Trump and the dangerous return to the Weimar era

Rather than restraint and responsible leadership, the drift is towards ultra-nationalism and simplistic solutions

- Max Hastings

Robert Kaplan is a Washington-based journalist whom you don't read first thing in the morning if you want to enjoy the rest of the day. He is a conservative – absolutely not the Maga (Make America Great Again) kind – who has advised government officials and gets read by lots of important people.

He is now a doomsayer. "We have to be able to consider," he writes in a new book entitled Waste Land: A World In Permanent Crisis, "that literally anything can happen to us."

Kaplan's message is that our only hope as human beings in a chaotic and dangerous world moving at breathtaking speed is to act with moderation and restraint.

These aren't, unfortunately, qualities that command much enthusiasm from voters in the Western democracies, to judge by the sort of leaders some have chosen for themselves lately. My eye was caught by one passage in Kaplan's latest, in which he compares our world to Weimar Germany, as it was in the 1920s between the two world wars, on the brink of Adolf Hitler's ascent to power.

I last heard this same grim assessment made by the wisest man I have ever known, a British historian named Michael Howard, who died in 2019, at the age of 96. Michael said to me a few years earlier: "We have entered our Weimar period." He meant that disillusionment with traditional elites spurs many people to become attracted to allegedly strong leaders with simplistic solutions, even if they are obviously gangsters.

Another historian whom I admire, Laurence Rees, has just published The Nazi Mind, subtitled 12 Warnings From History. He highlights, for instance, the manner in which the 1930s European tyrants generated cults of "us and them". They successfully deluded their followers they were on the side of the downtrodden, against elites who condescended to them.