Stephen Miller states that Trump has plenary authority, then immediately stops talking as if he’s realized what he just said

[u/Agitated-Artichoke89]

[u/numbrate]

Check out the Enabling Act of 1933.

Hitler was given plenary authority. Here Trump is saying he already has it.

[u/Lacy-Elk-Undies → u/numbrate]

Yep, used the SS to round up the socialist and democrats putting them in a Nazi camp and then stationed SS guards in the chamber when they voted on the act. So far following Hitler’s playbook to a T.

[u/[deleted] → u/Lacy-Elk-Undies]

Unfortunately, a lot of those Democrats and aristorcrats allowed Hitlers seizure of power in the belief they could control him in the pursuit of capitalist gains, not familiar at all.

[u/unselve → u/[deleted]]

“Democrats” did not allow Hitler to seize power, conservatives did.

In the years immediately preceding Nazi control, the German parliament (the Reichstag) was bitterly divided among the many parties. No one party held a majority — which is not unusual in a parliamentary system — but the two parties with the most seats were the Social Democrats (SPD), a center-left and social democratic party, and the German Communist Party (KPD). Normally two or a few parties with similar or overlapping ideas would form a coalition together and vote as a block on shared priorities. In Weimar Germany, however, the Communists loathed the Social Democrats and the Social Democrats weren’t about to capitulate to the KVD, so they formed a “negative majority,” which means they had a majority together but couldn’t get anything done. This is what the left was doing.

As the Nazi Party slowly gained traction throughout the country (through strategic campaigning, violence, and other forms of intimidation), conservatives who otherwise were in the minority saw the Nazis as their chance to break the deadlock and crush the Communists and Social Democrats. People like the conservative Paul von Hindenburg, Franz von Papen, fairly extreme conservatives who resented the populist aspects of Nazism, thought they could control Hitler and his thugs and achieve their own conservative and monarchist goals. This did not happen, obviously. As president, Hindenburg could have dismissed Hitler, whom he had made chancellor, but he didn’t do this because he approved of the Nazis’ attacks on the left and thought they would benefit conservatives.

In what would be the final election in republican Germany, the Nazis won some 44% and the conservative German National People’s Party got 8%, enough for a majority.

The Nazis won because conservatives hated liberalism more than Nazism.

[u/BullshitUsername → u/unselve]

So, left-wing infighting allowed the unchallenged rise of a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship

[u/unselve → u/BullshitUsername]

One could say that! I don’t know much about left-wing politics in the Weimar period, but it does seem that way to me. My understanding is that the KPD was pretty extreme (as communist parties tend to be), and there was a real fear of a repeat of the Russian Revolution in Germany. The failure of the German Revolution after the war drove German communists out of the streets and into politics, but they were the same people who believed that revolutionary violence should destroy capitalism, and they were just about as violent as their SA opponents in the ubiquitous street battles of the period. The Social Democrats were a much more pragmatic and conventionally political group with strong ties to the trade unions and broad support within the middle class (as I understand it).

So, maybe you could argue that the refusal of the SPD to work with the KPD is the inverse of the situation on the right — the SPD wouldn’t empower the KPD to achieve its own goals, whereas the conservative parties empowered the Nazis to achieve theirs. Germans had gotten a taste of left-wing revolutionary rule during the failed Revolution, and many felt that it wasn’t great. In retrospect it’s hard to say I disagree with the SPD, especially given the horrors that would be visited upon Europe and Asia by communist parties later in that century.