Weimar comes to Minneapolis Can America avoid Germany’s fate?

Whatever the other consequences of Renee Good’s death in Minneapolis, one thing should be crystal clear: America is accelerating toward some sort of reckoning. In this, probably the most common historical analogy is to Germany’s Weimar Republic, with street fights between Left and Right finally leading to Hitler and the Nazis. More than that, many on the MAGA wing of US politics see in Weimar a stand-in for the cultural rot of contemporary liberalism, whether in its music, its gender experimentation, or its pro-welfare state government. This refrain thus becomes a convenient way for ideologues, especially of a “post-liberal” flavor, to duck any association with the Nazis. It wasn’t the Right that birthed Hitler, they argue, it was the Left’s decadence that made him necessary.

Despite this dubious assertion, Twenties post-Kaiser Germany remains a solid analogy for 2020s post-liberal America — just not in the way conservatives often claim. Though moderate by interwar standards, the Weimar regime paved the way for Nazi terror by normalizing state violence and repression. The Weimar’s SPD leaders did so by unleashing law enforcement, often in alliance with Right-wing paramilitaries, to crush and kill Leftist radicals. This brand of state violence occurred not only during the 1919 Berlin Revolution, when the Freikorps murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but for over a decade afterwards.

Of course, the comparison between Good and Luxemburg only goes so far. Yet one can see in the Minneapolis killing the same kind of insecure, panicky overreaction that often took place under the Weimar government’s violent suppression of radical protest movements and wannabe revolutionaries. Particularly relevant here is the social media bloodlust surrounding Good’s death, and the desire of so many in government and the commentariat to justify Good’s death, grimly echoing Weimar-era targeting of radical women by Right-wing paramilitaries acting with state approval.

After violently suppressing Luxemburg’s Spartacists in 1919, after all, many army officers went out of their way to declare that any women who happened to stray into their gunfire were fair game. Radical women were, in their view, essential obstacles to restoring order. The Weimar military’s overt and unapologetic contempt for women, especially those of a radical Left persuasion, derived not merely from their association with the fiery Luxemburg, but from General Arnold Lequis’s attempt to excuse a failed military operation.

In a battle to retake the Hohenzollern palace from radicals, Lequis gave an order to attack, but was thwarted by rebel gunfire from the roof. In excusing his failure, Lequis gave the following response to a Berlin newspaper: “My soldiers don’t fire on women and children. That was where the mistake was made. A rank of my troops was driven back, they laid down their arms, and the rest went back to the university.” The message — that the government’s effort to free the palace had been derailed by women’s resistance — spread swiftly among military circles. From that point on, there would be no hesitation, as Weimar troops were instructed to fire at any hostile mob: including if women and children were involved or even just nearby.

In Trump’s America, a similar sentiment seems to have spread among ICE agents, now with a decade of cultural war baggage behind them. Yet their contempt for female activists, especially in the LGBT community, also has far deeper roots. Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, was dragged over 100 yards by another anti-ICE protestor in a vehicle last June. Ross, likely still traumatized by that event, may have made the same psychological leap General Lequis did in 1919: next time, there will be no hesitation, women or children be damned.

Securing stability through uncompromising state violence carried long-term consequences for the German psyche. The Weimar officials’ embrace of violence in pursuit of order normalized it, particularly against Leftist opponents. When the Nazis employed street violence and the assassination of political enemies — not only while in government but also during their ascent to power — it was far harder for ordinary citizens to recognize these acts as uniquely dangerous. For a while, at least, the suppression looked rather familiar.

Put the specifics of Renee Good’s case — or even ICE generally — aside for a moment. Normalizing state violence, and even violence between warring political factions, is the greatest danger of our current American moment. Certainly, it’s far more serious than a putative slide into “fascism”, whatever that means in the America of 2025, so different from the fragile democracies of interwar Europe. What is unfolding in the United States is clearly something different. It is an authoritarian movement, yes, but one that’s deeply American in character, shaped by frontier mythology and market absolutism. Projecting 20th-century fascism onto American politics therefore does little to help us understand what we are actually facing, or how to resist it.

The Social Democrats charged with governing Weimar Germany faced obscene challenges, many outside their control. Their menu of viable choices was extremely narrow, and under those conditions it is not surprising that the decisions they made were deeply flawed. After all, the Treaty of Versailles saddled them with unpayable debts for a war launched by a previous regime, one many Social Democrats had opposed. They also faced relentless risings from both Left and Right, each attempting to establish breakaway republics or overthrow the fragile national government altogether.

Which brings us to the actual solution to America’s accelerating descent toward an illiberal future — and it is not the election of a president with the “right” ideology. There is only one plausible way out of America’s Groundhog Day cycle of dysfunction, and it is the same structural change that might have prevented the Nazi seizure of power in Germany: accepting that our governing institutions are too large, too centralized, and too culturally incoherent to sustain democratic legitimacy.

There was far more ideological fluidity in Twenties German politics than is generally acknowledged. Across the decade, there were several radical uprisings, each attempting to create local worker-led governments. But whether in Hamburg, Saxony, or Halle, each of these experiments was brutally repressed by the Weimar regime. Had the Berlin government perhaps allowed more experimentation, echoed their Bismarckian predecessor in giving into some demands to weaken radicalism generally, things might have turned out differently. There’s a chance, of course, that the German far Left would have been further emboldened, but based on the experiences of the pre-1914 period, it’s more likely that they’d have lost purchase with everyday citizens. The same, incidentally, might be said of the Right — with a more flexible approach to governance potentially encouraging alternatives to Hitlerism, notably among economically radical nationalists like Otto Strasser.

Relitigating Hitler’s rise to power isn’t the point. In general, local democratic experimentation is something people in power detest, but it might also be the only way to free ourselves from the zero-sum politics poisoning American life. There is a fundamental urge, deep in the human psyche, to have control over our own localities without the oversight of distant governing bodies. Massive representative structures — of the sort now governing the 350 million Americans — no longer scratches our democratic itch. Much of what we’re arguing about online is a distraction from addressing that fundamental urge.

The down side of an intensely localist approach is, of course, the possibility of chaos ensuing. But given the reckless self-interest of those currently in charge of the United States, chaos increasingly seems to appear anyway. More fundamentally, recall that the republic wasn’t founded under the assumption that a powerful federal government should decide, over the objections of local populations, who counts as a citizen. It was fought in defense of small‑r republicanism — of local control, regional autonomy, and minimal centralized interference. The Constitution of 1789 represented a significant retreat from those principles, not their fulfillment. To avoid descending into outright dysfunction, and the normalization of political violence that follows, the United States must return to its original localist instincts. Breaking the United States into an “American Union” of six or seven regional political units, where state governments are framed by robust constitutions, executives, and greater autonomy — somewhat similar to how the European Union operates today — may be the only remaining solution to our culture-war deadlock.

Germany required total war, genocide and foreign occupation before being divided — and even then it lost nearly a third of its territory and has never recovered its pre-1939 standing. If America continues on its present trajectory, it’s hard to see why a similar outcome couldn’t happen here. Yes, Wall Street and national corporate entities would fiercely oppose such decentralization, since it would place meaningful limits on their power. But why should ordinary citizens care about that?

Besides, if you could go back and poll the Germans who survived the Nazi catastrophe on whether it would have been better to break up their nation in advance — allowing more room for the country’s various factions to experiment with different forms of governance — it’s fair to assume almost everyone would have preferred that option to the country destroying itself under Hitler.

There’s a broader issue here too. Though Weimar’s state repression wasn’t justified, at a certain point those in power must answer how they’ll deal with opponents who refuse to back down. Despite initial readings of the situation, it seems increasingly clear that Renee Good and her wife Becca were indeed obstructing ICE efforts before the shooting, with Becca taunting Ross in a highly reckless manner. None of this justifies Good’s killing, which was easily avoidable. But this is precisely how civil wars erupt. Flash‑bulb moments that have less to do with the immediate facts than with what they come to symbolize. If Renee Good’s death doesn’t trigger a national breakup, something else will. When these protests reach their denouement, the key questions will be who holds federal power, what their ideology is, and how they choose to respond. Yet as long as the two‑party cartel remains intact, the answer will almost certainly be law‑and‑order brutality that demonizes protestors — one way or another.

The mythic sanctity of a 50-state America still pervades, but cracks are forming. Red‑state secessionism, like the Greater Idaho movement, is real. Yet once Trump returned to power, much of that rhetoric evaporated, revealing that many Americans still cling to the illusion that they can eventually win outright and impose their will on unwilling regions. Blue‑state secessionism, by contrast, has never got off the ground. Fundamentally, this cuts to the core of progressives’ self‑conception, much as Twenties Marxist internationalists rejected settling for control over a single German province. Unlike deep‑red states such as Texas and Idaho — which flirt with secession when they’re out of power — deep‑blue states like Minnesota and Washington reject the idea entirely: they openly wish to impose their progressive vision on the rest of the country, imagining they enjoy widespread support in regions they’ve never even visited.

As an American who has lived in eight states, I find our conflict deeply sad and also deeply stupid. If we could recognize the problem for what it is — an irreconcilable divide in moral, religious, and cultural norms that cannot be solved by a federal government as powerful as ours — we might escape our march towards a second civil war and an illiberal, undemocratic future. But both sides still want to control the entire country, and that doesn’t bode well, just as it didn’t during Germany’s Weimar years. And at least they only had newspapers and the radio to contend with. These days, of course, social media pours constant, second‑by‑second fuel onto the red‑blue fire.

More anger means more engagement, which means more profit. Effectively speaking, big tech has exercised an outsized control over American governance since the Obama administration, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The upshot is that the culture wars will continue to consume any possibility of a rational, broad‑based democratic movement capable of challenging America’s existing power structure. So until people abandon social media en masse, efforts to impose national unity through force will only escalate — until state terror becomes routine, regardless of which side happens to be wielding it. The sky isn’t falling yet, but the only way forward to halt our escalating dysfunction is to embrace the fact that local regions ought to decide basic governance decisions, like who is a citizen and who is not. Either that, or we accept many more Renee Goods over the months and years ahead.

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