One hundred years ago this week—the 8th and 9th of November 1923—Adolf Hitler and a group of his followers and associates attempted to seize control of the government of Bavaria, with the goal of setting off a march on Berlin to overthrow the Weimar Republic. This coup attempt—known as the Beer Hall Putsch, thanks to the Bürgerbräukeller (Citizens Brew Cellar) that was the site of many early Nazi Party meetings—resulted in the deaths of fifteen Nazis, a bystander, and four police officers, a brief and cushy stay in prison for Hitler and several of his fellow conspirators—including Rudolf Hess, who used the time to aid Hitler in the writing of Mein Kampf—and ultimately a reshaping of the Nazi movement from a small band of street brawlers into an effective political organization.
Hitler was tried in March of 1924 for high treason, given a five-year sentence, and released in December of that year, a punishment for treason and what in America would be called felony murder that indicated a permissive attitude toward would-be revolutionaries who refused to accept Germany as it was after the First World War.
The parallels with recent events are glaringly obvious for anyone outside of America’s current fascist movement. In both the rise of Nazism and of Trump’s MAGA cult, there are the same hatreds of the perceived racial Other, be they Jews or Hispanics and Muslims, the same obsession with stereotyped masculinity, along with a slavering worship of a strongman, as much as that strength is in fact an illusion, the same substitution of emotive notions of will in place of expertise, and as the storming of the Capitol Building illustrated, the same early incompetence when the leader’s bombast and bullying was not enough to cow opponents into submission.
Thus, the fascists among us have gained no sophistication beyond the low cunning that they acquired early on, a willingness to use violence and lies to shut down civil discourse, to exploit crises, and to run their movements and their nations full tilt off a cliff. We all may seek reassurance in the fact that Trump departed the White House at the end of his term and that he and his law-breaking followers are getting or may be anticipated soon to receive significant sentences, but Germans in the 1920s may have thought the same thing about their brush with a fascist takeover. We might indulge in counterfactual history and wonder what could have been done to prevent Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, but the more pressing concern is to stop Trumpism from succeeding today.
One bit of good news here is that unlike Hitler, Trump is an old man. Hitler was thirty-four years old when he led the 1923 putsch. Trump is seventy-seven. As Robert O. Paxton observes in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascist movements do not last beyond the demise of their leaders. The constant struggle that such movements require, along with the ever-increasing need to violence to silence doubt, is exhausting, and the cult of personality around the leader evaporates without constant reinforcement. Whatever may be the truth about Trump’s mental or physical health, the fact of time is against him.
But that is not enough. He could conceivably win a second term, and someone with a better understanding of the nation’s legal machinery might convince him that time to be more structured in his efforts to undermine our system.
What we have to do is to commit to and engage in such reforms that will make fascism undesirable.
There are many national parallels between Germany of the 1920s and the United States today to complement the common party characteristics named above. We have a large portion of our labor force for whom economic security is a fantasy. Planning for the future looks more and more like a waste of effort, with Social Security being both inadequate and a constant target of Republicans and individual retirement plans dependent on the bubble of continual growth. The working and middle classes cling to what little we have while being flooded with messages about how immigrants will take their jobs for the brief period until Artificial Intelligence tosses us all out of work. And the rich continue to get richer as they pontificate about how the rest of us ought to be happy with our freedom to enjoy their meager leavings.
If we do not wish to go through a completed rise and ultimate Götterdämmerung of fascism in this century, an experience that with present technology would risk all of human civilization, we must see to it that Trump and his co-conspirators suffer such legal penalties as our law makes available, but we also have to move to a model of government and society that sees us as successful only if all members can live at least a decent life, can enjoy the blessings of education and good health, and can participate in how this society is run. Inequalities, especially for people who have had a taste of a better life, justly create resentments, and fascism exploits that opportunity.
The Beer Hall Putsch should have been a complete failure. Instead, it resulted in a change of tactics, with the motivating distresses allowed to fester. We do not have to repeat the same errors.
Now if only the Democratic Party would give up their hatred of the left and accept that the only way to defeat fascism today is to offer a meaningful alternative.
Excellent and loaded with common sense.