Several of my prior posts have been on the book; I have a couple of other posts to make on bits of it I’ve read recently. Part of the reason I’ve held back is the sense of live-blogging; another part is the fear that the book will disappoint me in the end.
I just read a passage, though, that demands a blog post of its own. This book is just full of what seem to be ominous parallels between conditions in Weimar Germany and current conditions in these United States:
The culture of Weimar Germany advocated irrational emotion. The economy demanded it. It provided conditions which allowed men no other mode of functioning.
The Republic was a mixed economy, the kind established by Bismarck and mandated by the nation’s new constitution. There was an element of economic liberty, and there were growing government controls—direct or indirect; federal, state, or municipal—over every aspect of the country’s productive life. The controls covered business, labor, banking, utilities, agriculture, housing, and much more. As a rule each new set of controls conferred benefits on some German group(s), at a cost. The cost was incurred by other groups, whose forced sacrifice paid for the benefits. The victims responded predictably.
Confronted with increasing British exactions one hundred and fifty years earlier, the American colonists did not decide to beef up their lobby in the English court; they heralded the rights of man and decided to throw off the yoke. There were no such ideas in Weimar Germany. The Germans did not question the code of sacrifice or the principle of statism. These ideas, they had been taught by every side and sect within their culture, specify how man ought to live and the only way man can live. They define the moral and the practical.
. . .
The authors of the Weimar constitution had believed that a controlled economy in the hands of a democratic government would foster peaceful cooperation among men, as against the “ruthless competition” and “war of all against all” which they held to be inherent in a free market. What the mixed economy produced instead was a ruthless competition among groups, a collectivist “war of all against all.”
. . .
Neither the warring groups nor the parties which courted them had any means to know what favors to insist on, when, or at whose expense, or when to yield to the demands of their antagonists, who also had to survive. By the nature of the system there was no principle to follow; no one could devise a rational way to divide a nation into mutually devouring segments, or an equitable way to conduct the devouring. Every group, therefore, swung at random from the role of beneficiary to that of victim and back again, according to the passions, the tears, the fears, the alliances, the front-page propaganda, the back-room deals, and the expediency of the moment.
Life, Spengler said, has “no system, no program, no reason.” It is not necessarily true of life itself. It was true of life in Germany’s mixed economy.
That kind of life has consequences. In 1923 the Germans discovered one of them.
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