Yes, It Could Happen HereReflections on the lessons of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian novel about America’s descent into dictatorship under the Senator-turned-president Berzelius Windrip, appeared in 1935. By then, Lewis was already famous, the author of five books, including Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925—but refused it—and in 1930 became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Compared to these other novels, his story of fascism in the United States received mixed reviews. What the book lacks in literary merit, it makes up for in its urgency. Lewis was warning Americans not to be complacent: Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, and Franco’s dictatorship in Spain were not anti-democratic turns from which Americans were immune just because they regarded their country as exceptional. Moreover, Lewis was writing when authoritarian populism was already part of interwar American politics. Huey Long (The Kingfish), Father Coughlin, and William Randolph Hearst became national figures by tapping into anxieties about inequality, runaway immigration, and declining social cohesion. Long’s rhetoric resembles Windrip’s; the Bishop Prang character was a stand-in for Father Coughlin, whose populist, antisemitic radio broadcasts reached millions. Thanks to his journalist wife, Dorothy Thompson, who interviewed Hitler in 1931, Lewis also had a good understanding of authoritarianism’s rise in Europe. The book’s title derived from a sunny—but false—reassurance by the son of Doremus Jessup, the main character and editor of a small-town Vermont newspaper, that Europe’s authoritarianism could not make its way here. (The son would later become a fervent follower of Windrip.) A theme in Lewis’s novel is that authoritarianism need not be imposed forcibly from above; it builds on discontent that already runs deep in society and that a demagogue uses to create a stirring narrative about what’s wrong and how to fix it. His success doesn’t require charisma in the conventional sense; nor need the narrative be true. Indeed, the demagogue’s speeches are stuffed with scapegoating, conspiracy theories about enemies at home and abroad, and stories of a rapacious elite’s betrayal of working people. Lewis described Windrip as “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic….” Lewis’s story ends with Windrip’s overthrow in a rebellion, and his would-be successors meet similar fates. Though It Can’t Happen Here was published 90 years ago, it remains relevant—the more so as Donald Trump’s second term proceeds—as a warning about democracy’s fragility and how rapidly it can be undermined. America’s Stress Test Many will dismiss the comparison between Lewis’s novel and present-day America as fantastical. American exceptionalism rests on the belief that coups, dictatorship, and the collapse of democracy happen elsewhere—often with our governments’ complicity—but not here. Yet ours is a young democracy. Not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the vote guaranteed to all Americans; before that, Southern states used various subterfuges to deny the ballot to Black citizens. American democracy hasn’t endured the disruptions and upheavals that have destroyed democracies elsewhere. Seen thus, Donald Trump’s return to the White House—Trump 2.0—is a historic stress test. Until recently, predictions of American democracy’s demise would have been dismissed as hysteria. Now the possibility is widely discussed—and by sober folks in the know. Americans have become worried enough to consider decamping to countries like Canada or Portugal. A recent poll revealed that 17%, and a quarter of all Millennials, have considered leaving within a few years—and many already have. Lewis portrayed the extreme: concentration camps containing Windrip’s opponents; widespread torture; the abolition of states in favor of eight administrative districts; and a brutal presidential militia, the Minute Men, that serves as Windrip’s shock troops. None of this is about to happen here. But dwelling on those details obscures Lewis’s larger point: Americans have no special immunity to demagogues who excite popular passions to chip away at checks and balances, proclaiming, as Trump did in February, that “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” That affirmation of unfettered executive power harks back to the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s dictum that “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception”—plainly put, rulers can rightfully suspend the law. The Rule of Law at Risk Not long ago Vance warned that Trump was “America’s Hitler.” As Vice-President, he has defended Trump’s 2020 false claims of election fraud and his pardon of the January 6 mob. When Trump federalized the National Guard and sent its troops into Los Angeles and Washington, DC, without any evidence that those cities were being rocked by riots or criminality that local police departments couldn’t control, Vance, the Yale Law School graduate, again defended the president. He will do the same if Trump acts on his pledge to dispatch the Guard to Baltimore and Chicago (but not to red-state cities, seven of which make the list of 15 with the country’s highest murder and property crime rates, with Memphis leading the pack). Vance won’t care that the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement without enabling legislation violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. Nor will the GOP majority in Congress: it has become a Trumpian cult. Signs of Authoritarian Drift Unfettered Presidential Power. The Trump team’s reading of Article II of the Constitution is based on “unitary executive theory,” which presents the president’s powers as chief executive as all but limitless. The lower courts have challenged this interpretation but have not received unequivocal support from the Supreme Court, whose supermajority is sympathetic to Trump. On day one of his second term, he tried to end birthright citizenship, which the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees. SCOTUS rejected the authority of lower courts to decide that the right applies across the board and limited it to particular ones, leaving the door open for the president to deny birthright citizenship to everyone born in territories under the jurisdiction of the US government. Later, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which applies only in wartime or during armed invasions, to summarily deport members of the Venezuelan crime ring Tren de Aragua to a hellish El Salvador prison. That Act permits a president to expel the citizens of enemy states when the country is at war or facing an armed invasion. Again, SCOTUS ruled that people slated for deportation were entitled to file individual legal challenges but lacked the standing to contest the legality of a president’s use of the Act to justify deportations. Even that didn’t satisfy Trump. In a Truth Social post, he attacked SCOTUS for blocking his executive powers, endangering the country’s security, and bending to “the Radical Left.” When lower courts have opposed his actions, he has gone further, denouncing their judges as radicals and lunatics and even demanding that one of them be impeached. His demonizing has produced a surge in threats against judges, including death threats. This was the context in which Chief Justice John Roberts warned, in a speech at Georgetown Law, that the rule of law is “endangered.” A Supine Congress. The Constitution grants Congress control over taxes and tariffs—powers that the GOP majority has all but surrendered by doing Trump’s bidding obediently. Bipartisanship, which has been atrophying since the Reagan years, is now effectively dead. Reaching across the aisle to build consensus based on compromise has become a sign of weakness, even disloyalty to the president. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) admitted that the risks of retaliation from Trump had become so serious that “we are all afraid.” Appeals courts have rejected Trump’s right to bypass Congress and impose tariffs through executive orders or to refuse to spend $11.5 billion that Congress set aside for foreign aid. The administration has appealed to SCOTUS, whose ruling may favor the president. Then there is the larger question, which legal scholars have explored, of whether Trump will find ways to sidestep court decisions by claiming, as Vance already has, that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Lest you be reassured by his use of “legitimate,” keep in mind what that qualifier means to proponents of unitary executive theory. Courts have measures they can use to enforce their rulings but, as a former judge conceded, “The truth is we are at the mercy of the executive branch. At the end of the day, courts are helpless.” A Cabinet of Flatterers. Unlike in Trump 1.0, there is no dissent within the cabinet, which has been stacked with people picked for their fawning loyalty to the president, not experience and competence. Almost to a person, its members lack qualifications for the jobs they hold. Consider FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Special Envoy to Russia and the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. Unsurprisingly, Cabinet meetings have become occasions for flattery, with one member lavishing praise on Trump and the others competing to see who can nod the most in agreement. That’s apparent in this tape of Witkoff hailing Trump as a peerless peacemaker who has already ended seven wars. The Nobel Committee (which he pronounced “noble”), Witkoff says, should “get its act together” and award the president its Peace Prize. One sign of a democracy in distress is the emergence of a “cult of personality.” We are well into that moment. Purges of Top Officials. Trump has fired senior officials, such as Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer or Defense Intelligence Agency head Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, for reporting information that did not line up with his claims about low inflation or the complete success of the strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. This excess has even extended to the Federal Reserve Bank, whose independence from presidential or congressional pressure is both guaranteed by the Federal Reserve Act and widely regarded as essential for sound economic stewardship. Presidents can remove the Bank’s Board of Governors—but only for “cause”: incompetence or unlawful conduct. But Trump is now trying to oust one of them, Lisa Cook, citing as his justification an unsubstantiated claim—first advanced by a Trump loyalist based on a “tip” whose source he won’t reveal—that she falsified information on a mortgage application several years ago. Trump’s real goal is a compliant Fed that lowers interest rates when he thinks it should. Civil Society Under Strain. A constellation of non-governmental organizations provides the information, legal representation, and education that empower citizens. Trump has repeatedly sought to bend them to his will. He strong-armed the nation’s biggest law firms into providing free legal services to his administration; five of them offered $940 million worth rather than waging a court battle. Universities, painted by Trump as Petri dishes for antisemitism, have been denied billions of dollars in federal research funding. To regain that essential support, Columbia had to pony up $221 million and accept various forms of supervision by the government, including the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which, according to its critics, equates criticisms of an Israeli government’s military excesses with that hateful ideology. Harvard has fought back but the president insists that it must pay “nothing less than $500 million” to have the funding reinstated. UCLA is on the hook for more than $1 billion. The media has also bent the knee to Trump, who attacks it with a crudity and ferocity that his predecessors would have found both unimaginable and unbecoming. On orders from its owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post broke with a 36-year tradition by deciding not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. Many employees and readers were outraged by Bezos’s transparent attempt to avoid incurring Trump’s wrath if he were reelected. After Trump won, Bezos took to X to offer “big congratulations” on “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” and he is not the only corporate titan who has curried favor with Trump. Paramount, owner of CBS, settled a $16 million lawsuit after Trump alleged that 60 Minutes unfairly edited an interview with Kamala Harris. Trump then announced that he anticipated receiving another $20 million in free programming and advertising from the network. A Cultural Revolution. Trump has ordered government-funded museums and public schools to disavow what he considers “anti-American ideology.” The Smithsonian in particular has come under fire for exhibits that fail to celebrate the nation’s history. His “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order directed JD Vance to eradicate “improper” exhibits from the Smithsonian’s galleries and museums. Schools are barred from teaching about “radical gender ideology and critical race theory.” The same goes for LGBTQ+ rights. In a January decree Trump vowed to stop the “imprinting [of] anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children.” How long before classroom discussions of, say, slavery, the seizures of Native Americans’ lands, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II are labeled subversive? Democracy at Risk: Given past practice, there’s good reason to worry that Trump will attribute any GOP losses in the 2026 midterm elections to fraud. Though seeking a third term would violate the Constitution, Trump never ruled it out and has alluded to the possibility. Nor is he offended by accusations that he’s acting like a dictator. On one occasion he responded that “the line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator,’” adding that “most people say…if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.” The Road Ahead. This isn’t, of course, an exhaustive list of the signs pointing to American democracy’s erosion. It may be comforting to reassure ourselves that we are far from the authoritarianism portrayed by Sinclair Lewis and to say, as Doremus Jessup did, that “it can’t happen here.” Yet for the first time, we must entertain the possibility that American democracy may not survive Trump’s second term—that what has happened elsewhere could happen here, even if not in precisely the same way. © 2025 Rajan Menon |