Warnings from WeimarSo, we're pretty far down this path.
The country’s conservative establishment made the first mistake. In the late 1920s, the mainstream right-wing party, the German National People’s Party, was struggling. Its leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was a powerful businessman and media mogul, but he lacked charisma and mass appeal. As he watched Hitler’s Nazi movement gain popularity in state and national elections in the late 1920s, Hugenberg saw an opportunity—not to stop Hitler, but to use him.
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But by then it was far too late. At a pivotal moment, Hugenberg had given Hitler what he needed most: respectability.
☑ The Republicans did this.
The Nazi-led government launched mass arrests, and Hitler immediately promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree, a draconian measure restricting freedom of the press and assembly and allowing the police to detain suspects indefinitely without a trial.
It was this climate of emergency following the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to propose the Enabling Act. Kaas and his fellow Center Party leaders debated it for hours, torn between principle and self-preservation. Some urged resistance, warning that Hitler’s power must be checked. But most feared the consequences of defiance. Still others clung to the hope that by cooperating, they might influence Hitler from within—perhaps by helping weaken their Social Democrat rivals or by carving out protections for Center Party or Catholic leaders. In the final vote, all 73 Center Party parliamentarians capitulated, justifying their surrender as a necessary evil to save the party. As Kaas himself told his colleagues, “If a two-thirds majority [is] not achieved, the government will carry out its plans through other means.”
☐ The Democrats haven't done this yet, but Schumer, et al did a more subtle version of this when they passed the BBB and gave billions to ICE, among other things. Also, to make our situation harder, they (and the Republicans) also unknowingly gave Trump something close to rule by decree by allowing Mitch McConnell to block Obama's SCOTUS seat. I'm not going to be surprised if something closer to the Enabling Act comes up, though.
The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable. The Nazi Party never garnered anywhere near a majority of the German electorate’s support, winning just over 30 percent of the vote in the republic’s last free and fair national elections.
This isn't apples-to-apples, but at many points, Twitter could have booted Trump, and he would have stayed a reality show host.
Which support Ziblatt's point:
Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him.