HISTORY DOES INDEED RHYME

The Atlantic’s publication of an excerpt from McKay Coppins’ forthcoming biography of Mittens Rmoney has everyone in politics talking. There are a few quotes worth serving up, but perhaps not for the reason Rmoney and his Boswell might think.

Coppins details Romney’s account of a GOP caucus lunch at which Trump made an appearance and delivered his signature bluster. “As soon as Trump left, Romney recalled, the Republican caucus burst into laughter.” Tellingly, they had given the former president a standing ovation only minutes earlier when he entered the room.

Back in 2019, Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating the Biden family’s business dealings were revealed in the press. Romney called the scheme “wrong and appalling.” Trump responded with a wrathful series of tweets, culminating in a call to #IMPEACHMITT-ROMNEY. A few weeks later, Romney found McConnell had privately urged Trump to stop attacking members of the Senate, and thanked McConnell for sticking up for him against Trump.

McConnell replied, “It wasn’t for you so much as for him. He’s an idiot. He doesn’t think when he says things. How stupid do you have to be to not realize that you shouldn’t attack your jurors? You’re lucky. You can say the things that we all think. You’re in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can’t say.”

A McConnell spokesperson said the senator “does not recall this conversation” and that he was “fully aligned” with Trump during the impeachment trial.

Romney’s disdain for so many fellow elected officials obsessed with self preservation is part of what makes him, like the late John McCain, a memorable political figure. Both men, despite their many, many faults, were able to rediscover their moral compass in the end.

Romney reminds me very much of Franz Joseph von Papen, German conservative politician, diplomat, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer, who was Chancellor of Germany in 1932, personally opposed the rise of the Nazis but failed to stop them, then orchestrated Hitler’s taking of power and served as his Vice- Chancellor from 1933-34.

President von Hindenburg asked von Papen to become Chancellor in 1932. Without a majority in the Reichstag, he ruled by presidential decree while negotiating the end of reparations at the Lausanne Conference of 1932. He then launched the “Preußenschlag coup” against the Social Democratic Party Government in Prussia. He was removed by Hindenburg following the June 1932 elections that saw the Nazis become the single largest party in Germany, which wiped out his hopes of creating a conservative coalition that could oppose Hitler.

Still determined to return to power, von Papen - who believed Hitler could be controlled once he was in government (sound familiar?) - pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor and Papen as Vice- Chancellor in 1933, where he would “guide” Hitler in a cabinet ostensibly not under Nazi Party domination. Seeing military dictatorship as the only alternative, Hindenburg consented.

Once in office, Hitler quickly marginalized von Papen and his “reasonable conservative” allies. Following the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 - during which the Nazis killed most of their conservative opponents along with the “revolutionary” Nazis of the SA - von Papen retired from politics, though he accepted an appointment three months later as Ambassador to Austria, where he conspired with the Austrian Nazis to create the crisis that led to the 1938 Anschluss.

After the war, von Papen was indicted for war crimes in the Anschluss before the International Military Tribunal, but was acquitted of all charges. In 1947, a West German denazification court found him to have been the main culprit in crimes relating to the Nazi government; he was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment at hard labor, but was released on appeal in 1949. He died 20 years later, still arguing that everything he had done had been to prevent worse things happening.

Hitler was distinguished from the rest of the German right during the Weimar years by his cool calculation in how he deployed the Big Lie that the Weimar Republic was “illegitimate.” Writing in Mein Kampf, he explained that “the masses more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one,” that even a propaganda claim “so impudent that people thought it insane” could ultimately prevail. Essential to it s effectiveness were a simple appeal to the emotions, not the intellect, and its endless repetition without concession to contrary evidence. Hitler realized that commitment to the Big Lie had to be total and uncompromising.

Sound familiar?

Following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler saw that he needed to pursue revolution through “the politics of legality.” The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy. As Joseph Goebbels said, they would come to the Reichstag, “as wolves to the sheep pen.” By 1929, the press lord Alfred Hugenberg embraced and financed Hitler, giving him nationwide exposure and recognition. The June 1932 election saw the Nazis gain the votes of several center and right wing parties that had collapsed, to become the largest party in the Reichstag.

Sound familiar?

The German “old guard conservatives” saw they were not competitive in any election without the Nazi base. With their support and the leadership of von Papen, Hitler became Chancellor. Because non-Nazi conservatives still held 8 of 11 cabinet positions, they persisted in their delusion that they could preserve the “guardrails” that would contain him.

Sound familiar?

Following the Reichstag Fire, Hitler pushed through the Nazi-dominated Reichstag an Enabling Act that suspended freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, granted an extrajudicial power to arrest and detain people without trial - voiding due process. Using these powers, non-Nazi state governments were deposed and legislative power was vested in the chancellor instead of the Reichstag. Hitler was then able to disband labor unions, purge the civil service, and outlaw opposition political parties. By June 1933, Germany was a one-party dictatorship and police state. Following the Night of the Long Knives a year later - by which the Nazis made themselves acceptable to the German One Percent - it was clear to everyone that the Nazis would kill anyone who opposed them.

“2025 Agenda,” anyone?

Like Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes.

Here today, Trump has placed his storm troopers in Republican legislators' brains. According to Romney’s book - and I have no reason to disbelieve this - United States Senators now make calculations about how to vote based on whether the supporters of Trump might kill them or their families.

“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump's second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family's safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him—why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn't change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. ‘You can't do that,’ Romney recalled someone saying. ‘Think of your personal safety,’ said another. ‘Think of your children.’ The senator eventually decided they were right…”

Romney now spends $5000 A DAY to protect his family from the wrath of the followers of the guy who followed him as GOP POTUS candidate.

Whatever you think of Romney - and I don’t think very much of him - what has happened to him since 2016 is an indictment of the pathologies of the GOP.

The Republican Party has arrived at the point where the man who in 2012 was looked at with amazement that his campaign had promulgated 487 documented lies (according to my friend Steve Benen, who kept count); the man who was caught on a tape telling rich Republican donors that the “problem” in the country was the “47 percent” of Americans who were “takers” - who paid no income tax but expected the government to support them - but who would vote for politicians who would take from the “makers,” Romney’s audience; the man who as a college student organized “pro-Vietnam war” demonstrations, then once graduated obtained a draft deferment as a “missionary” and was sent to France for two years due to the influence of his family, yet who positioned himself as a “patriot” and continued to excoriate those who had opposed the war; the man who created Bain Capital, a company that was the very definition of “Vulture Capitalism - this man is seen as a “good Republican.”

The fact that Mittens Rmoney is called a “good Republican” even by those who opposed him politically; whose departure from active politics is seen as a sign of our political decline; who is denigrated by his fellow party members for his lack of “party loyalty,” is the final proof of the complete, abject, moral failure of American Conservatism.

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