read it from the piece just so we get it right.
Okay.
Though the vote share of his National Socialist Party had been rising, in the election of September 1930, following the crash of 1929, they'd increased their representation in the Reichstag almost ninefold from 12 to 107.
In July 1932, they had more than doubled their mandate to 230 seats.
They were still far from a majority.
Their seats amounted to only 37% of the legislative body, and the larger right-wing coalition that the Nazi party was part of controlled barely 51%.
His party, 37%.
If you put him together with allied parties, like a central right party, they would have 51%.
This is not a situation where Hitler's national socialists have 65%, 75%, 85%.
Okay, so that's number one.
Hitler becomes the leader in a kind of roundabout way.
It was not a given, and I think one of the things I appreciate most about Ryback's writing here is he shows us the historical contingencies where...
There's a chance Hitler is not chancellor, where he is not in power, where none of this happens.
And I think that's the best kind of history is to remember none of these things were given.
And that rings true for me when I think of Trump.
When I think of Trump 2016 and I think of Russia's interference in terms of the social media stuff, when I think of Comey, when I think of so many things that happened in that election, that means there's a really good chance we never get Trump, and yet we do, right?
And so on and so forth.
Okay.
Now, they don't have two-thirds, so they can't change the Constitution.
So we'll get to that in a minute.
But you're talking about the will of the people.
And you picked up on something that I think is really important.
The will of the people or whoever's in government is the will of the people.
And whoever has the power of the government carries out the will of the people because they've been voted in.
There's a book I've been reading.
There's a scholar whose work I've been devouring lately, and that is Ivan Kroshtev, who's a Bulgarian, but who's spent his life basically studying the collapse of the Soviet Union, what happened after 1989 in the Berlin Wall, and the formation of things like the European Union, the quote-unquote new democracies of Central Europe, Slovakia, the Czech Republic.
Poland, and so on and so forth.
But one of the things he points out in his work that just really strikes me, Dan, as you were talking, is that one of the tactics of someone like Putin and others like Orban is not to imitate democracy all the time.
When they need to imitate democracy, they do.
Oh, I'm Orban.
I was voted in.
I'm Hitler.
I was voted in.
What do you mean?
But then, when they want to subvert democracy, they parody it.
It becomes a parody.
And they start playing on words and playing on little soft spots in institutions and in norms and processes and holding up a mirror that allows for the kind of incoherencies to be seen.
And once they are, they seize on them and they're like, see?
I'm going to do this.
What are you going to do about it?
I was democratically elected.
You can't stop me.
I'm going to talk about this more in the future.
I don't feel like I have my thoughts fully formed on this, but when I hear you talk about this rhetorical sleight of hand from the will of the people to being the will of the people, I feel like there's a kind of imitation slipping into parody there, where it's like...
You're subverting democracy through democracy, yes, but you're doing so by almost making fun of democracies like a willingness to include elements that could destroy it.
You brought up Derrida, but even in this essay, Ryback quotes Goebbels, and Goebbels says, let me find the quote here, he says, the big joke on democracy is that it gives its moral enemies the means to its own destruction.
He uses the word joke, which reminds me of parody, and I think anyway, I'll have more to say about this in the future, but that really struck me.
Other thoughts?
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