It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a dystopian satire by Sinclair Lewis, the American author who won the 1930 Nobel literature prize for Main Street, Babbit and other novels penned in the 1920s. “It” is what he saw happening in Italy and Germany and feared might prove contagious.
Today is the fourth anniversary of president re-elect Donald Trump’s attempted coup to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election. Given that the American electorate has deemed Trump’s assault on the constitution to be of insufficient consequence to deny him a second term, Lewis’ novel makes for an unsettling read.
Writing at the height of the Great Depression in 1935, he imagines the Democratic Party dumping incumbent president Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 in favour of senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, loosely modelled on the about-to-be-assassinated Louisiana demagogue Huey Long. Despite his Trumpish taste for “girl stenographers”, Windrip’s ascent has been greased by Bishop Lionel Prang, a radio preacher with 50-million listeners and founder of the League of Forgotten Men.
There is — as there was at the time — a lot of working-class anger for Windrip to exploit. The establishment has crashed the economy and has turned its back on the veterans of a foreign war in which they should never have had to fight. Windrip wins the presidency as a man of the people promising to restore American greatness.
He will put the country back to work by throwing up trade barriers. America will produce everything it consumes, “even coffee, cocoa and rubber”, he declares in his manifesto, Ground Zero — Over the Top. This, he promises, will generate more than enough revenue for the government to fund a universal basic income of $5,000 ($100,000 now). Trumponomics on steroids with a tab of LSD!
Nativism, anti-Semitism and Christian nationalism are key features of Windrip’s pitch. Blame for the country’s woes and supposed moral decline is Trumpily assigned to foreign and domestic enemies of the state — communists and socialists, of course, but also liberal intellectuals and the press. Windrip, like Trump, makes no secret of his intention to centralise power in the executive branch, bypassing Congress and ignoring the courts if he decides he has to.
Some like the sound of this, believing a strong hand is necessary. Others simply refuse to take the candidate at his word — can’t happen here. In the latter category is much of corporate America, which sees Windrip’s more extreme pledges as campaign rhetoric of which nothing will come, or from whose implementation he can be dissuaded or, if necessary, bought.
Elected, Windrip sets about appointing a kakistocracy. For treasury secretary he picks a banker who has been “more or less” acquitted of tax evasion but who did a good job on the stump selling the candidate as “saviour of the forgotten man”. A character redolent of Trump’s first term Svengali, Steve Bannon, is given a dual role as secretary of state and commander-in-chief of the Minute Men, a militia that calls to mind the Proud Boys who invaded the Capitol on Trump’s behalf four years ago and which, in the novel, becomes the Windrip administration’s vengeful enforcer.
There are protests when Windrip starts doing what he said he would do; these provide a pretext for suspending civil liberties and unleashing the Minute Men. It’s not long before journalists, including the novel’s protagonist, Doremus Jessup, editor of a small-town newspaper, and other enemies of the state are being arrested and put in camps.
Needless to say, there is no redistribution to the Forgotten Men. The administration seizes banks and industries in the name of stability and hands them to loyal oligarchs. Unions are placed under state control. Insiders get rich. Everyone else has to live on a diet of propaganda, or worse if they complain. Patriots buy the line. Most just go along. Shades of Putin’s Russia.
It’s just a novel, of course, nor is it Lewis at his best. Yet, its resonance with the present is at times downright uncanny. If you prefer not to read the book, simply follow the US news for your fill of dystopian satire, beginning with Trump’s re-election, bought and paid for by a ketamine-popping, multiple alias SA zillionaire from the Marvel Comics universe.
Except it isn’t satire. Is there anything that can’t happen here?
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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