What can we learn from the history of pre-war Germany to the atmosphere today in the U.S.?

By David Dyzenhaus, University of Toronto

The Guardian recently published an interview with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders about what happens if Donald Trump wins this year’s presidential election in the United States.

His dire answer: “It will be the end of democracy.”

The challenge the U.S. faces, Sanders said, “is to be able to show people that government in a democratic society can address their very serious needs. If we do that, we defeat Trump. If we do not, then we are the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s.”

Sanders is of course evoking the extreme political polarization and social discontent of the last three years of Germany’s first experiment with democracy.

That experiment ended with Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.

The senator is right that there are frightening echoes of the end game of Weimar in western democracies. But in the U.S., at least, his timing is off. The United States already is the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s.

Polarization in pre-war Germany

Naturally, there are some differences.

In Germany, the main fault line of polarization was between the far-right factions, with the Nazi Party the most prominent, and the Communist Party — both of which contested elections with the express intention of destroying democracy if they won power. In contrast, the main division in the U.S. is between Democrats and the far-right groups that dominate Trump’s Republican party.

My expertise is not political science but law, in particular the rule of law. I study the nature of law and its relationship to politics.

I wrote a book about the problems of the legal and political order in pre-Hitler Germany — and why those circumstances remain highly relevant to contemporary debates about what’s going on in the United States and other western democracies (including debates in Canada).

The Weimar Constitution had existed for only 14 years when Hitler forced the German parliament to make his will the ultimate source of legal authority.

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