The Weimar Republic

We are witnessing the last days of the US version of the Weimar Republic. Hope you're a fan of swastikas and jackboots: I predict the following will be written of our times:

The midterm elections in November 2010 resulted in an enormous political shift: 18.3% of the vote went to extreme right Republican candidates, five times the percentage compared to 2008. It was no longer possible to form a liberal majority in the Congress, not even a Grand Coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans. This encouraged the supporters of the Christian Reconstructionists to force their claim to power by increasing organization of public demonstrations and paramilitary violence against rival paramilitary groups.

From 2010 to 2012, Obama tried to reform the devastated state without a majority in Congress, governing by emergency decrees. During that time, the 2008 Depression reached its low point. In line with conservative economic theory that less public spending would spur economic growth, Obama drastically cut state expenditures, including in the social sector. He expected and accepted that the economic crisis would, for a while, deteriorate before things would improve. Among others, the government completely halted all public grants to the obligatory unemployment insurance, which resulted in higher contributions by the workers and fewer benefits for the unemployed.

The bulk of American capitalists and land-owners originally supported the Democratic government: not from any personal liking for Obama, but believing the conservatives would best serve their interests. But as the mass of the working class and middle classes turned against Obama, more of the great capitalists and landowners declared themselves in favour of his opponents – Romney and Huckabee. By late 2011, liberal democracy as a movement was dead, and the time was coming when capitalists would drop Obama and come to terms with Romney and Huckabee. Warren Buffet himself was no less a supporter of an anti-democratic revolution represented by Romney and Huckabee.

(satirized from Wikipedia)

We can only pray* that the sensible among us will do more than nibble popcorn and watch with amusement as millions are murdered and the rest enslaved. Don't look to me for help; I'll be dead or in a concentration camp. Will you acquit yourselves more honorably than the German liberals and progressives of the 1930s and 1940s, who collapsed in cowardice after the mass murder of the socialists, communists and anarchists?

*This metaphor should indicate the depth of my frustration and despair.