In a parliamentary system like the Weimar Republic, political dysfunction often takes the form of failing to be able to form a government. Something similar has plagued Israel in recent years, with multiple elections being required to gain a ruling majority in the Knesset. The United States doesn’t have a parliamentary system so our dysfunction takes a different form.

After the 2022 midterm elections, the Republican Party won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, but it took them 19 days to settle on Kevin McCarthy has the Speaker of the House. As I noted at the time, the new Speaker didn’t actually rule over a functional majority because he could not pass spending bills or pay our nation’s debts on time without relying on votes from the minority caucus. I predicted McCarthy’s speakership would be short-lived, lasting until June at a minimum and the end of September at a maximum. It turned out to be the latter.

After another prolonged period of paralysis, House Republicans forced Mike Johnson of Louisiana in as the new Speaker over the unanimous opposition of the Democrats. But Johnson doesn’t have a functional majority either. In a parliamentary system, this would likely lead to no governing coalition forming at all and a new set of elections. But the key is that in either scenario, when the legislative branch cannot come together to execute its constitutional responsibilities, the result is likely fascism, beginning with a strengthening of the executive branch at the expense of legislative and judicial branches.

In the Weimar Republic, the Reichstag was the legislative branch, and when it ceased to fulfill its budgetary role, it was marginalized.

The first Brüning cabinet, headed by Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party, was the seventeenth democratically elected government during the Weimar Republic. It took office on 30 March 1930 when it replaced the second Müller cabinet, which had resigned on 27 March over the issue of how to fund unemployment compensation.

Brüning hoped to be able to work with the Reichstag to solve Germany’s pressing economic problems, but when it rejected his budget for 1930, he worked with President Paul von Hindenburg to have it converted into an emergency decree. After the Reichstag rejected the decree, Hindenburg, at Brüning’s request, dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections. The steps that were taken after the rejection of the 1930 budget marked the beginning of the presidential governments of the Weimar Republic under which the president and chancellor used constitutional emergency powers to bypass the Reichstag.

By this point, a good percentage of the German public had lost faith in the parliamentary system. Specifically, they didn’t think coalition governments made up by cobbling together various parties, could act decisively or effectively to solve the nation’s problems. The problems were pronounced due to the global financial collapse on 1929. Once it was accepted that Germany would be governed by emergency presidential decree rather than through the Reichstag, the Weimar Republic was doomed.

Speaker Johnson has set up two new deadlines, January 19 and February 2, to fund the government. As The Hill reports, with no spending bills under consideration this week, that leaves only 16 legislative days for Johnson to meet the first deadline. His predecessor lost his job when he used mainly minority caucus votes to fund the government, and Johnson repeated that sin to extend funding into January. The government can be funded quite easily through this kind of ad hoc informal coalition government, but it is unsatisfactory to both Republicans and Democrats. It’s unsatisfactory to Republicans because they don’t control the spending levels and priorities but rather just continue the program set out by Nancy Pelosi when she was Speaker. For the Democrats, they rightly expect to share power if they’re serving in the functional majority, just as a coalition partner would in a parliamentary system.

Because the Biden administration cannot dissolve Congress and ask for new elections, nor can they simply bypass Congress and fund the government through presidential decrees, we face the ongoing prospect of government shutdowns and also potential national credit default if we can’t pay our debts on time. This constraint provides some protection against fascism but it actually makes it more difficult to solve the political gridlock. If we could dissolve Congress and hold new elections right now, we might get a functional partisan majority to replace the barely functional coalition majority we have now.

What’s constant between our system and Weimar however is that a dysfunctional legislative body loses public support and this leads to public acceptance of extra-constitutional solutions. Nothing is more extra-constitutional than Donald Trump and his political movement. This is a movement that refused to accept the legitimate results of the 2020 election and launched a violent insurrection against our legislative body in an effort to make Trump our Führer.

If polls are to be believed, the American public would prefer a Führer right now to another four years of Joe Biden and a dysfunctional legislature. Electing the Führer outright would resolve the House Republicans’ inability to agree on funding measures. They would no longer have factions among themselves, but one leader to follow. And that’s apparently what Americans want right now, not because they’ve thought this through but because the status quo calls out for someone strong enough to get shit done.

The Republican Party as a whole is really primed for a Führer because it lacks any coherent political program and cannot govern itself. They are desperate to be told how to act. They want to be compelled because they are conditioned against compromise. And the public is following along simply out of frustration.

There’s no question at this point that the legislature cannot stand a strong challenge from the executive, precisely because the congressional Republicans want to give their responsibility away. And the judiciary cannot due much of anything without help from the other two branches.

The American experiment in representative democracy appears to be coming to an end.

Can anything save us?

Yeah, what can save us is winning the 2024 presidential election. Nothing else will.