re: #252 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)

His upbringing was essentially a political football. Bismarck feared the liberal influence of his parents (his mother was a daughter of Queen Victoria) once his father became Kaiser. So he tried to influence the young prince against his parents, liberalism, etc. etc. And Bismarck essentially helped create a autocratic monster who believed in monarchial absolutism, Prussian superiority, and militarism. Of course, said autocrat was not going to stand by as a figurehead monarch to let the chancellor run things like his grandfather had so Bismarck was sent packing soon after Wilhelm came to power.

An interesting what-if would have been what happened if cancer had not killed Wilhelm’s father when it did. A longer reign there might have had some interesting European political ramifications.

Quite right, IMHO: especially the bit about Friedrich III (Wilhelm’s father; and subject of intense historical what-if study for 130+ years). However, also: one factor that tends to get overlooked in studying Wilhelm II and the First World War is that, despite the Kaiser’s deep-seated attachment to “…monarchial absolutism, Prussian superiority, and militarism.”, the political and social structures of Imperial Germany (even including the military) had a number of built-in constraints to curb said absolutism; frex, there WAS a elected parliament with a degree of control over the budget, a stable bureaucracy, the sub-kingdoms of the Reich did have some limited degree of local autonomy, even the nominally subservient military was a highly-professionalized and operationally independent arm of the state.
For an interesting take on the geopolitical factors leading up to the catastrophe of WWI, (including Wilhelm II’s issues) I’d also highly recommend The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark (2012). Clark’s thesis about the causes of the war focuses on a different “villain” provoking the conflict - and, for a change, it’s NOT
Kaiser Bill….