Eight Years Ago

A blast from my writing past.

I write.

I write and write and write. This Substack, articles, books, ad scripts, tv scripts, tweets, threads, and eldrich scrolls summoning dark forces from the vast deep, written in the blood of virgins, deep in my underground lair. (Well, the last bit may be a slight exaggeration, but if the water table wasn’t so high around these parts, you can bet your last golden guilder I’d have an underground lair.)

In creating this Substack, I’m trying to consolidate as much of this into one place as possible, and in pursuit of that, I have been trying to track down almost everything I’ve written in the last 8 years.

I’d honestly forgotten I’d ever even had a Medium account, but I did and had posted there as late as 2021. This piece isn’t much analysis, but it reflects what my historian's brain was piecing together. I was specifically looking into the 1933 German elections and comparing them to the 2016 primary election.

This Medium piece from 2016 holds up very, very well as a warning of what both Trump was then, and what he and his movement have become now:

Red Hats, Brown Shirts

Richard Evans wrote a magisterial history of the Third Reich that keeps haunting me, and what everyone dismisses as edge cases and bourgeoisie anti-Trump panic keeps echoing around. I’m not going Full Godwin, and I’m not saying Donald Trump is Hitler. The differences are obvious; Hitler had normal-sized hands, and didn’t have Twitter.

As the political climate keeps racing toward the cliff, I thought I’d post a handful of excerpts by Evans on the 1933 German elections for your consideration.

The election campaign was fought in an atmosphere of feverish, unprecedented excitement. Goebbels and the Nazi Party organization pulled out all the stops. In speech after speech, attended by crowds of up to 20,000 in the larger cities, Hitler ranted against the iniquities of the Weimar Republic, its fatal internal divisions, its multiplicity of warring factions and self-interested parties, its economic failure, its delivery of national humiliation.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Locations 4752–4755). Penguin Group.

In place of all this, he shouted, democracy would be overcome, the authority of the individual personality reasserted.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Locations 4755–4756). Penguin Group.

Hitler and his Party offered a vague but powerful rhetorical vision of a Germany united and strong, a movement that transcended social boundaries and overcame social conflict, a racial community of all Germans working together, a new Reich that would rebuild Germany’s economic strength and restore the nation to its rightful place in the world.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Locations 4757–4759). Penguin Group.

It was a message that summed up everything that many people felt was wrong with the Republic, and gave them the opportunity to register the profundity of their disillusion with it by voting for a movement that was its opposite in every respect.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Locations 4761–4762). Penguin Group.

Antisemitic slogans would be used when addressing groups to whom they might have an appeal; where they were clearly not working, they were abandoned. The Nazis adapted according to the response they received; they paid close attention to their audiences, producing a whole range of posters and leaflets designed to win over different parts of the electorate. They put on film shows, rallies, songs, brass bands, demonstrations and parades.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Locations 4767–4770). Penguin Group.

As the campaign reached its climax, the Nazis, driven by a degree of commitment that exceeded even that of the Communists, outdid all other parties in their constant, frenetic activism and the intensity of their propaganda effort.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Locations 4772–4774). Penguin Group.

Sympathetic newspapers registered the result as a ‘world sensation’ that announced a new phase of Germany’s history.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Location 4794). Penguin Group.

The Nazi Party had established itself with startling suddenness in September 1930 as a catch-all party of social protest, appealing to a greater or lesser degree to virtually every social group in the land. Even more than the Centre Party, it succeeded in transcending social boundaries and uniting highly disparate social groups on the basis of a common ideology, above all but not exclusively within the Protestant majority community, as no other party in Germany had managed to do before. Already weakened in the aftermath of the inflation, the bourgeois parties, liberal and conservative, proved unable to retain their support in the face of the economic catastrophe that had broken over Germany towards the end of 1929.

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (Kindle Locations 4860–4865). Penguin Group.