- Banned
- #1
Satire from 80 years ago is played out in real life with dumph
After Windrip’s coup at the Democratic convention, he won a three-way race when the other two candidates split the reasonable vote. Once elected, President Windrip appealed directly to his core constituency of unprosperous and resentful white mento help him repress dissent and bring fascism to America. It’s a chilling historical lesson, even though it didn’t actually happen.
Windrip’s election is the beginning of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” rather than actual American history. A wonderful example of prophylactic fiction, Lewis used his position as one of the nation’s top novelists to show his countrymen exactly how authoritarianism could rear its head in the land of liberty. The assassination of Louisiana Governor Huey Long (better remembered in literary history for inspiring Robert Penn Warren’s “All The King’s Men”) and the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt rendered Lewis’s warning moot for a time, but 80 years later the novel feels frighteningly contemporary.
Like Trump, Windrip uses a lack of tact as a way to distinguish himself. Americans know on some level that the country’s governing system has never conformed to its official values.
When it comes to making America great again, Trump promises to wheel-and-deal like the savvy businessman he keeps telling us he is. Instead of just implying their cynicism through participation in the electoral process like a normal politician, Buzz and Trump put it in their “pro” column. “We probably will have to lick those Little Yellow Men some day, to keep them from pinching our vested and rightful interests in China,” Windrip writes of Japan in “Zero Hour,” “but don’t let that keep us from grabbing off any smart ideas that those cute little beggars have worked out!” Any American president will be a thieving imperialist bastard, but these guys promise voters they will be the best thieving imperialist bastards.
It really can happen here: The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal
.
After Windrip’s coup at the Democratic convention, he won a three-way race when the other two candidates split the reasonable vote. Once elected, President Windrip appealed directly to his core constituency of unprosperous and resentful white mento help him repress dissent and bring fascism to America. It’s a chilling historical lesson, even though it didn’t actually happen.
Windrip’s election is the beginning of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” rather than actual American history. A wonderful example of prophylactic fiction, Lewis used his position as one of the nation’s top novelists to show his countrymen exactly how authoritarianism could rear its head in the land of liberty. The assassination of Louisiana Governor Huey Long (better remembered in literary history for inspiring Robert Penn Warren’s “All The King’s Men”) and the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt rendered Lewis’s warning moot for a time, but 80 years later the novel feels frighteningly contemporary.
Like Trump, Windrip uses a lack of tact as a way to distinguish himself. Americans know on some level that the country’s governing system has never conformed to its official values.
When it comes to making America great again, Trump promises to wheel-and-deal like the savvy businessman he keeps telling us he is. Instead of just implying their cynicism through participation in the electoral process like a normal politician, Buzz and Trump put it in their “pro” column. “We probably will have to lick those Little Yellow Men some day, to keep them from pinching our vested and rightful interests in China,” Windrip writes of Japan in “Zero Hour,” “but don’t let that keep us from grabbing off any smart ideas that those cute little beggars have worked out!” Any American president will be a thieving imperialist bastard, but these guys promise voters they will be the best thieving imperialist bastards.
It really can happen here: The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal
.
