In recent months, Germany’s Weimar Republic has been increasingly invoked as an analogy to the present political moment in the United States. Some have described former President Donald Trump’s supporters as fascists, while a recent editorial in the New York Times labelled their refusal to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s election victory as a modern-day version of the “stab-in-the-back” myth— the legend that “internal enemies” caused Germany’s defeat in the First World War.
The temptation to make these comparisons is understandable. How better to express the fear that the American republic is in danger, and that political violence on the streets might become more widespread, than by comparing today’s situation to the best-known historical example of a “failed” democracy that ceded to fascism?
