Looking through an expert's prism on US. - Germany parallels

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Carol Forsloff - Trevor Roper, the British historian of Adolph Hitler, spoke at the University of Washington of parallels between Germany and the United States and the risks from their histories that mirror news today.

It was a different time, when Roper spoke.  It was early 1965.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed.  John F. Kennedy's death, howeverfresh, had been absorbed, the grief had passed, the country had moved on.  It was a time of optimism mostly, with a belief in the power to change and with a relatively new President Johnson promising to eradicate poverty and racism along with it.  Women gained new opportunities. American looked ahead.  The War in Vietnam was debated, but the country believed it would be over in time and folks would carry on.

These days the conflicts in the press reveal great political divisions,
issues so greatly espoused that it is debated by experts whether people
will even read or listen to another view.

It is a time when the President of the United States Barack Obama has been compared to Hitler; some associate Hitler with the last President of the United States,George Bush,  by those whose agendas are different and who may or may not understand the specifics of German and American history as Roper knew so well.

And the fear for the future, if all things happened in the right way, according to Roper, was from the right, with the values that reflect where that place is on today's spectrum of political and social concerrns.

Roper was considered the foremost authority on the life of Adolph
Hitler at the time he spoke at the University of Washington, as he had tracked the rise and fall of the dictator in the context of Germany and the history of the world.  He knew beyond the superficial the risks that had occurred in Germany and what America could face without its people using reason and commitment to rise above the foolish and the vain.  He was an admirer of the works of Locke and Rousseau.

In the context of his work,Roper is considered to be by his  peers to be right of center on his political views,significantly anti-Communist at the time of his flowering as a historian, and someone who brought to bear a broad spectrum from the social sciences to support his views.  He was not without controversy
either, having at one time authenticated the Hitler diaries and then withdrew his support.  But his knowledge of Hitler's last days has been accepted by others as substantial enough for realistic discussion, as he is considered an authoritative source of that period.

At the time of Roper's presentation at the University of Washington,  a
reporter was yet somewhat a girl, naively, blithely believing in the best.  As years have passed the reporter has turned gray, the words, the message fresh as it was heard.

Roper said this, as I paraphrased it in notes at the time, as he made the parallels about the United States and Germany and whether America could experience the trauma of Germany and the dissolution of its democratic ways.

"Germany and the United States were both expanded through violence,
through the submission of minorities to the will of the richer and more
powerful groups, " Roper said, outlining his first comparison.  "Both
worship the gun and uniforms.  Both have had a history of admiration and
glorification of war and the military.  Both are democratic countries,
with highly literate populations and Christian majorities.  Both believe
they are superior to others."

What might happen that could catapult the United States into a cauldron
where untruths could surface, where idle stories would become
pronounced, where liberty would become license and lies transformed to
false realities while people marched along?  Roper was asked by that
young journalist, who stood and trembled with the question from the
floor.

This is what Roper said, in words that journalist remembers, on pieces of paper scratched and soiled and barely readable now.

"It would take a time of great strife, an economic devastation not
unlike Germany had before World War II,"  Roper explained.   His words
are paraphrased as these:   "From that problem people could become
chaotic and fix on leaders, empty promises and lose trust.  They would
respond to slogans, paranoia, parades that could grow to mobs."


Roper's warning recalled from those decades when America held such
promise for its young, is brought forward as context for the news today.  ISIS is the terror of the moment, as the Republicans have now gained control of both houses of Congress as well as dominance of the Supreme Court.  

The election of 2016 will determine whether all the elements of Roper's conditions are met and if indeed the United States could face a right-wing thrust that would make it the inheritor of the type of mantle it once fought valiantly against.

Constitutional Competition

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Joel S. Hirschhorn--Among Americans there remains strong pride about the US Constitution, even though there is widespread support for creating reform amendments to it.  Globally, however, what should surprise Americans is a significant loss of respect for it.  Other nations, especially those creating new democracies, see better constitutions elsewhere.  This is not opinion.  It is fact.  And it is important to understand this historic shift.



A new university study sends a disturbing message to all Americans that want to hang on the fiction that the US constitution is not only the world’s best one, but does not need to be improved.  Do not mentally block this finding: “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to the study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.



What exists today is far different than what was proudly proclaimed in 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, by Time magazine which calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on theU.S. version.”



Why has the US Constitution lost standing abroad even though Americans cling to their belief that it is sacred and the world’s best constitution?



The new study examined the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them.  This is what they found: “Among the world’s democracies constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall.  Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.  … the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.”



Professor Law identified a central reason for the trend: the availability of newer, sexier and more powerful operating systems in the constitutional marketplace. “Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1,” he said.   In other words, the US Constitution is old and out of date.



A Supreme Court Justice has also weighed in.  In a television interview during a recent visit to Egypt, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”  She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.  Such a view should be respected.



Should Americans disregard these findings and perspectives?  Absolutely not.  Only if more people pay attention to this global trend will they better see the need to seriously consider constitutional amendments to improve American democracy.  The core problem, however, is one shortcoming of the US Constitution: the great difficulty in amending it.  In this regard, noted legal authority Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in his book “Our Undemocratic Constitution” that “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today.”



All over the country diverse people and groups on the right and left are advocating for reform amendments, such as getting all private money out of politics, creating term limits for Congress, removing personhood for corporations, and imposing a balanced budget requirement on Congress.



The problem is that Congress is quite unlikely to propose serious reform amendments, which means that the option in the Constitution for an Article V convention of state delegates must be used.  But Congress refuses to obey the Constitution by ignoring the hundreds of state applications for a convention from 49 states, more than the single requirement of two-thirds of states in Article V.  Learn more at the website of Friends of the Article V Convention, the nonpartisan national group advocating for the first convention.



Consider this: Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years.   But it would be silly to propose a totally new US Constitution; that is too radical an idea.  However, it is amazing that Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, noted that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.”  Too bad the Constitution gives Congress the power to convene an Article V convention.



Americans should wake up, stop their delusional thinking and recognize that the US Constitution needs to be updated through reform amendments.  We the people must pressure Congress to convene the first Article V convention.  Otherwise the Supreme Court will continue to make interpretations that are more political than legal in nature and the federal government will continue to erode personal freedoms and liberties.  And more and more other democracies will operate under better constitutions.