Episode 3 - The Architecture of Allegiance: Building the Shadow State
Loading player...
There are lean years in any autocrats life and for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement those lay between 1925 and the depression of 1929.
It was all about patience, he had to wait until the feeling of relaxation in Germany as William Shirer calls it, had worn off. American money was pouring into Germany as it rebuilt following the First World War, between 1924 and 1930 Germany borrowed 7 billion dollars from American investors. These New York based capitalists appeared unconcerned about how the German’s may eventually repay their debts, and Germans appeared to give even less thought to it.
Germany’s social services in the 1920s were the envy of Europe, and the world, each state, city and municipality borrowed vast sums to build airfields, theaters, sports stadiums, swimming pools. German industry borrowed billions to retool factories. It’s output had dropped 55 percent between 1913 and 1923, but rose 122 percent by 1927.
Unemployment fell below a million in 1928, retail sales rose 20 percent in 1925, in 1926 real wages were 10 percent higher than where they’d been only four years earlier. The lower middle class, the people Hitler needed most as voters, the shopkeepers and small salaried folks, shared in general prosperity.
This was not the time for Hitler’s bitterness to flood the political landscape so he waited. It was the Great Depression that brought Hitler to power.
Trump needed a bitter landscape too.
Trump fiddled about with politics through most of the middle oughts, 2000 through to the banking crisis of 2007/8. During the first years of the 21st century, Trump was not yet a coherent political figure in the traditional sense. He flitted between parties, donated opportunistically, and treated politics less as public service than as branding. But beneath the theatricality, certain themes were starting to gel.
His America was being ripped off thread, combined with a gut feel that elites were incompetent and the political class was full of weak slack jaws, the Democrats and Republicans with their family wealth and class, the Bushs, the Kennedy’s.
These instincts intensified as the financial system began to buckle in 2007 and 2008.Trump approached the looming collapse as a familiar cycle of winners and losers. Having survived his own debt implosions in the early 1990s, he viewed crisis as opportunity. In 2007 he openly remarked that a property downturn could create enormous buying opportunities, stating that he had “always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.” Like Hitler, he realised that a weakening economy was his opportunity to gain. At this point, he wasn’t thinking seriously about entering a presidential race, but it had been on his mind for two decades.
As the subprime mortgage system unraveled, he warned that rising interest rates could “kill the real estate market,” while simultaneously positioning himself as someone prepared to exploit the wreckage. This duality is revealing: Trump’s worldview was never conventionally conservative in the Reaganite sense of disciplined free markets and restrained state intervention.
He admired strength, leverage, and survival. When the Bush administration proposed unprecedented banking rescues in October 2008, and new President Barack Obama signed off on quantative easing, pumping money into the market, Trump startled orthodox conservatives by endorsing the bailout logic, calling it “almost socialistic, but I like it.”
To him, ideology mattered less than preserving the system that protected property and hierarchy. Trump then began intuitively speaking the language of civilisational decline.
America, in his telling, was no longer the confident imperial centre of the 1990s. It was being cheated by China, weakened by bad trade deals, hollowed out by financial incompetence, and betrayed by its own elites. The banking crisis amplified a deep psychological fracture in American society.
It was all about patience, he had to wait until the feeling of relaxation in Germany as William Shirer calls it, had worn off. American money was pouring into Germany as it rebuilt following the First World War, between 1924 and 1930 Germany borrowed 7 billion dollars from American investors. These New York based capitalists appeared unconcerned about how the German’s may eventually repay their debts, and Germans appeared to give even less thought to it.
Germany’s social services in the 1920s were the envy of Europe, and the world, each state, city and municipality borrowed vast sums to build airfields, theaters, sports stadiums, swimming pools. German industry borrowed billions to retool factories. It’s output had dropped 55 percent between 1913 and 1923, but rose 122 percent by 1927.
Unemployment fell below a million in 1928, retail sales rose 20 percent in 1925, in 1926 real wages were 10 percent higher than where they’d been only four years earlier. The lower middle class, the people Hitler needed most as voters, the shopkeepers and small salaried folks, shared in general prosperity.
This was not the time for Hitler’s bitterness to flood the political landscape so he waited. It was the Great Depression that brought Hitler to power.
Trump needed a bitter landscape too.
Trump fiddled about with politics through most of the middle oughts, 2000 through to the banking crisis of 2007/8. During the first years of the 21st century, Trump was not yet a coherent political figure in the traditional sense. He flitted between parties, donated opportunistically, and treated politics less as public service than as branding. But beneath the theatricality, certain themes were starting to gel.
His America was being ripped off thread, combined with a gut feel that elites were incompetent and the political class was full of weak slack jaws, the Democrats and Republicans with their family wealth and class, the Bushs, the Kennedy’s.
These instincts intensified as the financial system began to buckle in 2007 and 2008.Trump approached the looming collapse as a familiar cycle of winners and losers. Having survived his own debt implosions in the early 1990s, he viewed crisis as opportunity. In 2007 he openly remarked that a property downturn could create enormous buying opportunities, stating that he had “always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.” Like Hitler, he realised that a weakening economy was his opportunity to gain. At this point, he wasn’t thinking seriously about entering a presidential race, but it had been on his mind for two decades.
As the subprime mortgage system unraveled, he warned that rising interest rates could “kill the real estate market,” while simultaneously positioning himself as someone prepared to exploit the wreckage. This duality is revealing: Trump’s worldview was never conventionally conservative in the Reaganite sense of disciplined free markets and restrained state intervention.
He admired strength, leverage, and survival. When the Bush administration proposed unprecedented banking rescues in October 2008, and new President Barack Obama signed off on quantative easing, pumping money into the market, Trump startled orthodox conservatives by endorsing the bailout logic, calling it “almost socialistic, but I like it.”
To him, ideology mattered less than preserving the system that protected property and hierarchy. Trump then began intuitively speaking the language of civilisational decline.
America, in his telling, was no longer the confident imperial centre of the 1990s. It was being cheated by China, weakened by bad trade deals, hollowed out by financial incompetence, and betrayed by its own elites. The banking crisis amplified a deep psychological fracture in American society.
