What about the Weimar Republic was bad? Seems to me our republic had a little trouble in 1861; France’s republic had several civil wars; England had several. It wasn’t the structure of Weimar that was bad-—and it absolutely was better than the Kaiser. The fact that a dictator takes over the country with only 44% of the vote is hardly a problem of the voting process.
—What about the Weimar Republic was bad? Seems to me our republic had a little trouble in 1861—
Yes, but the United States kept its troubles at home, and at the end our constitutional republic survived intact. We didn’t start a world war that killed over 50 million people, attempt to conquer Europe from the Pyrenees mountains to the Moscow suburbs, kill 6 million Jews, and, when it was over, allow the spread of Soviet Communism that would kill over 100,000 more Americans in Korea and Vietnam. The Weimar Republic was an abortion; it was bound to fail. The only question is whether it would go Communist or fascist. If the US was able to keep out of the Great War, it would have been fought to a standstill. Europe would have been stable, and the horrors of 1939-1945 (and the Cold War) would not have happened. The Weimar Republic was to governments what the Yugo was to automobiles.