Germans Have Taken to the Streets to Protect Their Democracy—Why Aren't Americans? | Opinion

While Americans brace for the next election, the Republican nominee has promised to strip tens of thousands of civil servants of their employment protections and replace them with loyalists, use the Justice Department to investigate political rivals, build migrant detention camps, round up over 11 million people for removal from the country, and prosecute more women who obtain abortions. According to a former chief of staff, Donald Trump routinely praised Adolf Hitler, whom he said "did some good things," and called the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini "a great guy." Watching this unfold in the United States, Germans in particular are dumbfounded that Americans are not taking action.

Over the past couple of months, by contrast, hundreds of thousands of people in over 100 cities across Germany have taken to the streets in defiance of their own far-right party "Alternative for Germany," known as the AfD. The protests erupted following press reports of discussions between leading AfD members and neo-Nazis around plans to deport migrants, asylum seekers, and even "insufficiently integrated" German citizens. Austrian far-right extremist Martin Seller, who subscribes to the white supremacist Great Replacement narrative (which claims that political elites and "the Jews" are conspiring to replace the white majority with people of color) was at the AfD meeting.

This remarkable movement is significant due to its sheer size—German sociologist Dieter Rucht described it as "the biggest mass movement in the history of the Federal Republic"—and also because it stands in stark contrast to the stunning complacency pervading the United States. Americans are increasingly protesting diverse issues such as climate change, racial injustice, President Joe Biden's border policy, and Israel's conduct in Gaza, which has erupted in headline-grabbing conflicts across U.S. college campuses. Yet nobody is rising up for the cause of democracy itself, even though that's how robust policy debates can occur in the first place. From a German perspective, it is mind-blowing that Americans are not running around screaming like their hair is on fire.

Instead, while the U.S. Supreme Court stands poised to insulate Trump from criminal liability, it already deactivated the Constitution's protections against an insurrectionist-in-chief under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—without even disputing that Trump engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has since pledged to pardon the rioters, called for the termination of the U.S. Constitution, declared his willingness to use the military against protesters, demanded that shoplifters be shot, and openly stated that he would become a dictator—even if only on day one of his presidency. In the immunity case before the Supreme Court, Trump's lawyer argued that it should be legal for a president to direct the military to murder a political opponent.

Meanwhile, the Great Replacement conspiracy narrative that has so upset the German populace has become a normal part of conservative discourse in America. While the AfD doesn't even reach 20 percent in the polls within Germany's parliamentary government with proportional representation, Trump has taken over one of the two major parties in America's winner-takes-all system. Yet the American public appears strangely apathetic to the looming threat that the country could succumb to authoritarianism.

So why aren't Americans taking to the streets? Part of the explanation likely lies in normalcy bias—a cognitive tendency to assume that because things have somehow worked out in the past, they will work out in the future. Another factor is habituation. The human brain tends to filter out constant background noise. Because Trump and his GOP allies have gradually pushed the limits of what is considered normal, people have become accustomed to accepting—even participating in—bad behavior. Right-wing media has helped Trump spread the Big Lie and is now working to convince listeners that the "woke left," an immigrant "invasion" or the "weaponization" of the justice system are the real dangers. Meanwhile, the so-called mainstream media is pretending either that the GOP is still a normal conservative party or that Joe Biden may in some ways be as bad as Donald Trump.

One crucial difference between the two countries lies in Germany's historical experience with Nazi rule from 1933-1945 that ended in the country's destruction. Adolf Hitler and his compatriots from the National Socialist German Workers' Party did not come into power through brute force (Hitler attempted that in 1923) but by legal means. Hitler then used his power to dismantle democratic institutions from within, much like Trump and his allies tried in late 2020 and early 2021.

In 1933, the Weimar Republic's parliament passed the infamous Enabling Act, granting the government unilateral power to pass laws, including unconstitutional ones. The Weimar Republic did not survive this maneuver, enabling the Nazi Party to take hold and plunge the world into a devastating war, resulting in the murder of millions of Jews. Germans learn about the history of the Machtergreifung—the Nazi power grab—in school, and thus are more sensitive to signs of autocratic tendencies.

It's impossible to predict with any certainty what America will look like if Trump wins in November. Currently, he and Biden are virtually tied in the polls. The danger is real. Perhaps Americans should take some advice from the Germans, who know from experience that modern dictators can take over in a democratic nation—even the most powerful one on the planet.

Dr. Frank A. Stengel is a lecturer in sociology at Kiel University in Germany.

Kim Wehle is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Her latest book, Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works—and Why, is out in September.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.