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The Weimar Republic was born of war and baptized in the fires of the revolution of 1918–19, and the right-wing coup attempt of 1920. The new social democratic government attempted to appeal to the lower classes by incorporating the welfare state into the constitution for the first time in German history, while maintaining the support of the upper classes by staving off communist revolution.
When Hitler formed his new party out of the right-wing German Labor Party, he didn’t really bring any innovations to existing right-wing ideology.62 The mix of militarism, traditionalism, hypermasculinity, anti-Semitism, and anti-Marxism that he set within a social Darwinist framework of national and racial struggle was but a particularly virulent strain of prevailing far-right thought.
Hitler, on the other hand, had come to master the psychological element of propaganda. Rather than put forward “reasons” designed to “refute other opinions,” he aimed at the “elimination of thought” and the creation of a “receptive state of fanatical devotion” through a dynamic politics of constant action.
