Richard Evans on tyrants and charlatans
Plus, Alan Taylor on the election of 1800
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If you’ve listened to my podcast over the past year or so, you’ve probably heard me caution against “rummaging around” interwar Europe for clues to understand today’s political predicaments.
I dedicated a newsletter to dismantling the historian Timothy Snyder’s reckless analogies comparing Putin’s Russia to Nazi Germany. To see Donald Trump’s “populist” appeal, I’ve directed listeners to the legacies of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan rather than Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini.
In my review of Did It Happen Here?, an anthology of essays on fascism edited by the historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, I concluded, “If liberal democracy is under assault across the globe, we need accurate evaluations. Pigeonholing an array of complex causes or a diverse roster of world leaders into a single taxonomic term prevents us from accomplishing the urgent task of meeting the challenge to humane civilization, the de-liberalization of liberal societies across the world.”
We should be thinking of globalization, deindustrialization, and the failures of American institutions in the post-Cold War period, not the traumas of the First World War and the Great Depression that permeated European societies from 1919 to 1939.
Yet, we must still study the Third Reich and absorb its lessons. The Nazis demonstrated in the starkest possible terms what human beings are capable of doing to others whom they view as threatening or less worthy of life. Hitler showed how emotional appeals to national greatness and racial salvation can persuade ordinary people to rationalize political violence or support cruel policies.
In his searching new book Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, the great historian Richard Evans says troubling questions that were raised by the rise and rule of Nazism “have gained new urgency and importance.” Today’s autocratic leaders are not fascists, but they are “emerging, often with considerable popular support, to undermine democracy, muzzle the media, control the judiciary, stifle opposition, and undermine basic human rights.”
“How do we explain the rise and triumph of tyrants and charlatans?” asks Evans. It is the defining question of our time, and there are no simple explanations. Global trends or structural forces may provide part of the answer, but each situation has unique ideological and historical contexts. What explains Orban’s domination in Hungary may not work for Trump in the United States or Xi in China or Putin in Russia.
In Hitler’s People, Evans takes the biographical approach, which differs from his past work. His trilogy on the Third Reich, published between 2003 and 2008, was a sweeping overview of the social, political, and ideological dimensions of Nazism from its origins to the final hours of the Second World War.
“Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime, and, by doing so, perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live,” writes Evans in the preface of his new study. He introduces us to Goring, Goebbels, Rohm, Himmler, Eichmann, and other top Nazi “paladins” and “enforcers.” Equally insightful are his essays on lesser-known individuals, such as the middle-class diarist Luise Solmitz of Hamburg who became intoxicated with Hitler as he promised to restore law and order.
Even so, the author is careful about applying past lessons to today’s ordeals. The study of Nazism is, therefore, only a starting point as we seek to understand “the rise and triumph of tyrants and charlatans” in a twenty-first-century context.
“Only by situating the biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, with all their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, in these larger contexts [of interwar Germany], can we begin to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influence. By doing this, we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and the assertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter them,” Evans concludes on p. 470.
A timely debut
Sir Richard Evans made his debut on History As It Happens in Tuesday’s podcast episode. We discussed his scholarship and the current global environment where, according to Freedom House, military aggression and flawed elections continue to endanger democratic institutions. His remarks reinforced (in my mind, at least) that the never-ending fascism debate can be a big distraction.
Fascism “is not an eternal political phenomenon that constantly rears its head. It’s a product of World War One. If you look at attitudes toward war, the fascists were hellbent on setting up new wars. Mussolini wanted wars to create a new Roman Empire… Hitler wanted a world war in order to establish global hegemony,” Evans says. “He wanted perpetual war because only through war and violence, he believed, could a race or a nation keep ahead of the competition for supremacy. Present-day anti-democratic politicians do not, on the whole, advocate war.”
Russia’s Vladimir Putin, notes Evans, is one autocrat who is waging aggressive war against a neighbor, but, unlike Hitler, Putin does not harbor designs on all of Europe – or even much of Europe. This point is highly contested, as some politicians and analysts see the potential for Russian aggression against the Baltic states, for example.
I tend to agree with Evans about Putin’s ambitions. Agree or not, today’s circumstances bear little resemblance to the mid-1930s when Hitler began pursuing his expansionist designs. NATO is not the League of Nations. Nuclear weapons did not exist. No one today agreed to the dismemberment of Ukraine a la Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich in 1938. On the contrary, the West came to Ukraine’s defense with billions in arms and aid shipments and vital intelligence, if not boots on the ground. The West has imposed economic sanctions, too. And unlike the Wehrmacht, which steamrolled over Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, Putin’s armies have been mostly bogged down in Ukraine for two years.
“There are many differences with today’s anti-democratic, would-be dictators and strongmen. And it’s important to realize that, because we cannot and we should not fight the enemies of democracy with the weapons of yesterday,” Evans says.
I was honored to have Richard Evans on my podcast. His scholarship is essential to understanding the most important events of the twentieth century and, therefore, to steer us clear of confusion about what’s happening now.
If you missed it, you can read my published review of Evans’ book here.
The wacky election of 1800
In Thursday’s episode of History As It Happens, the historian Alan Taylor brought us back to the early republic, when partisan hatred and paranoia threatened to tear the young country apart. Think Americans are polarized today?
“I’m often asked, are our politics today the most polarized they’ve ever been? Without selling short how polarized they are today, the answer is no. There have been periods in American history in which it looked like the United States was going to blow apart. It did blow apart in the 1860s. It looked like it might blow apart in the late 1790s,” says Taylor, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor emeritus at the University of Virginia.
Just a decade after the ratification of the Constitution, two competing philosophies had formed concerning the role of the federal government and the meaning of the American Revolution. Americans who could vote – a tiny minority – already had a clear choice between factions, the (pro-British) Federalists and (pro-French) Republicans. With the calming influence of George Washington now removed from politics, ferocious factionalism (or partisanship, to borrow a modern term) buffeted the administration of John Adams from inside and out.
The Quasi-War
Adams faced a crisis from the start: a potential war with France, which began intercepting neutral American merchant ships in retaliation for the Jay Treaty. By 1798 the climate in the country was so fraught that Adams reluctantly signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, the latter making it a federal crime to criticize his administration. The infamous XYZ Affair led to calls in Congress for a declaration of war, and fear spread of a French invasion of the continental United States.
“Part of what made the politics so vicious is that nobody accepted the legitimacy of the other party, and both claimed that they were the one authentic grouping that spoke for the American people and well-being of the United States. So you have these very scurrilous attacks because scurrilous attacks get attention, but also because they’re written by people who are truly alarmed the other side might prevail,” says Taylor, who recently published the fourth volume in his panoramic series, “American Civil Wars.”
These broadsides on Adams’ character were typical of Republican (pro-Jefferson) pamphlets circa 1800: “a gross hypocrite, a wretch who does not have the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courier, or the courage of a man,” and “old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled and toothless.” Was Adams old? He was 65 in 1800 – or 17 years younger than President Biden will be in November. He was also described as an “egregious fool” and “the champion of kings, ranks, and titles.”
As Alan Taylor discusses in our conversation, neither Adams nor Jefferson campaigned. There were no speeches, no rallies, no formal nominations; nothing that we might take for granted today. The election took from May to December, as state legislatures one by one selected their electors for the Electoral College. Direct voting at a ballot box took place only in a handful of the 16 states. The final tally was a tie not between Adams and Jefferson, but Jefferson and his “running mate” Aaron Burr! Oops. How the heck did that happen?
In February 1801, the House of Representatives, after six excruciating days, decided the election for Thomas Jefferson after some Federalist scheming tried and failed to deny him the presidency. There were genuine fears of violence, but the first transfer of power from one party to another went off peacefully, establishing one of our most important republican traditions. It lasted until January 6, 2021.
“What is a great reservoir of hope is the conviction, which I think is quite correct, that a very strong majority in this country favors continuity, favors a peaceful transfer of power. The great concern is this is the first time we’ve had a major presidential candidate who insists the election was stolen from him the last time… who insists the electoral process was thoroughly corrupted to steal the election from him, and you have millions of Americans who agree with him. That’s unprecedented,” says Taylor of the breakdown of norms and guardrails.
“It makes it very tough to go forward because what it breeds in the other party is the notion that we don’t have an opposition party that plays by the same rules that we do. Then the temptation becomes, okay, how do we put our thumbs on the scale to keep [Trump] out of power?”
If Trump loses the election to Kamala Harris in November, there is no reason to assume he will go quietly into retirement. We should expect Trump to endorse violence. Will this be our new norm every four years? Only if the major parties continue to nominate individuals of such execrable character as Donald Trump.
What’s next?
Coming up on Tuesday’s podcast, historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel will talk about the vice presidency, in all its irrelevancy. The choices of JD Vance and Tim Walz produced around-the-clock breathless commentary over the past month or so, but neither pick will make much of a difference. No one votes for vice president!
Next Thursday I will welcome back the historian Carolyn Woods Eisenberg to talk about her Bancroft Prize-winning study Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia.
August 8 marked the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation. Rather than rehashing for the umpteenth time the break-in and coverup that became the Watergate scandal, we are going to focus on a more important, but overlooked, aspect of Nixon’s legacy: the lawlessness of his foreign policy. Presidents before and since Nixon have acted as “imperial presidents,” an issue of obvious relevance today that neither party’s mainstream seems very interested in confronting in our world of “forever wars” and sprawling U.S. security commitments.