The U.S. Mustn’t Follow Weimar Germany and Ancient Rome

In its moment of crisis, the American republic can find warnings but also inspiration in the past.

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He’s the author of “Hannibal and Me.”Read more opinionFollow @andreaskluth on Twitter

Since the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, America’s institutions, leaders and citizens have been groaning under one of the most severe tests in the history of the republic. Are there lessons to draw on from the past?

History, according to a famous aphorism, may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Here, then, is my own personal musing on two republics that failed, with consequences for the whole world: pre-Imperial Rome between 133 BCE and 27 BCE, and Weimar Germany between 1919 and 1933.

Let’s start with the latter and get the obvious disclaimer out of the way. No, Donald Trump is not another Adolf Hitler. And although some individuals in the mob that stormed the Capitol clearly have fascistic tendencies, Trump’s followers aren’t Brownshirts or Nazis.

But there’s at least one crucial parallel between Trumpism and Hitlerism. It’s theshameless embrace of what Hitler in his book “Mein Kampf” called the Big Lie. This is distinct from the ordinary fibbing that all humans do every day, and also from Trump’s egregious but banal mendacity before the November election. Instead, a Big Lie is so “colossal” (Hitler’s term) in inverting reality that the human mind struggles to grasp its audacity, leading many people to succumb.More fromJPMorgan Had a Good Bad YearWar on Terror Teaches How to Fight Hate GroupsJPMorgan’s $3 Billion Profit Booster Comes With a CatchHow to Make Google and Facebook Care About Privacy

For Hitler and the Nazis the Big Lie was the “stab-in-the-back-myth.” It said that Imperial Germany was never defeated in World War I, and that it collapsed, surrendered and suffered the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty only because Jews and socialists at home betrayed their country. These domestic traitors were henceforth the new enemies. They had to be eliminated to Make Germany Great Again.

Trump’s Big Lie is that the November election was stolen from him — that he, not Joe Biden, is the rightful president for the next four years. All Americans who see it differently, including judges and civil servants who resisted Trump’s entreaties to reject the vote tallies, are what the socialists and Jews were to the Nazis: domestic enemies.

For a republic, a Big Lie is less like an exploding bomb and more like a corrosive acid. It works slowly. Hitler failed in his attempted coup, the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, and even spent time in prison. He then kept failing for several more years. Incidentally, the Nazis never won more than 37.3% in an election. But Hitler nonetheless seized power in 1933.  

If it took 14 years for the Weimar Republic to crumble, the terminal decline of the Roman Republic lasted a century. One analog between it and today’s America is an unhealthy rise in inequality, as rich Romans increasingly bought up the small farms of Italy and turned their former owners into plebeians in the slums of Rome. The U.S. equivalent is what Trump has called “American carnage.”

With this inequality came increasingly brazen corruption by the newly super-rich in Rome’s senate, assemblies and courts. This led to the rise of populism as a political style, as “populares” appealed directly to the mob to gain power and conservative “optimates” resisted them. Like many populists today, the populares — from the Gracchi brothers to Julius Caesar — were usually themselves members of the patrician upper class, but cynically exploited anti-elitism to amass power.

Then as now, taboos kept being broken. Political violence became commonplacein the Roman Forum and backstreets. And starting with Marius and Sulla, legions started being loyal to their commanders or charismatic individuals rather than the republic. An anxiety that this could also happen in Trump’s America recently motivated all ten living defense secretaries to issue a public warning against deploying the military in election disputes.

Once broken, taboos are hard to unbreak. And their damage is cumulative. Lies go unpunished, violence leaches from words into deeds, loyalties shift from country to parties or individuals. Gradually, the republic — its constitution, precedents and norms — becomes hollow. Citizens stop believing in it.

When that happens, as in Weimar and Rome, republics tend to expire quietly, sometimes even discreetly. Hitler never bothered to formally repeal the Weimar constitution of 1919, he just ignored it. Octavian, later known as Augustus, made a big show of keeping all the iconography of the Roman republic, including the senate, assemblies and magistrates. He didn’t call himself king but princeps, or “first.” But everybody knew that Roman liberty had ended.Opinion. Data. More Data.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email.EmailSign UpBy submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and to receive offers and promotions from Bloomberg.

The good news is that the American republic was built by founders who heeded exactly these warnings from the Roman past. That’s why Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym Publius — the name of the man who overthrew Rome’s monarchy in 509 BCE and became one of its two first republican consuls. It’s why, later, Americans made their citadel of democracy — the one ransacked last week — look Roman and named it after Rome’s Capitoline hill.

Their insight was that self-government and liberty are privileges that each generation must affirm and defend, in constant strife against the all-too-human lust for power by wannabe dictators. Hence the constitution’s checks and balances, hence their many reminders that citizens must strive for what they called “virtue,” or civic duty.

The record so far is promising. The American republic has survived for almost a quarter of a millennium, half as long as Rome’s. It has withstood insurgencies and conspiracies, a civil war, contested elections and presidential assassinations. And now it is facing the test the founders foresaw: an attempt, however buffoonish, at dictatorship.

The things that Weimar Germans and republican Romans omitted, Americans must now do. We must call the Big Lie just that, and kill it. We must re-sanctify republican taboos and punish their breakers. All this is in our power. If we rise to the occasion, America’s republic will indeed resemble the sword in this metaphor: The more it’s “pounded with a hammer, heated in the fire, thrust into cold water,” over and over, the stronger it becomes.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

By Andreas KluthJanuary 15, 2021, 1:00 AM EST

To contact the author of this story:
Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Nicole Torres at ntorres51@bloomberg.net