Lurching to a new Weimar

America seems to be heading inexorably toward a Weimar moment, a slide toward political polarization from which it could be increasingly difficult to return. Weimar — that brief, brilliant and tragic German republic of the 1920s — was replaced by Hitler’s murderous regime in 1933.
Like Weimar, our politics are increasingly defined by violence, whether the Pittsburgh massacre, the mass mailing of bomb-laden parcels, dueling mobilizations on the border, the shooting of Republican