Weimar, the short-lived German republic preceding the Third Reich, has always provided a convenient broadside for conservatives of every stripe. It stands as a parable of reckless effulgence, the image of a society unaware of its own need for order and state power and so doomed to be visited by state power in its most vengeful and cruel form. As Robert D Kaplan puts it, the Weimar revellers, enamoured with anarchy and end-of-the-world partying, had no idea what was in store for them: “The more abject the disorder,” he writes, “often the more extreme the tyranny to follow.”
Since Trump appeared on the political scene, America has at times been compared to Weimar. The message in every instance has been the old cautionary tale: by embracing radical change and by abandoning its political traditions and norms, America is courting social and political disaster. In his new book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, Kaplan builds his argument on the image of Weimar, and his instincts are invariably fogeyish, but he is less interested in domestic politics than in the question of world order. That’s how he arrives at the highly original concept of a “geopolitical Weimar”.
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