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A Better Analogy Than Weimar Germany...

I’ve written about the similarities I see between late Weimar Germany and contemporary America before, which definitely got a rise out of Cliopatria’s readers. I see this week that Brian Leiter and many others are starting to make the analogy more strongly and confidently as well. Given speeches like Zell Miller’s, which I think really did have many of the cadences and tropes of 20th Century fascism and militarism, it’s a hard analogy to pass up.

But there’s another analogy out there that in some ways bothers me even more, and seems even more to the point, and that’s to the 1948 elections in South Africa.

Doubtless this seems like an equally inflammatory comparison, given that the victory of the mostly Afrikaner National Party in 1948 was the beginning of the imposition of the racist policy of apartheid as the official doctrine of the South African state. Apartheid and racism is largely immaterial to my analysis, however.

The important analogy is that the National Party that won in 1948 arose out of the collision of four decades of nationalist organizing with the social history of Afrikaners following the Anglo-Boer War. The interests behind the National Party went through various internal conflicts and struggles before 1948, and in fact, the party that won in 1948 had been in the 1930s an extremist splinter faction of an earlier Afrikaner political party. In whatever form, however, Afrikaner parties and nationalists after 1913 consistently opposed bland, centrist parties that drew primarily on more socially and politically liberal English-speaking white support on one hand and organized white labor for the bulk of their political strength. (In the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, the few non-whites who still had the franchise had been systematically stripped of it, long before apartheid came into being.)

By 1948, the National Party drew on a highly energized base of support whose cultural and social identity was strongly aligned not just towards the imposition of harsh racial segregation but towards cultural and social conservatism across the board. The National Party won power in 1948 on a minority of the white votes due to splits in the opposition and a generally complacent attitude from those in power.

It the aftermath of this election that I think provides a very disturbing and relevant lesson for us. It’s well known that the National Party proceeded to institute apartheid, but less well known by people who do not study South African history that apartheid was hardly a sharp or revolutionary break with government policy from 1910 to 1948. Legally mandated segregation was already a central doctrine of the state; apartheid simply took that to new extremes of both ideology and structure.

What is more relevant is that the National Party used its control of the state to very rapidly advance the idea that white society in South Africa faced a dire emergency that required an urgent response which included changes to the structure of the government and significant increases in the power of the central apparatus of the state to respond to what it deemed imminent threats. The National Party quickly rammed through a dizzying array of legislation that gave the government sweeping new powers. These changes had another secondary and in my reading entirely planned effect: they essentially transformed white-ruled South Africa into a one-party state by placing structural and ideological obstacles in the path of white political opponents.

The consequence of these changes, which happened with startling speed, was that the white South African electorate found itself by the mid-1960s locked into either supporting apartheid—an essentially endless war against the non-white majority—or pursuing opposition outside of electoral politics. There were a few who kept on opposing the National Party from within the political system, but their opposition was symbolic at best. I think even as early as 1961, and certainly by 1976, many white South Africans knew full well, even if they couldn’t admit it to themselves, that apartheid was utterly unsustainable, not to mention deeply immoral. But now they were trapped inside of it: a fervent, substantial minority of the white community had seized the state and rebuilt into a squalid fortress, locking everyone, white and black, into a deadly, destructive prison. A short-term “emergency” had been allowed to turn into a long-term one-party authoritarian dead-end. The difference between Nazism and apartheid is that Nazism was so haphazard, so slapdash, so improvised that its long-term stability was always going to be in doubt. Apartheid was doomed, too, but the National Party hegemony over the South African state lasted for four decades.

The current leadership of the Republican Party strikes me as being equally capable of sustaining a long-term authoritarian "emergency" whose ultimate fate is certain but whose misery could be horribly prolonged. The speeches at the Republican Convention, most especially those by Giulani, Miller and Cheney, made it clear that the current leadership of the Republican Party is rolling the dice and going for broke. They’re not going to compromise here and bend there, acknowledge dissent on some points or soften their policies where prudent. They’re pushing a total, rigid program of social and political transformation that serves the needs and desires of a sizeable minority of Americans and imposes their authority over the will of the majority. Like the National Party in South Africa, they may be able to accomplish this by taking advantage of the peculiarities of American electoral politics—and like the National Party, they may have both the will and the methods to permanently alter the structure of American constitutional democracy so as to lock their control of the government for as long a perpetuity as they can manage.

Every society has moments where there is a chance that the pendulum of political change will stop swinging from side to side, where forces and circumstances align that threaten to break the pendulum altogether, where the rules of the political game get so thoroughly violated and discarded that the game comes to an end. When that happens, a lot more than the pendulum of change tends to get broken, and people decades hence will find themselves shackled to a future that they did not choose, do not want, but cannot escape.