The US today and political polarization in Weimar Germany

Corey Pein did a report last year for The New Republic on a development that at this point is a small curiosity in American politics, , Antifa Is Arming Itself Against a Trump Crackdown 07/02/2019.

Armed far-right groups are hard to overlook in the US. Dave Neiwert recently wrote about a recent development in the Trump Administration's encouragement of such groups. Bureau of Land Management director's deference to 'constitutionalists' creates chaos in the West Daily Kos 02/12/2020:

The nexus of the law enforcement problem is the Constitutionalist Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a far-right group that has been steadily recruiting sheriffs, deputies, and other police officers into their “constitutionalist” belief system. The CSPOA contends, like all such “radical localism” ideologues, that the county sheriff, and not any federal agency, is the highest law-enforcement authority in the land.

These beliefs, as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s disturbing investigation of the CSPOA’s reach explained, originated with the Posse Comitatus, a profoundly racist and anti-Semitic organization of the 1970s and ‘80s whose ideas had a kind of underground currency in rural America for awhile. The Posse’s leaders preached that the Constitution limited the federal government’s powers to raising a military and conducting foreign policy. The intent, as always, was to restrict if not nullify the government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws, as well as gun control laws, land use, and a host of other policies. In the end, the Posse was urging its followers to ready themselves for acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. [my emphasis]

The police and courts in the United States have generally always been less aggressive and less harsh toward violent far-right groups than toward left-wing ones. It's understandable, since the far-right seeks to preserve the established order of money, power, and privilege. Even when the groups' rhetoric is populist. Their version of the elite they claim to be fighting is likely to be some variation of The Jews, Hollywood, The Media, colleges, and Mean Libruls.

Understandable, but often dangerous even for law enforcement themselves. Because violent crackpot groups attract more than their share of fools and unstable characters. And groups like the "sovereign citizens" often target police who they see as representing illegitimate authority.

The main terrorism problem in the US recently has come from the white-supremacist far right, even more so than from Islamic fundamentalists, whose politics are also a different brand of far right. The extreme fundamentalist Christian Reconstruction ideology often plays a role in the thinking of violent far-right sects.

There is an occasional case of political terrorism in the US that more-or-less fits the profile of leftwing. But they are very rare.

The small groups on which Pein reported were antifa (antifascist) activists who organize and counter-protest against far-right groups who advocate and practice violence based on their ideologies. So they have good reason to be prepared to defend themselves, a right the NRA invokes incessantly to promote endlessly growing gun sales. (With no apparent regard to the ugly practical consequences.)

I don't foresee anything resembling the partisan militia groups of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and early 1930s becoming a significant factor in US politics in the immediately foreseeable future. In Germany, not only the Nazis but other rightwing parties had their militias, or at least goon squads, e.g., the NSDAP Brownshirts (SA). The Social Democrats and the Communists had their own militant groups who could put up a physical fight when it was called for.

In Austria, the conservative Christian-Social Party had an allied armed militia called the Heimwehr. The Social Democrats had their own militia-type group, the Republikanischer Schutzbund. And the Austrian Nazis had their own goon squad, too. The clashes between the Heimwehr and the Schutzbund resulted in what is known as the Austrian civil war of 1934, although that particularly intense phase of the clashes lasted only a few days. But it was a very significant event in Austrian history, which became a huge barrier to Austria having the possibility of a united resistance against the German invasion in 1938. The Austrian Nazis directed by Berlin also made an unsuccessful coup attempt in Austria in 1934 that included the (successful) assassination of the conservative dictator Engelbert Dollfuß.

In both Germany and Austria, the partisan militia phenomenon had a lot to do with the conditions in the two countries after the First World War. For one thing, there were millions of men who had served in the respective Imperial Armies who had training and experience with firearms. Another was the chaotic conditions following the war in both countries, Austria itself being created as a separate country for the first time. Both nations had new democracies, and both were under restrictions from the victories Allies on their official military armaments.

Military conflict actually continued for both Germany and Austria after the surrender. From the Wikipedia entry on the German Freikorps, the paramilitary groups supported by the German government:

Freikorps also fought against the communists in the Baltics, Silesia, Poland and East Prussia after the end of World War I, including aviation combat, often with significant success. Anti-Slavic racism was sometimes present, although the ethnic cleansing ideology and anti-Semitism expressed in later years had not yet developed. In the Baltics they fought against communists as well as against the newborn independent democratic countries Estonia and Latvia. In Latvia, Freikorps murdered 300 civilians in Mitau who were suspected of having "Bolshevik sympathies". After the capture of Riga, another 3000 alleged communists were killed, including summary executions of 50–60 prisoners daily. Though officially disbanded in 1920, some of them continued to exist for several years and many Freikorps' attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the government in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Their attack was halted when German citizens loyal to the government went on strike, cutting off many services and making daily life so problematic that the coup was called off. [my emphasis]

In Germany, the bloody suppression of the mass demonstrations in 1919 that came to be known as the Spartacus Revolt and then the violent overturning of the leftwing Bavarian Soviet government that same year generated massive distrust between the Social Democrats and the Communists. The failed Kapp Putsch was a violent attempt at overthrowing the constitutional democracy that was thwarted by the massive general strike supported by the left. And the conservative parties never particularly trusted the whole idea of Weimar democracy anyway. So, the democracy's lack of political legitimacy in the eyes of many on the left and the right prevented the establishment of what these days we somewhat vaguely call a "monopoly of violence" for the government.

This is one aspect of the "lessons of Weimar" that is difficult to apply to the United States in 2020. Others, like the fatal austerity policies of 1930-32, have more obvious direct relevance.