It Can't Happen Here

"The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water--all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip." 

 

 

There's a book I've been quote-mining recently, and you can expect me to keep doing so for a while longer. That's not due to its trenchant futurology or its lyrical virtuousity. Not that it's terribly written, but Sinclair Lewis' style is decidedly prosaic and strained a bit too hard to interweave It Can't Happen Here with both the middlebrow diction and jargon of 1935 and real-world references or analogies which have somewhat dropped out of public consciousness in the intervening ninety years and counting. Purely as a dystopian vision, it measures poorly against the field's defining works like 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. It lacks the same grandiose sweep, the same universal insights. But, weirdly, all of the above can also be seen as its strong point.

 

I can't remember how I ran across the book, but its central villain's rise to power has tracked eerrily in every description and plot point that more modern phenomenon of Trumpism, from a lack of even casual acquaintance with the truth to blatantly insane campaign promises to fickle political alliances, to the blatant idiocy deliberately ignored by his supporters, to even the artificial folksiness and crass, casual dudebro mannerisms which should rightly shame any public figure out of the public eye. But don't.

 

Described from the viewpoint of a small-town New England newspaper editor, instead of dropping you in medias res into a dictatorship already established, this alternate America's rapid crash into fascism lays out the venal or delusional psychological tricks by which commoners allow or collude with their own descent into helpless subjects of a despot, during each step of heightening restrictions, privations and terror. As such the story falls into that rarer subgenre of an apocalyptic procedural, outlining day by month the personal impact of social decline, every social nicety you lose, every right you never knew you'd miss, every tiny vanishing luxury, every fresh insult piled upon injury.

 

But others surely have done all that better. The novel's true strength lies in the flip-side to its lacking universality, because it is indeed a vision of how it can happen (and is currently happening) here, in Anytown, U.S.A. Lewis captured facets of small-town yankee psychology which the more ambitious or flamboyant dystopias miss. The distinction is a white-collar vs. blue-collar one drawn elsewhere between, say, the Addams Family with their old-world manners and obscure tastes and The Munsters with their more limited appeal to the "meat&potatoes" 'Murican baseline, but also one of shallower social structures. I've said before that it's damned hard to find the traditional European gemeinschaft represented anywhere in American life, or, as a result, in their artistic output, except in stories about backwater dregs like Winter's Bone. Thus, while for example a previously discussed description of social decline in Il gattopardo might center on customs whose origins lay forgotten in the mists of time, ancestral homesteads, generational debts, restrained manners and privilege and art and millennial institutions like The Church, the cast of It Can't Happen Here inhabit a looser milieu of social clubs and college sports teams and puritanical frigidity.

 

Lewis manages to drive home the point that Americans' more confused loyalties in no way insulate them against a fascist takeover. Sure, the demographic friction might be a few centuries shorter in the making, but "niggers" 'n "kikes" nonetheless made acceptable targets of opportunity for profit-minded yankee rabblerousing. Instead of a few gigantic levers of traditional grievance which a European dictator might pull, a fascist takeover in the States must press a myriad tiny buttons, but these are still open enough for the pressing and less protected by a self-respecting bourgeois intelligentsia available overseas. All it takes is a few slogans, a few marching songs, a bit of folksy babbling about the good old days (whatever those might be) and the ever-useful harnessing of envy against one's neighbours, and up spring the gulags in Vermont as surely as they do in Siberia.

 

In may not be the most artfully penned world classic, but it's one everyone on this side of the pond probably should have read fifteen years ago.