Apparently sales of Sinclair Lewis’s book It Can’t Happen Here have skyrocketed since the election of Donald Trump. This is a book, written in 1936, fascism’s first heyday, about a homespun politician’s rise to the Presidency and subsequent institution of German-style fascism in the United States.
I feel like a little bit of a hipster about Sinclair Lewis, since I liked him long before he was cool. Main Street is one of my favorite novels, and I read Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, and Dodsworth in a great big rush about six or seven years ago. I’m pretty sure I wrote about them on this blog at the time (omg this blog is ten years old, it’s absurd), but I’m too lazy to dig up the posts right now.
What strikes me most about the book, however (which I’m currently listening to on audio) is the primary parallel between it and Hitler that Trump has not followed. Both the rise of Buzz Windrup, the politician in It Can’t Happen Here, and the rise of Hitler were facilitated by the creation of paramilitary forces that quelled dissent by extralegal methods. Windrup’s ‘Minutemen’ occupy Congress after he declares a state of emergency, and Hitler’s SA was used, after the Reichstag fire, in a similar manner to arrest all opposition and to intimidate the Reichstag into giving him dictatorial powers. In the latter case, the SA, which had about two million members, was by far the largest armed force in the country (the army only had 100,000 members) and was literally unstoppable. From the moment that Hitler took office as Chancellor, there was no longer anything that the citizenry of Germany could do to stop him.
Right now, for all the parallels between Trump and Hitler, there exists no such paramilitary force. I’m not saying one couldn’t be created. Given the degree to which law enforcement and the military and the various gun-owning persons in this country tend to be pro-Trump, it’s not impossible that he could create such a force in relatively short order. But as of this moment, it doesn’t exist.
Which is more of an accident than anything else. I think the thing that Sinclair Lewis did not predict (and he predicted a lot) is the sheer ineptitude of Donald Trump. It’s something that we, as Americans, really don’t have an easy time understanding. He has a certain low cunning that enables him to stop other people from having victories–nobody is ever able to claim victory in a deal w/ Trump, because he’s always willing to pull the rug out from under the them, even if it hurts the country as a whole–but he’s just not particularly organized, and he’s not great at delegation or at leveraging other peoples’ talents.
Our nation is in pretty rickety shape right now, and if our democracy endures, it won’t be a testament to anything we did, but rather to all the things that Trump failed to do.