How to Kill a Democracy

Eric welcomes historian Timothy Ryback, the Co-Founder and Director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in the Hague. He has been Director and Vice President of the Salzburg Seminar and a lecturer in History at Harvard University and is the author of Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). They discuss why Tim wrote this book and why it seems especially timely now, the political and historical contingency of Hitler's ability to seize power and why it resulted not just from large historical forces but by a series of decisions by individual players in the drama. The roles of President Hindenberg, Chancellor Franz Von Papen, Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, and media mogul and nationalist party leader Alfred Hugenberg in the decisions that led Hitler to the Chancellery and the fact that the Nazis never commanded more than 37% of the vote in Germany. They touch on the role of political parties, political violence and the role of big business in the rise of Hitler as well as the critique of liberalism that Hitler and others shared of liberal democracy in Weimar Germany and its resonance in contemporary U.S. politics with figures like Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power: https://a.co/d/4ZRUL5J https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/is-the-far-right-channeling-german Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.