We are having a Weimar moment. We have been having one for a while. The Weimar Republic rose in 1919 after the defeat of the German Empire. It fell in 1933 to the Nazi dictatorship. In its 250th year, America shows early symptoms of Weimarization. Amid the legitimation of political violence, street mobilization, runaway debt, and a “stab-in-the-back” legend of racial grievance against the Jews, the political class is divided between those trying to control the chaos and those trying to ride it into power.
It’s a Weimar world out there. One morning in mid-May, I stood on a chair outside a cafe on London’s Strand and watched as a sea of marchers flooded the broad avenue as far as the eye could see. The “Unite the Kingdom” march was organized by Tommy Robinson, an erstwhile soccer hooligan who, in a picaresque transformation familiar from 18th-century novels, has become an articulate and popular representative of “populist” discontent with mass immigration.
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The marchers were Georgian, too, but in a Hogarthian way. They waved the Union flag and the flags of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, drank beer for breakfast, ate meat pies of uncertain provenance in the street, urinated in doorways with the liberty of freeborn Englishmen, and wore shorts so that the soccer badge tattooed on their calves would function like a dog tag in case they passed out and had to be medevaced to the shires. Apart from the shorts and tats, nothing about this would have surprised Edmund Burke. This was Olde England, off the couch and on the march.
The Germans are serious, but this was England, so the atmosphere resembled a coach trip to the beach. An undercurrent of potential violence is always palpable in large gatherings, and I was reminded of the Duke of Wellington’s quip about his soldiery: “I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God, they frighten me.” But everyone was friendly, and there was no trouble despite the boozing. I saw pictures of fringe racists later, but when the march reached Parliament Square, I saw plenty of nonwhite faces and Persian and Israeli flags, and heard gospel-themed versions of “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Jerusalem” too. The media called it a “far-right” event, but I only saw ordinary people who love their country and, as we now say, want it back.
Later that day, I caught the end of a pro-Palestinian march. The marchers wanted someone else’s country, though they never had it in the first place. They represented the illogical but now-familiar alliance of upper-middle-class vegetarians, their entitled student grandchildren, and enraged Muslims that defines the Left in Western Europe and is redefining the Democrats, too. No one was laughing, but they seemed to be enjoying the hate. Women in veils and burkas shouted “Free Palestine,” which is the only thing they are allowed to shout. Men in masks sold flags of the Iranian regime. Little boys handed out free Korans to the post-Christian libs.
The intergenerational bourgeois lefties were a recognizable English sort, middle-class and metropolitan in provenance, where the Robinson marchers were working-class and provincial. The Georgian nonconformists begat the Victorian evangelists of social reform, who begat the 20th-century social democrats, who begat this genteel rabble. While Robinson’s lads were hale and hearty, and frequently on the heavy side, the friends of humanity were pale and thin, with a sizable elderly component using wheelchairs and walking supports. No wonder they want to stop time in its social-democratic phase. Meanwhile, their Muslim allies looked like a demographic bulge on legs. They reminded me of how, when the literary critic George Steiner was 6, an antisemitic mob calling for death to the Jews passed his family’s apartment in Paris. His mother hurried to close the shutters, but his father took little George onto the balcony so he could watch: “This is called history, and you must never be afraid.”
Apart from the Muslims, and also because of them, England’s Weimar looks like a postmodern heir to the old English culture wars, which were wars of sectarian religion. We hear many of the same echoes in the United States, where the Puritans begat the progressives and the progressives the woke. These lineages mean that Weimar symptoms are unlikely to produce Weimar outcomes. Anglophone systems manage their crises differently. French constitutions come and go like buses, but the American Constitution endures. Britain’s almost-constitution totters on, too. We stand and fall in our own ways.
That’s the problem with history. It doesn’t repeat. It only half-rhymes, and you never know if you’re hearing it right. Look to the past, and it refracts like you’re looking into a kaleidoscope. Still, if we are experiencing another of those Anglophone transitions now rather than the Weimar apocalypse, an accurate sense of history would be helpful. Our professional historians, the academics, are wild optimists, selecting data points as a bridge to the progressive heaven. But if history has a lesson, it is tragic. The 19th century’s great discovery about how history works wasn’t the archival method of Leopold von Ranke. It was Maxwell’s second law of thermodynamics.
Energy depletes over time. Its expansion produces chaos, then inertia. The nationalists and the Muslims have energy. The Left is inert. We have come through chaos before, and the current bout might ultimately refresh the Anglophone constitutions. But we cannot survive inertia.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
