| Back to Eric's Home Page | Up to Site Map | $Date$ |
On August 19, 1934, 95% of the Germans who were registered to vote went to the polls and 90% (38 million) of adult German citizens voted to give Adolf Hitler comlete and total authority to rule Germany as he saw fit. Only 4.25 million Germans voted against this transfer of power to a totalitarian regime.Hitler's program was not a secret; nor were the means he proposed to use. 90% of the people voted for "Mein Kampf" and the Nuremberg rallies and the repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles and Kristallnacht; the mandate was overwhelming.
I do not find it not surprising that establishment historians and political scientists have largely failed to confront this stark fact. For to do so would be to expose the shakiness of the assumptions that underly our own political system.
The Weimar Republic's 1934 elections wrote a grim and final epitaph for the theory that constitutional democracy is a reliable guardian of individual liberty, or even sufficient to prevent deliberate genocide. The demonstration is given more point for Americans by the fact that the Weimar Republic's constitution was explicitly modelled on that of the United States.
Constitutional democracy was invented by the founding fathers of the United States because all previous systems had been found wanting. The verdict of history since has agreed with Winston Churchill's epigram that democracy is a terrible form of government, but eight times better than any other.
But constitutional democracy itself is not proof against the short-sightedness and moral blindness of its own people. This is not a new insight; two centuries ago Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", the book which effectively founded the modern study of history, found there its major theme.
What the willful self-destruction of Weimar Germany demonstrates is that the terminal instability of democracy is not a marginal or distant pheonomenon. A modern, educated, civilized, and cosmopolitan people in the heart of the liberal West can -- and will, at the behest of even a single, sufficiently skillful demagogue -- surrender their liberty and condemn millions of innocent victims to mass death.
In doing so, it raises a trenchant question. If constitutional democracy has failed so catastrophically to solve the problem of government, what system possibly can?
No one has yet improved on Max Weber's definition of government as an organization claiming a monopoly on the licit first use of force in a specified geographic region. The question of good government reduces to this: who can be trusted to wield the first use of force wisely and morally?
We already knew that kings, priests, emperors, and autocrats of all kinds have failed this test, as have noble classes and other oligarchies. We know from the aftermaths of the French and other revolutions that the sovereign people, unchecked by constitutional restraint on their tribunes' use of force, can be fully as arbitrary and vicious as any tyrant.
Weimar Germany demonstrates that constitutional restraint doesn't work either. One does not actually need Weimar Germany to make this point; the history of the U.S. itself should be sufficent to demonstrate it, at least to anyone honest enough to admit that the Founding Fathers did not intend for us to suffer under the weight of a stifling regulatory bureacracy, a redistributionist welfare state, and the IRS. But Weimar makes a more persuasive example, because even those willing to defend the U.S. Government's escalating abuses of power will hardly defend Nazi Germany.
I struggled with this question for years after I read Shirer. It seems
| Back to Eric's Home Page | Up to Site Map | $Date: 1997/08/04 22:33:50 $ |