What Comes Next?

Before I start, I want to be clear that I don’t think we’re facing the end of our form of government. I think Trump, and the Republican majority in Congress, will enact a lot of troubling policies and do a lot of damage, but I don’t think they’ll, say, suspend elections. However, that said, I do think it is worth considering what a movement from here to dictatorship would actually look like in practice.

With that in mind, I think we need to be talking about the Reichstag Fire.

On February 27, 1933, the German parliament (Reichstag) building burned down due to arson. The government falsely portrayed the fire as part of a Communist effort to overthrow the state.

Using emergency constitutional powers, Adolf Hitler’s cabinet had issued a Decree for the Protection of the German People on February 4, 1933. This decree placed constraints on the press and authorized the police to ban political meetings and marches, effectively hindering electoral campaigning. A temporary measure, it was followed by a more dramatic and permanent suspension of civil rights following the February 27 burning of the parliament building.

Though the origins of the fire are still unclear, in a propaganda maneuver, the coalition government (Nazis and the German Nationalist People’s Party) blamed the Communists. They exploited the Reichstag fire to secure President von Hindenburg’s approval for an emergency decree, the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State of February 28. Popularly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, the regulations suspended the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other constitutional protections, including all restraints on police investigations.

You may be familiar with this from fiction—something similar happens in books like the Handmaids Tale, and in movies like V is for Vendetta—but the underlying principle is very real and very dangerous.

As Kevin Drum notes in Mother Jones:

George Bush used 9/11 as a justification for the PATRIOT Act, ubiquitous surveillance, the resumption of torture, and an insane war in Iraq. But even Bush was smart enough to always make it clear that we were fighting terrorism, not Islam. Trump has no such smarts and no such restraint.

A Reichtstag Fire incident acts as a pretext for the limiting civil rights, or even for altering the political process itself. It could look like a major terrorist attack, or it could look like something else entirely—and as the Reichstag Fire ultimately reminds us, it does not matter who actually carries it out, it matters only who is blamed.

I am by no means suggesting that the situation the United States today is identical to that in Germany in 1933; rather, I am pointing to the Reichstag Fire as perhaps the most well-known example of a process by which autocratic leaders seize or cement power. A Reichstag Fire event requires only a dramatic event, a scapegoat, and an excuse for imposing martial law and placing limitations on the free press.

Such an event can be wildly successful:

Justified on the false premise that the Communists were planning an uprising to overthrow the state, the Reichstag Fire Decree permitted the regime to arrest and incarcerate political opponents without specific charge, dissolve political organizations, and to suppress publications. It also gave the central government the authority to overrule state and local laws and overthrow state and local governments.

The Nazi press described the Reichstag fire as the work of the Communists and a signal for their planned uprising. Even the US independent Fox Movie Tones newsreel reflected the German government version. Although the Communists had not, in fact, developed any plans for an uprising, the impact of propaganda and terror on existing fears of a Communist takeover convinced many Germans that Hitler’s decisive action had saved the nation from “Bolshevism.”

The propaganda aspect is the scariest part. A Reichstag Fire event allows an autocratic individual to seize power while convincing the majority of people that he is doing it for their own good—and that they need him to protect them and keep them safe.

I am very hopeful no such thing will happen. But if it does, we need to have our eyes open and our wits about us. Let’s be ready—and aware.

I have a Patreon! Please support my writing!