In January 2017, this 1935 satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) -- which sets out a scenario in which a fascist dictatorship takes over in the United States -- became the eighth best-selling book on Amazon. A "relatively obscure" work, it had been out of print in Britain, but Penguin ran off a new edition, and were anticipating the sale of 11,000 copies.

And what else happened in January 2017? The inauguration of Donald Trump...

It Can't Happen Here is set a year in the future, in 1936, seven years into a crippling economic depression. It was written in just four months, which probably accounts for a certain unevenness. Contemporary reviewers complained about it -- while also declaring it a must-read.


Cambodia, another place where It Could Happen

I found it a little heavy-going to start with. We open with farcical conservative figures setting the stage with outrageous, though sadly not unprecedented, viewpoints (General Edgeways: "We must be prepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves 'governments'; Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch: "Woman must resume her place in the Home... What this country needs is Discipline!"). It's amusing, but the massively larger-than-life characters are hard to cope with after a certain point. Satire works best in very short bursts.

But then Democratic candidate Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip is elected to the presidency, and we embark on a rapid descent to tragedy: The seizure of the legislative and executive branches; martial law; viciously suppressed riots. When the Minute Men (the militia created by the Windrip campaign) look as though they're faltering, Buzz and his loudspeaker fire them up again: "I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in America! To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again."

The first death hits you like a body blow. Now the scenario is no longer larger-than-life, because we've read this story before. We are familiar with its horrifyingly rapid slide to violence, repression, censorship, and concentration camps; its repulsively predictable pattern of cronyism, racism, sexism, anti-communism, anti-intellectualism, and war-mongering militarism. And we are familiar with the heart-rending by-product of regimes such as "Corpoism": the desperate streams of refugees, in this case trying to ride the "underground railroad" north to Canada.

Etienne de La Boetie (1530-63), beloved friend of Montaigne, wrote, probably in 1552/3, a piece called "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude". It discusses how tyrants manage to dominate the masses (even though their power would dissipate immediately if these masses withdrew their support); and how such tyrants exercise a kind of hypnotism over their people; and how something pushes people inexorably towards -- in La Boetie's words -- a profound forgetfulness of freedom. How clearly these words echo down the centuries...



Our hero in It Can't Happen Here is Doremus Jessup, the editor of the Daily Informer in Fort Beulah, Vermont (population 20,000). Born in 1876, he is an eclectic reader, a lover of the land around him ("a kind country, cool and clear as a shaft of light"), a family man with a little love interest on the side, "a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal", and "a small-town bourgeois Intellectual". He sees himself as fairly run-of-the-mill. But he hates cruelty and intolerance. And as the catastrophe unfolds, he wonders (in words that again reminded me of Montaigne) what brought it about: "'Is it just possible,' he sighed, 'that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?'"

Doremus is arrested, and briefly detained. He is released back to his job, but on a short leash, and experiences the temptation of indifference: "The worst of it was that it wasn't so very bad -- that, he saw, he could slip into serving the Corpo state with, eventually, no more sense of shame than was felt by old colleagues of his who in pre-Corpo days had written advertisements for fraudulent mouth washes or tasteless cigarettes." He wonders endlessly what to do, debating, "like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block -- particularly when they 'had wives and families to support.'"

But then the book-burning starts. Doremus has already hidden anything that might be considered suspect. But they burn his Dickens collection: "That guy Dickens -- didn't he do a lot of complaining about conditions -- about schools and the police and everything?" Doremus tries to escape to Canada with his family, but their attempt is foiled. So he "retires" from his editorial position, adopts a low-profile stance, and secretly joins the resistance. After completing a number of useful tasks for them, he is again arrested, and this time imprisoned in Trianon Concentration Camp, where life revolves around violence, deprivation, and waiting...: "The Waiting. It became a distinct, tangible thing, as individual and real as Bread or Water. How long would he be in? How long would he be in? Night and day, asleep and waking, he worried it, and by his bunk saw waiting the figure of Waiting, a gray, foul ghost. It was like waiting in a filthy station for a late train, not for hours but for months."

Eventually, Doremus is smuggled out to Canada. But after a while, he again slips back into the US as a "secret agent".

The political situation is volatile now. Windrip has been rolled by one of his entourage (but he goes into exile, and has provided himself with a few million dollars in secret accounts, so he'll be OK). The roller is, in turn, also rolled (but killed). Before the war with Mexico can get going, there's a rebellion against the Corpo regime, but it's not gaining much traction. So we leave Doremus in a country that is still in the grip of tyranny and civil war. He is shaken awake one night, and told there's a posse looking for him: "So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom. And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die."

You hope he can't, anyway.



Here are some of the passages that hit me over the head with their spookily recognizable themes:

-- Replying to someone who insists the excesses of 1930s Europe couldn't happen in the US, Doremus replies: "Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical -- yes, or more obsequious! -- than America... Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? ... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares... Remember when the hick legislators in certain states... set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!" Ouch... Do you remember freedom fries? And the evolution controversy has still not gone away.

-- Buzz's platform has him "all against the banks but all for the bankers -- except the Jewish bankers".

-- And he declares: "I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep all our dollars at home."



-- Meanwhile, Philip, Doremus's Buzz-infatuated son, rails against "this antiquated parliamentary-democratic-liberal system that really means rule by professional politicians and by egotistic 'intellectuals'".

-- As time goes by, Windrip becomes "more a miser of power... [who] daily wanted louder, more convincing Yeses from everybody about him". Hearing of the desertion of the vice-president, and bubblings of rebellion, he cannot believe what's going on: "You forget that I myself, personally, made a special radio address to that particular section of the country last week! And I got a wonderful reaction."

-- Secretary of State Lee Sarason demands that, "in order to bring and hold all elements in the country together by that useful Patriotism which always appears upon threat of an outside attack, the government immediately arrange to be insulted and menaced in a well-planned series of deplorable 'incidents' on the Mexican border, and declare war on Mexico as soon as America showed that it was getting hot and patriotic enough... Once, pointed out the learned [Dr Hector] Macgoblin, governments had merely let themselves slide into a war, thanking Providence for having provided a conflict as a febrifuge against internal discontent, but of course, in this age of deliberate, planned propaganda, a really modern government like theirs must figure out what brand of war they had to sell and plan the selling-campaign consciously."



So whose fault is all this? Karl Pascal is a convinced communist, and as one of Doremus's cell-mates, turns out to be a pontificating scourge. But the terms of his analysis have lost none of their relevance: "What burns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what you folks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500 a year or less -- remember, those weren't the unemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing honest labor... Buzz isn't important -- it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've got to attend to -- the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently unemployed, and growing larger."

So true... Our complacency is still killing us. "In some ways," says Alexander Nazaryan, "Jessup is the predecessor of today’s coastal liberal who did fine during the Great Recession of 2008 and doesn’t entirely understand the rage of those who fervently believe in America’s decline."

But then there's our high-handed assumption of superiority. People will vote for nonsense, Doremus prophesies, because they're convinced Buzz is "on the side of the plain people". He reflects: "If it hadn't been one Windrip, it'd been another... We had it coming, we Respectables..."

And there's our failure to react... After his first brief detention, Doremus reflects: "The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest."



Lewis's book was a best-seller, notching up sales of more than 300,000. It gained even more impact, however, when it was turned into a stage play in 1936.

A new version of the play-of-the-book was staged in September 2016. Susan Medak, the managing director of the theatre concerned, aptly comments: "The issue is not whether Trump is the guy in the book, but whether we the American people are the people Lewis is writing about. Are we the Americans he was warning us about? I do think we are. There is a fascination with demagoguery, someone who offers simple answers to complex problems. I think we are the people he was talking about 80 years ago."

In which case, you can't help hoping that this book and its dramatizations run and run...