“It seems to me in developed and semideveloped countries there is emerging a new kind of politics for which maybe the best taxonomic category would be right-wing populist nationalism,” said Stanley Payne, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why, voters ask, did the government allow so many bankers to behave like criminals in the first place? Why did it then bail out banks while letting car factories go under? Why is it welcoming millions of immigrants? Are there separate rules for the elites, defined by a hypermodern liberal worldview that ridicules the working class - and their traditional values - as yokels? The heady growth of the 2000s led Europeans and Americans to believe they were on firm economic ground the shattering of banks, real estate markets and governments in the wake of the crash left tens of millions of people at sea, angry at the institutions that had failed them, above all the politicians who claimed to be in charge. The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent global recession were nowhere nearly as painful as the Great Depression. “There is a tendency at times to try to fit current movements into understandable constructs - some refer to terrorist groups in the Middle East as Islamofascists - but scholars say there is a spectrum that includes right-wing nationalism, illiberal democracy and populist autocracy,” Peter Baker adds for The Times: Some didn’t want to.… At the same time, even the imminent threat of a fascist dictatorship couldn’t persuade the left-wing parties to join forces. In fact, many mainstream politicians recognized the danger but they failed to stop him. Some people today imagine that Hitler sneaked up on Germany, that too few people understood the threat. The elites were blamed for the resulting chaos, and the masses were ripe for a strongman to return order to society. This produced a widening cultural gap between the tradition-oriented working and middle classes and the cosmopolitan avant-garde - in politics, business and the arts - that reached a peak just when economic disaster struck. …All this happened as traditional ways of life and values were being shaken by the modernization of the 1920s. The Black Friday stock-market collapse of 1929 set off a global depression. To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today,” he writes for The New York Times:įirst, the history. “Setting aside debate about whether the rise of Nazism was built into the German DNA, there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder. “Still, Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s offers a frame for understanding how liberal democracies can suddenly turn toward anti-liberalism,” argues Jochen Bittner, a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. In the mid-1930s fascist movements cropped up in most advanced democracies. Mr Trump is not a fascist, if by that you mean a successor to Mussolini or Hitler….But there was more to fascism than those two ogres. The problem with the comparison is that it comes with an accusation of impending genocide that overshadows whatever enlightenment might come from making it. Robert Kagan thinks Mr Trump is a precursor to a 1930s revival in politics. That there is debate among conservative thinkers about whether the Republican nominee might in fact be a fascist is quite a thing, The Economist notes:Īndrew Sullivan thinks that to apply the label to Donald Trump might be an insult to fascism. The emergence of a virulent new strain of authoritarian populism on both sides of the Atlantic has prompted many observers to draw (largely inappropriate and far-fetched) analogies with the rise of inter-war fascism.

Weimar moment definition