Fear Itself (17 page)

These, in the main, were dictatorships by consent.
⁵¹
Backed by a demonstrated propensity for violence, claiming to advance the wishes, beliefs, and interests of the whole community, and acting as the key hinge between the population and the state, these parties secured active participation and the committed backing of most of their citizens. Of course, it is hard to gauge the degree to which the broad support offered by the public reflected genuine enthusiasm or a pragmatic set of adaptations to make it possible to get on with family life and continuing employment. Writing about Fascism, Hans Morgenthau, the noted émigré student of international affairs, stressed how “it derived its rule from the source that America had thought to be peculiarly its own: the consent of the governed. Fascism laid claim to the democratic title as did America, and even claimed an exclusive title as America once had done; for, pointing to the crisis of the American purpose, it proclaimed the superiority of its own democracy over the sham democracies of the West.”
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Yet underneath this “consent” lay unprecedented repression justified by a strident language of cleansing and enforced by ruthless persecution. These dictatorships brought into line teachers, university professors, and independent labor leaders, lawyers and civil servants, journalists and writers, and musicians and artists (preferring the didactic and heroic to the expressive and abstract). Placing their rule on a single philosophical base, they did not hesitate to eliminate potential sources of opposition aggressively. Aiming to bolster and toughen the collective body of citizens based on solidarities of race, nation, or class, they respected no zone of privacy and personal identity, and rejected the idea of an independent civil society. Economy and society were conceptualized and organized in service to the party state. Toleration for diversity and pluralism of any kind was coded as weakness. They routinely deployed military metaphors to justify their other policies and behavior.

In constructing governance along these lines, the rituals and practices of the dictatorships worked to undo the sordid mess they believed liberal and democratic government had produced.
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They claimed to be correcting the politics of division—whether between classes, factions, parties, or divided national loyalties—in the public interest. “In each case,” the historian Richard Overy has observed, the dictatorships defined superior, nonliberal democracy “as the absence of political division and the true representation of popular interests, the creation of a united mass public into a singular people capable of acting to solve society’s most pressing problems.”
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II.

H
AVING ESCAPED
to the United States in 1940, the historian Konrad Heiden wrote a study of Hitler’s rise to power, stressing how German democracy had failed to protect itself from willful subversion and hooligan violence. He noted how, “from the afternoon of March 23, 1933, Hitler was dictator, created by democracy and appointed by parliament.”
⁵⁵
But this had hardly been a free vote. Needing a two-thirds majority, Hitler appealed to the Reichstag for the passage of the Enabling Act in person at the Kroll Opera House, less than three weeks after Franklin Roosevelt had begun his presidency. The chamber was dominated by a large swastika. Dressed in the brown shirt signifying his role as Nazi Party leader, and surrounded by “a mass of swastika flags and banners,” with the parliamentary “corridors and aisles . . . lined with brown-shirted SA men,” he spoke for two and a half hours, outlining the substantive program to combat unemployment, protect the peasantry, place the armed forces on a parity with other countries, and promote a program of moral renewal that his government would pursue once the act was passed. All the exits were guarded and the building surrounded by uniformed Nazi loyalists. Threatening the Reichstag’s parties with war if it refused his request, and appealing “in this hour to the German Reichstag to grant us that which we could have taken anyway,” he justified the need for executive power by arguing that “it would be against the meaning of the national uprising and would hamper its intended purposes if the government were to negotiate with and petition for the Reichstag’s approval of its measures from case to case.”
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“The mob unleashed by the government ruled the capital and the vote was taken in an indescribable atmosphere of terrorization and coercion.”
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Commenting the next day in his diary, Joseph Goebbels recorded, “Now we are also constitutionally the masters of the Reich.”
⁵⁸

Although the Reichstag lingered on for a period, and though Hitler used it from time to time to legitimate the government’s decisions, as he did by having parliament pass the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws in 1935, parliamentary government effectively ended. The institution survived as an empty shell, merely a platform for Hitler’s speech making.

This transfer of power and authority was not unprecedented. Such a shift to lawmaking authority had also characterized the first year of Italian Fascist rule in 1922. The historian Charles Maier has recalled how parliament had been “generally compliant before Mussolini and quickly endorsed a grant of ‘full powers.’”
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This supersession of parliamentary democracy was the deepest-possible negation of a central liberal political principle. In 1690, in the
Second Treatise of Government,
John Locke had anticipated, and rejected, the possibility that an elected assembly might pass along its ability to make laws to other persons and institutions. “The power of the
legislative
,” he wrote, being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make
laws,
and not to make
legislators,
the
legislative
can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands.”
⁶⁰
In a democracy, moreover, it is the task of the legislature and the representatives who people it to manage a robust relationship with citizens, balancing the good of all with the specific good of constituents, judging merits both as individuals and as members of political groups open to external influence, and seeking a balance between responsiveness and craven behavior.
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Looking back in 1936, Karl Loewenstein recalled how “dictation according to the leadership principle was substituted for deliberation and majority vote in parliamentary bodies.” The separation of powers, moreover, which ever since Montesquieu’s
Spirit of the Laws
(1748) had been considered a guarantee of political liberty, “was superseded by a unity of command and the concentration of authority in the hands of the ‘Führer’ and his associates.”
⁶²

Democracy’s frictions were made to disappear. So, too, were civil liberties and the independent rule of law, notwithstanding the Weimar Constitution, which formally protected liberal rights, though they were never formally abolished. But such “fundamental rights which create free spheres for individuals untouchable by the state,” the Nazi judge Roland Freisler announced, “are irreconcilable with the totalitarian principle of the new state.” So much so, that judges were given the capacity to punish behavior deemed a crime even if no law had been passed defining it as illegal. As secretary of state in the Reich Ministry of Justice, Freisler urged judges to avoid what he called “exaggerated caution” in applying due process to criminals, especially in instances where the correct punishment was sterilization or castration.
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In these ways, Nazi Germany and the other dictatorships turned the resurgence of executive power that had been deployed into an emergency device during World War I into a permanent principle.
⁶⁴

The last open election in Germany took place the day following FDR’s ascent to the presidency. Gaining 44 percent of the vote, the Nazi Party emerged as the dominant player in the Reichstag, far outstripping the Social Democratic Party, with 18 percent, and the Communists, with 12. The democracy that had been hatched at Weimar seemed like a distant mirage. Forming a government of the National Union with the German National People’s Party, which secured 8 percent of the vote, assured Hitler’s control of the legislative process. Following the Enabling Act, there was a torrent of lawmaking, but not ordinarily by parliament, which established the basic contours of the Nazi dictatorship.
⁶⁵
These statutes were not subject to judicial review. Under these rules, a federal state was transformed into a unitary and centralized national government, and a one-party executive state replaced a multiparty parliamentary regime. These decrees often included stipulations of delegation, leaving it up to individual ministers or to the cabinet as a whole how a given law would be carried out. Arbitrariness obtained the sanction of law. When elections to the Reichstag were conducted, as they were on November 12, 1933, and March 29, 1936, only one party ticket was on offer, the others having been outlawed in July 1933. Jews, including those with mixed parentage, were barred from participating in the second election. The emancipation that had come to Germany’s Jews some six decades earlier was harshly abrogated as citizenship came to be defined by blood.

Haunting the new Roosevelt presidency, the March 1933 Nazi domination of the Reichstag and the liquidation of parliament were accompanied by new realities on the ground. “The day after the March election, stormtroopers rampaged along the Kurfürstendamm, a fashionable shopping street in Berlin, hunting down Jews and beating them up.” Episodes of mass beatings and intimidation of Jews also took place in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Braunschweig, Wiesbaden, and Kassel. There and elsewhere, “synagogues were trashed, while all over Germany gangs of brownshirts burst into courthouses and dragged off Jewish judges and lawyers, beating them with rubber truncheons and telling them not to return.”
⁶⁶
The historian Peter Fritzsche notes that “everything changed for Germany’s Jews in two months, March and April 1933. After the 5 March elections, a wave of violence descended upon Jews. As thousands of new converts joined the paramilitary units of the SA, whose numbers shot up ninefold from 500,000 in January 1933 to 4.5 million one year later, the scale of antisemitic actions expanded dramatically. Becoming a Nazi meant trying to become an antisemite as well.” In that period, “nearly one in every four active adult men in Germany had turned himself into an
SA-Mann
; many other Germans stood in the ranks of Hitler Youth or the Nazi Party itself.”
⁶⁷
By May, Jews were being fired from large and small firms and asked to leave corporate boards, their shops were passed by, and books were being burned in Berlin’s Bebelplatz and in eighteen other university towns and cities, declaring a cultural war against modernism and the role of Jews (speaking as the Berlin bonfire proceeded, Goebbels declared that “Jewish intellectualism is dead”).
⁶⁸
By July, more than 100,000 Germans had been arrested, and 26,000 were behind barbed wire.
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“Fascism is action,” declared Mussolini, gloating, his words suggesting a stark contrast to the deliberative institutions of the liberal democracies. Unlike such governments that place legislative lawmaking at their center, making it possible for citizens to shape public policy, “the Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood,” he observed, “Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of the people. No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) exist outside the state.”
⁷⁰

Mussolini’s political theory of unchecked executive power, an ideology of destiny, and a cult of heroism was based on the claim that liberal democracies simply were unable to confront central problems in the modern era of mass politics, capitalist economics, and total warfare. He had good reason to suspect that governments based on the central liberal values of consent, pluralism, toleration, rights, and legislative representation could not face up to these complex challenges or govern effectively.
⁷¹
He had experienced the lack of confidence Italy’s liberals had had in their own parliamentary institutions, and their willingness to share power with Fascism at the start of his rule.
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He would have observed how many foreign commentators, including those with no particular sympathy for Fascism, attributed his regime’s rise to Italy’s loss of confidence in the ability of parliamentary institutions and liberal political ideas to deal with the country’s ailing economy, incessant labor struggles, and mass emigration.
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His claim on the eve of Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration that “the Gods of liberalism” were dying seemed vindicated. Liberal Italy before the March on Rome had experienced a stunted parliamentarianism, “an affair of narrow elites” characterized by shallow social roots, great fragmentation, endemic violence, political and policy paralysis, and mass parliamentary parties that were driven by strong extraparliamentary movements. Parliament simply could not absorb and manage the deep divisions between Liberals, Socialists, and Catholics, let alone the emergent Fascist forces. At least a year before Mussolini took command in revolt against the liberal state, “whatever authority liberal parliamentarianism had once enjoyed in Italy had vanished.”
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In Germany, antisystem parties vied on roughly equal terms with Weimar’s defenders from the very start of the postwar republic. They sought to bear out the wartime view of Otto Hintze, arguably German’s leading early-twentieth-century international relations analyst, who had argued that “in the face of a world of enemies,” it is necessary to decisively rebuff “a transformation” of political life “that would place the government in the hands of changing majorities and subject the army to corrupt parliamentary influences.”
⁷⁵
Like many others writing in this period, he feared that party divisions, personal dishonesty, and ideological disunity that he associated with parliamentary government would cripple the capacity to govern and make difficult but necessary decisions. All through the later years of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler ascended to power, the German Reichstag, Europe’s most visible and significant democratic emblem, had begun a sharp descent into irrelevance. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution stated, “If public security and order are seriously disturbed or endangered within the Reich, the President of the Reich may take measures necessary for their restoration,” and this resulted in more than 250 suspensions of constitutional rights, mostly concerning matters of economic emergency.
⁷⁶
Starting in 1930, the Reichstag met less and less often when it became impossible to find parliamentary majorities that could sustain any of the period’s governments or support their lawmaking initiatives. As a result, Germany came to be ruled more and more by emergency decrees by the president that were authorized by the republic’s constitution.
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