When Identity Replaces Citizenship |
America is not Weimar Germany (younger generations – open Wikipedia to learn about Weimar Germany), and identity politics is not national socialism. That comparison is too simplistic, too emotionally loaded, and ultimately unhelpful.
However, history does not need to fully repeat itself to offer a warning.
The deeper lesson is not merely about the rise of Adolf Hitler as an answer to Weimar Germany, or the collapse of a single republic. It is about what happens to democracies when citizens stop seeing one another primarily as fellow countrymen and seeing one another as members of rival tribes competing for power, legitimacy, and moral superiority.
The Real Collapse of Weimar
Many people reduce the fall of Weimar Germany to economics, hyperinflation and unemployment. Political extremism certainly played a central role too.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Germans viewed politics as an existential conflict between irreconcilable camps. Communists, nationalists, socialists, monarchists, and radical movements who no longer believed they belonged to the same civic project.
Institutions lost legitimacy because they were viewed through ideological identity. Courts, universities, media outlets, cultural institutions, and political parties were no longer trusted and were viewed as weapons controlled by rival factions.
This is the dynamic every modern democracy should recognize because democracies become unstable when citizenship itself weakens.
From Citizens to Identity Groups
America’s political culture increasingly encourages people to........