How Democracy Slowly Melted Away in 1930s Germany

Modern American fascists

The recent fall of democracy in Georgia is prompting some folks to raise the alarm over the fate of democracy. Thom Hartmann, host of the show Democracy Now! (left bias, high fact accuracy) on Free Speech TV, writes about this bit of history and the parallels with Nazi Germany and the fall of democracy there. Hartmann writes:

In light of what Georgia’s legislature and Governor Brian Kemp just did to crush democracy in that state, you will want to read what a brilliant reporter wrote in the 1950s about how the Nazis took over Germany. It illustrates what the GOP is doing with vivid detail.

The Nazis corrupted the political system and took it over, bit by bit, gradually drawing the people along with them, and packing the courts with partisans in a way that was shockingly banal and totally resonant with today.

And then, in a relative instant, they changed the laws so it was all irreversible.

This was Chicago reporter Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination, after he got to know real Germans who’d lived through the years of the Nazis.

An American Jew of German ancestry, and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany 7 years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

Georgia legislature the power to decide who won elections in that state, regardless of how the vote turned out.

It was introduced into the House, passed the House; introduced into the Senate, passed the Senate; sent to the Governor and signed by Governor Brian Kemp… all in less than one day.

Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing a similar process:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security...." 

The German survivor continues, as if he’d been living in Georgia or Iowa or Wisconsin for the past decade: 

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ..." 

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. 

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. 

One day it is over his head."

A week ago, we all thought we had a fine constitutional republic that had just been battered a little bit by a crazy billionaire con man.

Today, we’re discovering that throughout the past five years — and really since 2001 with Bush’s PATRIOT Act/torture/war/wiretap response to 9/11 — we’ve been incrementally changing our country with every Republican administration, particularly at the state level, and most Americans didn’t even realize it.

We are farther along in the process than most Americans understand. America has now sunk so low in the rankings of democratic nations because of the way Republicans have rigged state governments and use the filibuster in the US Senate that we are as dysfunctional as Argentina or Hungary.

This, Mayer’s German informant suggests, is how fascism will always take over a nation.

"You see, one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."

Thus came the final opportunity for genuine fascists like Kemp to move and move quickly.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You're an alarmist.’"

Meanwhile, Florida is trying to pass SB90, which would require everybody in the state to re-register to vote for every election.

Are the parallels between 1930s Germany and America in 2021 fairly close, or are there major differences that render this analogy false?