NIALL FERGUSON: ‘Weimar America?’ The Trump Show Is No Cabaret. Detractors have been equating the U.S. with 1920s Germany for 85 years, and they are still wrong:

Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel and play “It Can’t Happen Here” launched the genre we might call “Weimerica.” Inspired by his wife Dorothy Thompson’s experiences as a foreign correspondent in Germany, and her observation of the ambitious and charismatic Louisiana Senator Huey Long, Lewis imagined the sudden collapse of the New Deal and the advent, under the dictatorial leadership of the bombastic Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, of an American Third Reich.

Windrip’s ideology, devised with the assistance of his Goebbels-like press secretary, Lee Sarason, is “The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.” They form “a nationwide league of Windrip marching-clubs, to be called the Minute Men,” with a uniform suggesting “the pioneer America of Cold Harbor and of the Indian fighters under Miles and Custer,” and a five-pointed star as their swastika. The Constitution is swept aside, the free market replaced by a corrupt corporatism, the free press stifled. Darkness descends.

Weimerica has recurred in dystopian function: in Stephen King’s “The Running Man” (1982), Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004) and Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” (2008). In each case, although the focus is on life in a fascist America, there is a version of the Weimar back story, for without the degeneration of the republic, the rise of the dictatorship is inexplicable. (For some reason, the Weimar syndrome rarely claims dear old Canada, which provides a bolt-hole for the U.S. resistance.)

So when my old friend Andrew Sullivan urged us last month “to be frank” about recent developments in American politics and admit that it is all “very Weimar,” he was adding to an 85-year-old tradition.

“The center has collapsed,” Sullivan wrote. “Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.”

It’s not the first time Sullivan has made the Weimerica argument. Six months before the 2016 election, he warned that “our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy” was leading “the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump” — and from there to tyranny.

As far back as September of 2007, Sullivan referred to then-President Bush as “The Weimar President,” as a way to do the Bush is Hitler analogy that every other leftwing pundit was making back then without fully redlining the Godwin Meter. The publication it appeared in? The Atlantic. As Led Zeppelin would say, the song really does remain the same.