As the US faces a pivotal election, parallels with history raise stark questions about the resilience of democratic institutions and the global impact of America’s choices.
No one knows how the US presidential election will turn out. One possibility is that the Trump bubble will finally burst, allowing for a return to normalcy in America and around the world. But it is also possible that the United States will lurch toward a radical militarised authoritarianism that would establish a new norm for despots elsewhere.
Political scientists are hardly the only ones to see worrisome historical resonances here. According to Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, General John Kelly, the former president “fits the definition of fascist,” by which he means “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.”
Modern US-style fascism has obvious roots in the past. In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth was drawing on real historical figures and events to present his counterfactual scenario in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president on a radical isolationist, anti-Semitic “America First” program. And some analysts and historians would look back even further, not just to the 1930s, but a century earlier, to the populist rhetoric and promiscuous racism of President Andrew Jackson.
In any case, episodes of democratic collapse always give rise to the same anguished question. Has some particular feature of the culture gradually eroded the political system, or are we dealing with a deeper, innate human tendency that can only ever be held in check by the right institutional arrangements (like those brilliantly outlined by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in the Federalist Papers)?
The iconic case of a descent into barbarism is, of course, interwar Germany. To explain the country’s slide into political violence, fascism, militarism, and ultimately genocide, some analysts have pointed to inherent German cultural proclivities – from Martin Luther’s fierce anti-Semitism to nineteenth-century German liberals’ abdication in the face of raw political power and Bismarck’s “blood and iron.”
Like this year’s US contest, the German elections of the 1930s were very close. In each case, Adolf Hitler and his party won a significantly smaller share of the vote than Trump is likely to receive in November. After winning a 37% share in the July 1932 election, the Nazi Party slid to 33% in the November 1932 contest. Even in the unfree election of March 1933 – when the Communist Party was banned and voters were subjected to mass intimidation – the Nazi vote was under 44%. Hitler himself won only 30% of the vote in the first round of the spring 1932 presidential election, and 37% in the second round.
Thus, Hitler was not swept into power by a vast wave of support. Rather, he owed his political ascent to the response from traditional institutions: the army, the bureaucracy, the police force, and above all the business community.
Like corporate America today, German captains of industry were divided. Many were suspicious of the Nazis, but even they didn’t fully recognise the radicalism of Hitler’s agenda. Georg Solmssen, the CEO of Germany’s largest bank (Deutsche Bank), had been baptised as a Protestant, but his grandfather had been a rabbi, and his father had been a banker who went into finance because Jews were excluded from the civil service. This calm, intelligent man saw the Nazis as a threat largely because of the socialist and populist elements of their program; their rabid anti-Semitism, he assumed, was just a tactical electoral ploy.
Solmssen did not comprehend what Nazism was about until April 1933, when it was too late. He was hardly alone. Many decent people lacked the imagination to grasp the extent of the violence that Hitler would soon unleash. The assumption within the German establishment was that the demagogue could be tamed. But this dangerous view was based on an illusion.
After all, the broader political context had fundamentally changed. The post-World War I reparations system, established at the 1919 Versailles peace conference, had severely constrained Germany and limited its room for maneuver; but by 1933, the international system had already disintegrated. Two years earlier, the Japanese army had provoked a border incident in Manchuria and then flooded across the frontier, ignoring the League of Nations and its covenant forbidding “aggression.”
Moreover, with the global economy suffering through the Great Depression, there were few incentives to keep playing by the rules of the old economic system. Nationalism and autarky thus became increasingly attractive as costless strategies to pump up German living standards.
Again, there are ominous parallels with the current moment. Most, if not all, international institutions are showing signs of their age, and the United Nations system has been paralysed by divisions over Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah, and – perhaps soon – Iran.
Unlike in the early 1930s, however, the world economy is still very much interconnected and interdependent. Thus, any move toward genuine autarky would not be painless. On the contrary, the costs would be glaringly obvious to Americans and the rest of the world, and to financial markets above all.
In this context, it is stunning to hear prominent financial figures like BlackRock’s Larry Fink argue that the US election “really doesn’t matter” for markets. Why won’t leading figures like Warren Buffett come out and say something? They seem to be reproducing the behaviour of German business leaders before January 1933.
Precisely because international economic connections can restrain national political action, severing them risks causing a major financial shock. Depending on how this election plays out, there could soon come a time when Americans (and everyone else) will be very grateful for the constraints that come with a globalised economy. Few events are more sobering – and more discrediting to those pushing bad policy – than a financial meltdown that destroys voters’ livelihoods and degrades their living standards.
Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University.