An American Weimar Republic

German man (circa 1922/23) with wheelbarrow full of money for a loaf of bread

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword, the other is by debt.

~ John Adams

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What was a disaster for Weimar was good, very good for us.

~ Gregor Strasser, Senior Nazi Party leader

What are the logical comparisons and consequences we can understand between the economic, moral and intellectual devolution of Germany under the Weimar Republic that ushered in the National Socialism of Adolf Hitler and a post-Ronald Reagan America (since 1990), that continued the Democratic socialism of Wilson, FDR and LBJ, which eventually ushered in the Age of Obama?

Professor Allan Bloom (d. 1992), author of the modern-day prophecy "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987), did not know Barack Obama, but as a prophet to the academy, Bloom foretold that intellectually decadent societies like Revolutionary France (1789-99), the Weimar Republic (1919-33) and America were ripe for demagogic radicals to fill the moral vacuum inside the souls of Europeans and Americans.

Bloom wrote:

But the Weimar Republic, so attractive in its left-wing version to Americans, also contained intelligent persons, who were attracted, at least in the beginning, to fascism, for reasons very like those motivating the Left ideologues, reflections on autonomy and value creation. Once one plunges into the abyss, there is no assurance whatsoever that equality, democracy or socialism will be found on the other side. At very best, self-determination is indeterminate. … Both [Heidegger and Nietzsche] helped to constitute that ambiguous Weimar atmosphere in which liberals looked like simpletons and anything was possible for people who sang of the joy of the knife in cabarets.

The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed virtually destroyed the Weimar Republic. The Crash had a terrible impact on the American economy, but its negative effects were obscured by America having propped up the Weimar Republic with huge loans in 1924 (the Dawes Plan) and in 1929 (the Young Plan). Furthermore, repeated socialist uprisings and massive hyperinflation moved France and Belgium troops to annex the Ruhr in 1923. Now America needed those loans back to help her declining economy.

Doesn't 1929 Weimar sound eerily similar to America 2011 with China owning most of our debt? A few weeks ago China unexpectedly dumped 97 percent of our T-bills. What will happen to our already bankrupt economy when China calls in the trillions in loans we owe them? Answer: America will become the Weimar Republic of the 21st century where people will need a wheelbarrow load of money just to buy bread.

Weimar in the 1920s lacked a conventional, broadly based conservative party. The DNVP was extreme, regressive and completely detached from its traditional political base as evident with the election of the moribund President Paul von Hindenburg and his lackey appointees – Chancellors Bruening, Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher – until a no-confidence vote in the Reichstag in January 1933 forced a new coalition of leftist radicals (nationalists and communists) bringing to the forefront the only man with the charisma and authority to keep Germany together – the megalomaniac Adolf Hitler.

The Weimar Republic was also infamous for its cultural experimentation and bohemian values, which alienated many traditionalists. Hitler and the Nazis repeatedly exploited these social divisions. The Old Guard also underestimated the ambitious Hitler. It was an astonishing miscalculation. They realized too late that it was the Nazis who used them.

There is a wise saying that "In troubled times, the fearful and naïve are always drawn toward charismatic radicals." A paralyzing fear of Bolshevism dominated both the old and the new elites during the Weimar period. Likewise, America, having elected a real conservative Republican (Reagan) in 1980, irrationally followed his two successful terms with a series of four presidents who were essentially three Democratic socialists and a Marxist who all embraced the progressive, socialist and Keynesian promiscuous spending policies that doomed the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and which have brought America to the brink of economic catastrophe in 2011 under President Obama.

Is Obama destroying America's economy on purpose? Regrettably, yes.

New figures released last Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office show debt rising to 190 percent of the gross domestic product by 2035. The annual long-term budget outlook forecasts a surge in public debt this year that will rise to 70 percent of GDP by the end of fiscal 2011, compared to 62 percent by the end of 2010. In contrast, by the end of 2011, Greece's debt will be around 150 percent of GDP – and that nation is on the verge of national bankruptcy, ironically propped up by Germany.

It was the Cassandra-figure Winston Churchill who in the 1920s predicted the rise of Hitler and his bloodlust Gestapo and Brownshirts to a skeptical, indolent Europe. Nobody listened to Churchill until it was too late.

Borrowing a page from Hitler's playbook, Barack Obama, in a speech delivered in Colorado Springs on July 2, 2008, called for his own personal police force:

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded [as America's combined military forces].

Few Americans realize that truly Obama fulfilled that campaign promise and today has legions of paid bureaucrats ("Brownshirts") sworn to his allegiance just like Hitler's Brownshirts and Gestapo of the 1920s and '30s.

History has repeatedly taught humanity that nature abhors a vacuum – whether it was Greece, Rome, Weimar, Europe, Russia, China, Iran or America – and that the degree nations have departed from God, the Bible, veritas, natural law: the synthesis of legality and morality, was the degree that they embraced charismatic radicals who always led the people down the path to perdition.

In the end, socialists are socialists first. If Strasser were a Democrat of today perhaps he would say, What was a disaster for America was good, very good for us (Obama and the Progressive Revolution).