A Hapsburg or Weimar Republic future?

 As you can tell I love Instapundit. I got an "instalanche" from them once. And I try not to over link to them but this time around I can't help it. Found another article from there to share with you. For those of you who don't understand history you might not get the references to the Hapsburgs or the Weimar Republic.

The Hapsburg were a royal family over the nations of Austria-Hungary and ruled over most of central Europe until the 1st World War. And the Weimar Republic ruled Germany after the 1st World War when the German Emperor abdicated when they lost that same war. The Weimar Republic enabled the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler who started the 2nd World War.

So this article I want to share with you asks are we emulating the fates of two former empires. Are we emulating the fall of the Hapsburgs or are we emulating the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic of Germany?

The author Domic Green makes the comparison considering America's current predicament:

Aaron Sibarium has written a fascinating article for American Purpose on the parallels between the current American republic and the Weimar republic. It’s worth reading on its own merits as a history lesson, as a reminder that no people is immune to time and tide, as a reflection on how democracy can turn into disaster. It’s worth reading even if you disagree, as I do.

Sibarium rightly identifies the Weimar-esque tendencies in modern American life: radicalization of once-centrist parties, demonization of the other side, a willingness to overturn founding principles in the same of restoring or repairing them, a rise in street violence — all reflecting an elite ‘inchoate radicalism’, a ‘vague, burn-it-down impulse increasingly common across the political spectrum’.

As Sibarium says, America isn’t Weimar. The Freikorps who tried to overthrow the Weimar republic would eat the cosplay protesters of Portland for breakfast. And, above all, the American constitution has proven durability. The Weimar constitution demonstrated its weaknesses soon after its creation in 1919, and those weaknesses are why Weimar still overshadows us, because they made possible the democratic rise and parliamentary victory of Nazism.

Weimar society was born fissiparous in the aftermath of military defeat. The new constitution, rather than healing those differences, contained a powerful incentive for exacerbating them: proportional representation. While this made Weimar democracy unstable, Article 48 of the constitution rendered democracy dispensable, but on nebulous terms. Article 48 gave the president emergency powers to override the Reichstag, but without defining the emergency.

The American system remains a two-horse race, regardless of the knackered quality of the ponies. The president’s powers are extensive and, as Walter Bagehot smirkingly pointed out, almost monarchical, but they are also tightly defined in law. So while we see Weimar symptoms in American society, the deeper condition isn’t Weimaritis. Rather, the framework of the current American crisis is an inflammation of the Hapsburgs. 

The emperor in the White House rules a colossal terrain. In this, the American president has more in common with an Ottoman sultan or a Hapsburg emperor than a British monarch or even a French president. Like the sultan and the emperor, he is the ever-present provincial symbol of the distant metropolitan power that prints the money and maintains the army.

The American emperor’s subjects have sorted themselves into two kingdoms, Democratic and Republican. The urban-rural aspect of this split has similarities to Georgian England, and the divisions that Trevor-Roper called ‘court and country’. But the political geography of America is closer to that of the Hapsburg empire after it had sorted itself into two kingdoms, the Dual Monarchy, in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.

The Hungarians wanted their rights and rebelled in 1848. The Austrians refused to grant them and installed military rule, then struck a deal. The result was a two-headed beast in which neither head trusted the other, and a condominium that, instead of calming nationalism, intensified it by leaving its strongest passions unsatisfied. The Austrians compromised in 1867, but not enough to satisfy the Hungarians, and all the other nations under Austrian control saw what the Hungarians had won, and wanted it for themselves. Fast-forward to Franz Ferdinand’s day trip to Sarajevo.

This article is eye-opening, however, what is America's future?