You covered a vast territory encompassing all of Weimar society. That’s a bit unwieldy; let’s focus on politics, which is like the two-dimensional projection of a 3D reality. Or the ripples on the surface of the ocean showing the turmoil beneath.

Besides, the Nazis spent most of 1933 after they first took power killing off all that beautiful bourgeois society. The nightclubs, the theater, the universities, the symphony, even the sports clubs, all were purged, of Jews and other “non-Aryan” influences. Bauhaus was purged. Leave it to the Nazis to transform architectural brutal simplicity into simple brutality.

I recently read The Coming of the Third Reich (link goes to Amazon), which, despite the title, takes a broader view of Weimar Germany, and correctly, I think, places Hitler during most of that 14 years as one striver among many, one orator who rose to the top with the most compelling voice.

As you note, Hitler didn’t introduce anti-semitism to Germany. It had been thriving, and though there’s no doubt he was a passionate anti-semite himself, he certainly made it a central weapon in his arsenal. As any good authoritarian would.

There’s the conventional story of post-Versailles bitterness, fueled by the consoling story that The Jews had “stabbed Germany in the back” to cause it to lose the war; and then along came the Great Depression.

But just as important was that the democratic republic, Weimar, established by a short revolution after the Armistice–before Versailles–was widely viewed as illegitimate. Large numbers of Germans hated democracy, and wanted a return to the security of Bismarck’s authoritarian Second Reich.

Right from the start, then, Weimar had a large right wing political movement, made up of many parties, determined to further delegitimize and ultimately tear down the democratic republic and restore the Reich. A Third Reich. The Nazis were only one among many such right wing parties, and took most of that 14 years to come to dominate the German Right.

The German Right was, for a long time, balanced by a thriving Left, from Communists at the fringes through Democratic Socialists to centrists. The Right considered them all enemies, and set out to destroy them.

What I see in this history is that democracy will ultimately fall before a determined long-term effort to tear it down from the inside. The Weimar Republic started with a hopelessly shaky foundation and a large population of anti-democrats, and it took only 14 years start to finish to destroy it.

But if the Right is patient, and willing to pursue a multigenerational mission, fueled by dynastic fortunes perpetually threatened by democratic government, it can bring down even a once-solid, long-established democratic republic.

If the Right spends decades preaching that democratic government is the enemy…that democratic government takes from virtuous us and gives to unworthy them…that government should be starved until it’s small enough to strangle in a bathtub…you can destroy even the United States.

The Right spent decades and billions of dollars softening up the electorate to bring us to this point.

And now they’re outraged that Trump has stolen the fruits of that labor, just as they were about to seal the deal forever.

It is to laugh.

Its lower classes are given a taste of a better future, then cast down into despair. Its middle classes experience a renaissance of prosperity and progress, then suddenly find themselves in a period of decline and economic backsliding. Meanwhile, a rapacious upper class finds a way to profit from this state of affairs and single-mindedly exploits it in the most unscrupulous and unsustainable way.

Faced with a loss of confidence and a feeling of impending doom and helplessness, plus a cultural tradition of searching for the easy answer and the quick fix, a substantial portion of the people come to the conclusion that it can’t be their fault, or the fault of those they emulate and wish to become, or even of historical forces over which no one has any complete control; but that it must be some kind of conspiracy of villains. They search for scapegoats.

Of course, there really ARE villains, and they find that serving up scapegoats and demagoguery are an easy shortcut to power.

Why these things happen is a matter of debate, and no doubt many historical social forces can be proposed to explain this state of affairs. And of course there are differences in country to country, and era to era. But the response to it, particularly the response of the middle class, is most clearly demonstrated in the example of Germany between the wars. A lot of nations may go through periods like this, and usually their national traditions and the innate common sense of their peoples pull them back from the abyss. But in others…

And of course their are variants of this phenomenon, such as in 20th century Italy, Spain, the USSR, Japan, Argentina and several MittelEuropan and South American fascist regimes. It doesn’t always follow the exact same pattern. But in general, Fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class.

Oh, yes. There is one more disturbing historical parallel. Both twenty first century America and twentieth century Germany had a ready-made historical nucleus about which the forces of hate and vengeance could precipitate: racism. In both nations, the conditions of the main minority population had reached a point of relative success, both the Jews and the Negro. The contrast of their improving conditions (and the annoying political agitation which they engaged in to secure them) was simply an irritant a population in general decline could not tolerate. We also have Mexicans and Muslims.

When a people feel themselves the inheritors of an unstoppable historical process of progress and prosperity and suddenly feel it snatched away from them, they quickly and violently react. Fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class.

What the hell is wrong with America?

After a lot of study of history, I have to conclude that the “great man” theory of history is bullshit. A history of Weimar Germany (not the usual history of “the rise of Adolph Hitler”, but a history of the nation he took over) says that Weimar Germany created a job opening, and Hitler was the man to fill it.

What the hell is wrong with America that Donald Trump is the solution?

It’s worth taking a closer look at the fourteen years of Weimar Germany, and asking, what the hell was wrong with Weimar Germany that Hitler was the solution?

Contrary to your claim on flame, I am not Obsessed with RobVG… I AM very seriously concerned with the existential danger Trump – and those that would support him-present.

Right now he would lose to Clinton- decisively , but no one knows what will happen in the next 7 months of hell… and I would bet right now that by election day the two will be within the margin of error in the polls by November.