It Can't Happen Here

This book imagines a world where the United States succumbs to authoritarianism. Subsequent writers have explored this theme, but I love Lewis’s novel because it captures a precarious historical moment (the 1930s) that has a lot in common with the present day.

“Buzz” Winthrop, the politician turned dictator, whips up fears about threats to America, stressing the need to get back to the nation’s “true” values. It’s a chilling portrait of a nation that loses its way.

Dystopian when it was written, Lewis set the book distinctly in its own period, the depth of the Great Depression. He could not have written a better account of the Trump presidency had he tried.

Buzz Windrip, the whirlwind populist demagogue president, is the very essence of Trumpism. The story that follows, of the fascist oppression of his enemies and his inevitable self-destruction, often funny, often not funny at all, packs all the punch of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, written almost a century later, which looks in hindsight at the same phenomenon as Charles Lindbergh unseats FDR… show more.

Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel was inspired by European fascism and serves as a bridge between Hitler/Mussolini and the blustery, bloviating, red-faced American version, Huey Long and Donald Trump. After winning the Presidency on a populist platform, Lewis’s demagogue, Buzz Windrip, outlaws the opposition, puts his political enemies in concentration camps, sets up The Minute Men, a personal paramilitary force, eliminates the power of Congress, and restricts rights for women and minorities. A huge number of American voters back these fascist measures as necessary to make the country great again. Sound familiar?

Full disclosure: this book was an inspiration for my… show more.

Lewis wrote this at a time when followers of fascism were becoming more powerful in the United States – forces that I document in a history chapter “If 20’s are 30’s” in my book. Some critics would later dismiss this novel as fantastical, but it’s full of verity about the country – there is a strong message in this story for us to learn from today. 

Sinclair Lewis was master of the ‘diagnostic novel’—America was always his sick patient, and in many of his novels he diagnosed what the problem was. In 1935, the problem was that America, like so much of the world, was in danger of falling under the spell of fascist demagoguery.  

It Can’t Happen Here isn’t a sci-fi novel—but it is certainly speculative fiction, with resemblances to both 1984 and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It details the rise of populist demagogue Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip, who is elected president after fomenting fear and promising a return to traditional values. With the… show more.