In 1935 watching events unfold in Europe Sinclair Lewis wrote “It Can’t Happen Here”, a novel whose plot is about a take-over of the United States by forces of the extreme right using tactics akin to those that brought the Nazis to power in Germany with an American flavor.
“It Can’t Happen Here” of course was a fast written topical novel of its time and most agree that the man Lewis had in mind as his model for a far right leader was Sen. Huey P. Long, the bellicose, dangerous authoritarian from Louisiana assassinated in 1935. If you’ve read “All the King’s Men” the novel by Robert Penn Warren or seen either of its movie versions, especially the 1948 version with Broderick Crawford, then you know the Huey Long story.
“It Can’t Happen Here” was a clarion, an alarm in the night to warn an inward looking America then determined to avoid another involvement in another conflict like WWI not to be complacent, not to take freedom for granted; not to let noisy ignorance and extremists take freedom from them or replace democratic values with authoritarian, totalitarian government. It is a novel that warns us against ignorance, prejudice, fear and their products — hate, stupidity and terror.
Of course that did not happen here. WWII did. Out of the war came a United States that dominated the world for the next 70 years and more. But today the U.S., has military stationed by some accounts in 150 of the 195 nations in the world and yet is drawing inward.
It is diverting so much national treasure into military spending that the nation the military protects literally is falling apart. Its rail, airport, road, bridge, water, sewer and electric grid infrastructure is coming apart as the bill to repair and replace it rises every day without a plan much less the money to reverse the decline.
In the past 70 years as in the years that preceded the post WWII era, all sorts of far right extremist movements and leaders came and went. But they never succeeded in making a real dent in American democracy and except for the early 1950s in the U.S. Senate they never won control over a branch of our government, much less all of it.
But now comes Trump, achieving what none of them could by actually gaining not election but selection by the electoral college — not by the voters but by the electoral college: Now comes Trump, replacing government with chaos, all the while imposing his angry, alien and every more clearly racist will on the nation and the world in complete ignorance of pretty much everything and anything a reasonably informed citizen should and would know much less what a president must know.
He revels in doing it with total disregard for truth, with indecency and without respect for the dignity of the office the electoral college purloined for him.
Charlottesville may have looked like an extreme moment by an extreme movement. It was not. It is not. It is the angry Trump rally wanting to take the United States back, back to 1955 and beyond with all that implies.
In that time, the 50’s, the far right spat up the John Birch Society, Young Americans for Freedom, Klan revivals, White Citizens Councils and a vast array of other white power and extreme right groups. For the most part they were and remained on the far fringes of American politics and never got a chance to enter government. Never.
Now, in these times, like the thrashing tentacles of a giant squid striking out through all their causes and organizations the vast and ever more powerful political networks of the likes of the Koch brothers the Mercer family, Bannon and dozens and hundred of others with vast fortunes at their command are intent on employing their wealth to make an America they want– a 1955 America with a twist. The twist? It would be like Russia today — an oligarchy with all power held in the hands of a few and they are the few they see as entitled to impose this on you, on me, on everyone else.
Presiding over this dismal empire and darkening future of fear, ignorance, hate, racism and animus toward “the other” is the chaotic, purposefully ignorant, divisive Trump. Notwithstanding the muted cries and whispers of a few of its prominent figures like Senators Flake and Corker, who speak out a little now only because they have chosen to surrender, one of our two national political parties has been captured through the instrument of extremist right wing money and delivered to the unleashed nihilism of Trump.
We now have either two parties called the Democratic Party or, take your choice, the Nationalist Party or Trump Party, or we have three parties, the Democratic Party, a rump Republican Party and the Nationalist Party. The Nationalists include many dozens in the House and a significant number among the 52 Senate Republicans.
What we can see and say for certain is that Lewis’s 1935 novel has come to pass. We are now in the hands of an anti-democratic, nationalist, nativist, destructive reactionary government — it’s only seeming purpose to destroy, to wreak havoc with the progress of the past 70 years and turn the clock back even farther than that. If it is not going to get better the question is how much worse will it get?
Recent events in China are instructive. There at the five-year meeting of the Communist Party the course of modern Chinese politics and governmental practice would have had someone on the ruling council of the Communist Party elevated to the position of clear successor to President Xi five years from now when his second term ends.
But that did not happen and it could well be that President Xi intends to do away with China’s version of a two-term limit as Putin has in Russia, the latter virtually appointing himself the first Tsar since Nicholas II.
At the same time, 70 years after we saved Europe from itself, Western Europe is descending into the dark, nationalistic past that resulted in the rise of Nazi Germany and its conquest of virtually all of Europe saving Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Sweden with all the resulting terror, horror, war, death and destruction Germany wrought.
In Eastern Europe nationalist political movements in Slovakia, Poland, the Baltic states and Hungary are on the rise or in control dredging up from dark pasts the one unifying historical hate they share — anti-Semitism — that made them complicit and in some cases like Slovakia and Hungary outright willing Holocaust partners of Nazi Germany. Yes, the very same nations over which we have been arguing in this country as to the value of protecting them from Putin under the NATO umbrella are turning to a dark fascist past.
If there could be a topper to all of that in Europe then surely it comes in the form of Alternative for Germany (German acronym AfD), the far right party that two weeks ago became the third largest in the Bundestag — the modern German parliament. Make no mistake, they can call themselves what they want but in plainest terms they are the rebirth of Nazism in Germany.
The AfD won 13 percent of the vote. Not so much you say? In the scheme of things perhaps not but first consider this: In the organization of the Bundestag Chancellor Merkel now must look to her right, not to the middle to construct a government that can exclude the AfD.
And then consider this: Given German history and guilt, it has been and should forever be impermissible for a party like the AfD to hold any seat much less third place in the Bundestag. It should not even exist in Germany and every German should be ashamed that it does.
So no, 13 percent is a long way from imposing a far right dictatorship but history offers a lesson from German politics. As the Nazis rose in the early 30s from a marginal, discredited extreme right, crazy and craven nationalist, anti-semitic movement they did it after Hitler shrewdly decided his path to power would not be a putsch, having failed at that in Munich in 1923. He decided the path to power would be constitutional — through elections.
Three elections tell the tale. In the late 1920s the Nazis were a fringe movement, winning smaller percentages than the AfD just did. Then came the Great Depression, the rise of fascist Italy, a surge of Communism in Germany vying with equally aggressive far right parties among which the Nazis emerged at the top of the list.
So, did the Nazis ever win a Reichstag majority before they took complete and total power and caused to cause and carry out WWII with all its horrors culminating in the Holocaust? No, they did not. They won at the voting booth in a numerical range just like Trump’s favorable rating polls today here and now.
In the early 1930s one German government after another fell, causing a series of elections. The last three are most instructive. In July 1932 the Nazis broke through to 37 percent but in an election that November they slipped to 33 percent. When German industrialists and traditional right-wing nationalists maneuvered to construct a government from that election they ended up in a compromise they believed would enable them to control Hitler and the Nazis.
But the compromise made Hitler chancellor of Germany on Jan. 30, 1933. On that night as he stood on a balcony of the Chancellory with his arm extended in the Nazi salute, reviewing tens of thousands of brownshirt storm troopers, the fate of Germany and the world had been sealed. You could say Hitler had been given the power to make Germany great again.
The last of the three elections was in March 1933 and even then, with Hitler in charge and Nazi terror taking a firm grip over all of German life, still the Nazis failed to win a majority, finishing with 43 percent of the vote. It didn’t matter. They didn’t let the opposition take their seats, drove them out of the Reichstag (the then name of parliament) and quickly passed the Enabling Act, a law that delivered all governmental power to Hitler.
Sinclair Lewis knew all this, had watched as the world watched with alarm as these events unfolded in Germany. He saw a madman and his insane and criminal movement come to power by legal, constitutional means in the greatest nation in the heart of Europe.
When he wrote “It Can’t Happen Here” he was warning that it could, that if our political system fell into bad and wrong hands it could have the same terrible, terror-filled result.
Now stunningly this decade mirrors the 1930s with inward looking, nationalist, religious and racially bigoted political movements sweeping across Europe, even Germany, the continent’s most important, economic and financial power and, by means of Brexit, severing Britain, our foremost ally from Europe. And there are the strongmen nations: Russia, Turkey, Syria, Egypt and now China — gleefully opponents watching this self-inflicted disintegration of western democracy.
Not only can it happen here, it is happening here for all the reasons we know it is — the greatest almost certainly being the economic failure across what is so often called the heartland, the industrial center of the nation that today may more aptly be described as opioidland.
Whether that is upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, rust belt Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, rural Appalachia, or the rural south, through all of these places there is post-industrial economic failure compounded by alienated and alienating racism directed at black Americans, Hispanics and immigrants. It is compounded by educational failure and all of it bears the brand of opioid addiction, death and devastation.
These terrible changes and forces combined to be manipulated by an opportunistic, atavistic class of economic and social primitives who, with vast wealth at their disposal, would create the world Sinclair Lewis said “can’t happen here”.
Do they, could they, would they go so far as to overthrow all the norms of American government, governance, tradition and even the very founding documents whose meaning and intent they alone claim to know — would they or do they even now imagine that they can make it happen here?
Do they imagine they can they, like Putin in Russia or Xi in China seems intent to do — do they imagine they can keep the presidency beyond the constitutional limit of two terms?
They rely on the fact that social media is replacing all normative values, knowledge and debate with a cacophonous clamor in which each and every person operates on his or her bias; believes what they want as opposed to what they should know — in which in effect each person is his or her own editorial page or, more likely a blank page on which forces of the far right are imprinting a new dark belief system
Were he writing today Lewis might want to change his title to “It Happened Here”.
How and when will you know it is happening here? Watch for any attempt to remove Robert Mueller as special prosecutor or to stop or hinder his work.
History is more than the past. It is always a lesson for now and a warning to the future.
Peeling the Onion 