SINLAIR LEWIS - "It can't happen here" was published in the year 1935
It can’t happen here: I published this text on March 13, 2017. President Trump just had started his first term. Since he is back, this is a good reason to put this back on my blog in November 2024.
Sinclair Lewis’s book from 1935 presents a US president, Berzelius Windrip, who comes to power through a populist electoral campaign. After taking office he transforms the United States of America into a fascist state. Behind him stands an ideological radical adviser, „the satanic Lee Sarason“, who controls the security community and exerts real power through violent storm troopers, called Minutemen, and through a single party, forbidding all other parties.
„The New Yorker“, „The New York Times“ and the British „The Guardian“ published articles that drew parallels between the novel and the rising of Donald Trump and his adviser Stephen Bannon.
A German translation was published in the former GDR in 1984. I bought the translation many years ago and read it again recently. The English text is available at Project Gutenberg.
The first part of the book is really a striking description of the rise of Donald Trump. Many chapters start with citations from the fictive book „Zero Hour“ from Berzelius Windrip. Take this example:
I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne.
You recognize the toolbox of populism, as it was used in Donald Trump’s campaign: Facts were ignored or replaced by alternative facts, the campaign addressed especially the losers of the economic crisis, who were attracted by grand promises, and also playing with their prejudices. Mexico was declared an enemy country, and the critical press was threatened. After the elections the policy of the president in Sinclair Lewis’s novel does not serve the masses who elected him, but his super rich buddies. Similarities could certainly be explained by coincidence of unrelated facts.
Before he wrote this book Sinclair Lewis had informed himself through eyewitnesses about the situation in fascist Italy and Nazi-Germany, which three years earlier, 1933, had come under Hitler’s regime. His description of violence by the Minutemen storm troopers is based on reports about the Nazi storm troopers called SA. Inhuman treatment and torture in the American concentration camps, erected on order of the new President Berzelius Windrip are descripted by Sinclair Lewis in accordance with the experience victims from Italy and Germany had reported. The death camps of the Holocaust were then still unknown.
It is very interesting to read, how Sinclair Lewis describes the reaction abroad. It is something between incredulity and appeasement: it is all not as bad as people think, the new president is building motorways, it is necessary to cooperate with the new regime. The propagandists of the new president are given all the room to spread their views and they are successful, they find enough people who believe them.
Naturally in the book from 1935 we can only expect an outlook to the future based on the world of 1935. The comparison of the president in the novel with president Trump is striking insofar as the thinking and the methods of populism as well as reactions from the outside are described. Sinclair Lewis wants to warn those who think that a transformation of populism into outright fascism couldn’t happen in the United States of America. The slandering of judges, the direct appeal to worst instincts of the people, the permanent movement with plebiscite character, and the treatment of the political adversary as an enemy, were the alarming signals.
The further development in the novel was a negative utopian narration, a dystopia. Sinclair Lewis could not know at that time that he rather underestimated the murderous nature of fascism and nazism. The second part of the book is quite speculative, in no way comparable with modern populism based on new media. There are no violent paramilitary units, and the checks and balances of the American constitution seem to function. However Donald Trump should read Sinclair Lewis’s novel. At the end President Windrip is ousted by his chief adviser Lee Sarason and sent into exile to Paris. It reminds us that Breitbart-Bannon’s ideas are not that far from fascist thinking.
The book is not a prediction of president Trump's administration. Here „The Guardian“ and the „New York Times“ exaggerated, at least in 2017. However the warning that plebiscitary right-wing populism can easily be transformed into fascism should not be underestimated. It is this warning which makes the novel of Sinclair Lewis look so topical today.
Soon, Donald Trump will be back in office in 2025. This time the international setting is much more sombre than in 2017. That makes populism even more dangerous. Trump may have changed - I fear, not for the better. Read Sinclair Lewis again.
Sinclair Lewis: "It can’t happen here" is available at Project Gutenberg