Having a parliamentary majority together with the DNVP (quite possible) and using the non-parliamentary movements (such as the Stahlhelm) and the tools of the state (the army, the police) to crush any street protests thrown up by the communists and other opposition. It is quite possible for a democracy to be authoritarian and still a democracy. One of the main reasons Germany became a dictatorship was that it was relatively young as a democracy and did not have the institutional inertia to resist it. A lot of people wanted a strong nationalist party that took control, banned communism, restored order to the streets and "restored the pride and position of Germany". That was the main reason people voted for the nazis, not their anti-semitism or that they wanted a dictatorship.
I reject that idea. It would be like claiming the Confederate States of America was a "liberal democracy" that formed itself on a principle of states' rights instead of the evil economic and political principle of the right to own and exploit human beings because they were considered inferior and therefore open to such pernicious evil denial of their human dignity, human rights and civil rights.
The German state that allowed the Hitlerites into power had not developed the "rule of law" and the "individual concept of a free human being equal before that law" which is the hallmark of a modern liberal democracy and part of the theory and practice of the polity governing itself through such recognition of the individual human dignity, of the individual human rights and civil rights.
Weimar had the trappings and fixings, like the Confederates did. Where the analogy functionally stops, is that there was a political movement and tradition that was truly liberal democratic inside the Americans. Imperfect as it was and still deeply flawed down to the present, that liberalism took to the field and ended the Confederate slavocracy and the evil political system that supported its rotten edifice.
The Germans did not do that at the crunch time. There were no liberals, or not enough to take the Nazis down by force of arms in Weimar. That was left to the rest of the world to do. THAT is the reality. So if someone claims that Germany of the Kaiser or of the Weimar was a "liberal democracy", that is not the actual case. The German polity of the era, especially in its power elites and in its army did not reject Hitler, did not reject the Nazis, did not reject the evil the Nazis publicly preached, the way the northern and western regions of the United States rejected the Confederate rat bastards, who openly preached racism and the right to own slaves. The polities of those regions rejected the power-elitist slavocrats who polluted the United States socially and economically with their notions of privilege. The American liberals put down the slavocrats' King Cotton economic system of sanctioned and legalized human bondage at bayonet point. And yet... We are still trying to fix our system, because the rat bastards who championed the racism and that fictional and perjurous lie of divine right or social Darwinist economic and political and social iniquity (Unreconstructed Confederates) are still with us. You can tell liberal democracy by its raucous activity, for the liberal democrat citizens will not accept a government that violates their rights or oversteps the dignity of the individual human being. Show me a system that is "soziale Kontrolle und Ordnung" and I will look for secret police and paid informers, sort of like what 1930s Germany quickly and all too easily became by 1935 before the real Nazi horrors kicked in.
That is the metric. Did the German liberals take up guns to end genocide, mass murder, enslavement, racism, and colonial imperialist ambitions before the Hitlerite criminal conspiracy became the state law? Did they reject the BIG LIE? Did they fight against Hitler? Or did they fight and die for him?
McP.
