Oh, Dear!

Or as Nicky from the Great British Bake Off 2023 would say, “Oh, dearie me!” Fourteen years ago, I started this project of reporting publicly on my reading. In 2017 I decided that the internet was, for me, no place to hold political discussions. But I keep reading political things! What do I do?

I heard about Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in an article by a writer who finds parallels between the events in the novel and the dangers he associates with a certain current figure in U. S. politics. I, too, see this figure as potentially dangerous. So I read the book. In this novel, the fictional Buzz Windrip is elected President of the United States in 1936 by grievance-feuled voters. (The book was written in 1935, so Lewis didn’t know yet how the U. S. would vote in their upcoming referendum on how Roosevelt was handling the Depression.)  In his campaign, Windrip has outlined his agenda, which includes banning all immigration, keeping most women at home, barring minorities from higher-paying jobs, and giving all legislative and judicial power to the President, Congress being reduced to an advisory board and the Supreme Court stripped of its veto power. He challenges election results in an election he won. After inauguration, he immediately claims emergency powers and begins to enact his authoritarian program. The Supreme Court can’t stop the coup because Windrip has placed them and all his other political enemies under house arrest. With his new, unchallenged authority, Windrip abandons any plans for helping the hungry and unemployed, creates a police state, and essentially turns the government into a crime mob.

For most of the details, Lewis merely translates steps in Hitler’s rise to events in his alternate America. Windrip has his own militia groups, for instance, outlaws all other parties, and makes every news outlet a purveyor of Windrippian propaganda. But the goal of the dictator’s totalitarianism is the very American goal of making money by taking money rather than the very German (or at least Prussian) goal of leading a military juggernaut.

Lewis doesn’t prove anything. Stories aren’t about proving things. But he immerses the reader in a situation that seems plausible. (I suppose I’m only saying that he fulfills the function of a novelist.) I’ll admit that I thought of stopping halfway through; Lewis had made his point, it seemed, and the middle’s long, dry litany of tawdry, unilateral revolution – Windrip did away with states and appointed his cronies to oversee new districts; he redesigned the executive departments and appointed toady X to newly created office Y, where he enacted policy Z; and so on – lacked the vivid, conversation-driven scenes of the first few chapters. But I’m glad I stuck with it. The journalist Doremus Jessup returns to the fore in the last third of the book, and his struggles with the conflict between the duties of resistance and of family safety provide a moving, suspenseful build to the climax.

The U. S. survives in Lewis’s dystopian daydream. But only barely.