U.S. News

I’m not an expert, so I would be pleased to be educated to the contrary by someone who knows, but I think a key difference here is the structure of U.S. federalism versus the Weimar federalism in which Hitler came to power.

Here in the U.S., both the state governments and the federal governments derive their authority directly from the sovereignty of “the people”—either the people of each state, for state governments, or the people of the entire nation, for the federal government. Here, taking over the federal government does not necessarily entail taking over the governments of the states (federal supremacy notwithstanding—and there should still be reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment).

In Weimar Germany, however, the states, I believe, were really administrative units of the federal government, so that taking over the federal government was effectively taking over state governments, too.

And we haven’t always had a federal government as strong and as broad in its assertion of authority as we have had until January 20, 2025. In some sense, what Trump is doing is pushing back to a pre-Civil War federal government—although I expect an aggressive assertion of federal power over matters traditionally understood to be within the realm of the states to be coming: it will be the right-wing revenge tour, for all of the ways they have always bemoaned how the federal government forces them to be nice to people, with antidiscrimination laws and the like. They see that as tyranny, and will turn it around and try to force the rest of us to be white supremacists.

But I think now is the time for us in the U.S. to remember the adage that all politics is local, and to redouble efforts at our cities, counties, and states.