If we know anything about National Socialism, it’s that for the first time in German politics human stupidity has been successfully and completely mobilized.
–Kurt Schumacher, SPD member of Weimar Germany parliament, prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor.
This quote from page 214 of Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic by Volker Ullrich perhaps makes you want to question the value of today’s democracy: it often appears that the electorate just votes for their party, either unwilling or unable to objectively evaluate what they’re lines of bullshit they are being fed, the contradictory messages provided to different groups (Hitler was a master of this), often thinking of a single issue without a holistic understanding of its impact. Agreed that most politicians are narcissists looking for public recognition of their greatness, therefore some level of bullshit comes with the territory but the current levels are off the charts!
Kurt Schumacher was arrested shortly after the Nazis came to power, at which time the SPD was ruled an illegal political party, surviving the war – barely – by spending most of it in concentration camps. He rebuilt and reorganized the party after the war, and was elected into the first post-war Bundestag in 1949.
The question is which politicians are the true leaders able to drag us out of the morass and reestablish a political system where what is done is done for the benefit of the majority and not histrionics intended for the few. Hopefully I’m alive to find out.
