“Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews,” I told an Israeli politician recently who asked me to characterize the Republican frontrunner. The comparison seems more apt every day. The title of this note refers to Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, “The Resistible Rise of Alfonso Ui,” portraying Hitler as gangster in the mode of Al Capone.
Donald Trump has tapped an ugly mood in America’s middle class, whose prospects have dimmed noticeably since the 2008 financial crisis. For the first time since the Great Depression Americans are losing ground that they cannot regain. Median household income fell by nearly 10% from 1999 through 2011 and remains far below previous peaks. Home ownership is down from 69% in 2008 to just 64%. The rate of participation in the labor force has fallen from 66.5% before the crisis to just 62%, the lowest since the 1970s. A generation of young people has graduated from college with mediocre earnings prospects and mountains of student debt…
There is a touch of Weimar in the air. The Germans of the 1920s didn’t understand why they were impoverished and humiliated. Germany was Europe’s fastest-growing economy before World War I, its center of innovation, its greatest military power. How could it have lost the war, swallowed painful reparations payments, and given up huge swaths of its territory? The Germans were in a mean mood and they wanted the nastiest attack dog in politics. Hitler accommodated them. Even worse, the German Establishment, led by Franz von Papen, thought it could use Hitler, and invited him to form a government in January 1933.
We’re a long way from Germany in the late 1920s, to be sure, but the parallels are disturbing.
