Rod Dreher
speaker
490 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Rod Dreher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When we hear Weimar, we think of the film Cabaret and corruption, and we think it all ended up in Nazism.
But that is a superficial understanding of it.
We have created in America today, perhaps throughout the West, the psychosocial conditions of Weimar without having...
suffered the traumas that Germany did, losing the First World War, hyperinflation, and then the Great Depression.
Well, what I mean by that, and this also goes back to Hannah Arendt and her famous 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she tried to explain how it was that right-wing totalitarianism in Germany and left-wing version in Russia rose.
And she said, these are the factors.
Social atomization is by far, said Arendt, the most important factor.
We have done this with our young.
And not only that, but the loss of trust in institutions, a feeling of wanting to tear it all down, there's nothing for me there, it's all here.
And it made me think, it made me fear that we are one economic crash away from something very ugly.
It may not be Hitler 2.0.
It may not be Stalin 2.0.
It might be something all American, but it's not going to be what we're used to.
And people of my generation and yours really don't understand what's happening.
One of the things that shocked me about my historical research is that as late as 1928, the Nazi party was still a fringe movement in Germany.
It got only 2.6% in that year's elections.
The next year, 29, comes the Great Depression, which hit Germany much harder than America.
In 1930, the Nazis went from 2.6% to 18%.
Two years after that, they even doubled.
Which was the demographic group that ran towards the Nazis?
Showing 281–300 of 490 · page 15 of 25
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