MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: In “Trump’s Weimar America,” the New York Times’ Roger Cohen aims to attack The Donald, ends up hitting Obama much harder instead:

Welcome to Weimar America: It’s getting restive in the beer halls. People are sick of politics as usual. They want blunt talk. They want answers.

Welcome to an angry nation stung by two lost wars, its politics veering to the extremes, its mood vengeful, beset by decades of stagnant real wages for most people, tempted by a strongman who would keep all Muslims out and vows to restore American greatness.

“We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty,” Donald Trump says in response to the San Bernardino massacre. People roar. He calls for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” People roar. “People want strength,” he says. People roar. His poll numbers go up. Pundits, even the longtime guru of Republican political branding, Karl Rove, shake their heads.

Trump is a clown. No, he is not. He is in earnest. And he’s onto something. It is foolish not to take him seriously.

A near perfect storm for his rabble-rousing is upon the United States. China is rising. American power is ebbing. The tectonic plates of global security are shifting. Afghanistan and Iraq have been the graveyards of glory. There is fear, after the killing in California inspired by the Islamic State, of an enemy within.

Over more than a decade, American blood and treasure have been expended, to little avail. President Obama claims his strategy against Islamist jihadist terrorism, which he often sugarcoats as “violent extremism,” is working. There is little or no evidence of that.

As Glenn has noted on numerous occasions, it was Obama who took credit for Bush’s success in Iraq, and then, as Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker wrote last year, Obama threw it all away by personally choosing not to maintain an American military presence there, in order to have bragging rights in the 2012 election. On the home front, the domestic conditions that Cohen describes are all a result of the economic and social policies which the Times have been championing for the last 15 years.

And note this from Cohen:

The Europeanization of American politics is also the Europeanization of American political risk. The unthinkable has happened in Europe. It is not impossible in America.

But who have been the two greatest champions of the “Europeanization of American politics?” The New York Times and Barack Obama. Who has praised the culture of Weimar? The New York Times:

There was no place like Berlin in the 1920’s. The capital of the modern movement in literature and the arts, pioneering in the cinema and theater, in social studies and psychoanalysis, it was the city of “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” the cradle of the youth movement and the haven of unheard-of sexual freedom. The Mecca of a whole generation of Isherwoods, it has entered history as the center of a new Periclean age.

Only a few were aware of its true importance at the time; most Germans emphatically rejected what Peter Gay calls Weimar culture and what, to all intents and purposes, was the culture of Berlin. “Swallow,” “rootless,” “destructive,” “cultural Bolshevism,” “asphaltliteratur,” these were the most common epithets used by its critics.

The advocates and the enthusiastic followers of this avant-garde movement came from a small unrepresentative layer of German society; left-wing or liberal, largely Jewish, it was concentrated in Berlin and a few other big cities. It had no popular success at the time; in the list of contemporary best sellers one looks in vain for the famous names of the twenties. Yet internationally these men were the only ones who counted, and in Germany, too, there has been in recent years a spectacular revival of the golden twenties.

After 1933 many of these intellectuals and artists were forced to emigrate; their impact in foreign lands has been considerable.

Yes — beginning in the late 1930s, the Frankfurt School brought “critical theory” and deconstructionism to America as Michael Walsh explored in his recent book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, the impact of which is currently destroying academia. (The word salad regurgitated by the kid whom Dinesh D’Souza recently attempted to pound some common sense into is pure Frankfurt School, even if the poor schnook doesn’t know it.) The former directors of the Bauhaus brought sterile modern architecture. After WWII, we would also import Germany’s engineers to design our first jets and spacecraft.

In late 19th and early 20th century, we had already Germany’s education system, as Glenn has written in his books about its current endgame, and we concurrently imported Nietzsche – H.L. Mencken wrote his first English translations in 1908. Nietzsche would kill God in Germany in 1882, Time magazine, founded by the son of Christian missionaries to China, would similarly do so in America in 1966.  In short, the American “Progressive” intellectual project of the last century was to turn American intellectual life into what Bloom described nearly 30 years ago in The Closing of the America Mind as “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”

And it seems to me I read Cohen’s thesis before, when in 2007, Andrew Sullivan described Mr. Obama’s predecessor as “The Weimar President”; right around that same time, Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard spotted a whole raft of articles emerging from the paranoid left terrified, as Emery wrote, that “The fascists are coming!”

Or rather, they’re already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America’s increasingly unhinged left. If only, sigh many Bush partisans, wondering when this administration will get out of the fetal position and show some fighting spirit. To them, as to most reasonable observers, the White House shows the chronic fatigue of a two-term presidency reaching its final year. Nonetheless, paranoia about what Bush and Co. are up to preys on the minds of many progressives, who have progressed, in this case at least, beyond reason.

Which they followed by cheering on what Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal described this month as Obama’s smashing of the “political guardrails,” in much the same way that Weimar broke all of the cultural guardrails nearly a century ago. Too bad; Cohen and his fellow Timesmen are belatedly discovering that we could use a few right now.