It Can't Happen Here
So I just finished reading It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis in which a demagogue takes power in the United States in 1936 and quickly brings fascism to the United States, complete with the police state, concentration camps, and aggressive invasion of its neighbors (Mexico) in 1939 after staging false flag attacks by Mexico. I assumed this was all written after WWII with the benefit of hindsight but was surprised to realize after I finished that it was written in 1935, before Germany had concentration camps much less had invaded Poland in 1939!! (well okay google just now informs me German concentration camps began in 1933, but still it seems like it was pretty prophetic.)
Altogether the book was very good and had one constantly thinking both about what it would have been really like to live in Nazi Germany at that time, and what the Trump administration almost turned into / what a new Trump administration would certainly be like. But before we get into those points I want to discuss three decisions of the author I felt distracted form his main goals.
(1) almost immediately he has the new fascist administration completely, and I mean completely, overhaul the institutional framework of America, there are no longer fifty states but (a dozen) administrative sectors, with different subdivisions than our current counties and such. Maybe the author did that so he didn't have to concern himself with adhering to actual political considerations, but it seemed both very implausible, and it robbed the whole story of a great deal of verisimilitude. Ie it would have been much more poignant if the American fascism was more recognizably American.
(2) for some reason the author chose to make a major plot point that the protagonist doesn't love his wife and is having an affair. This seemed completely unnecessary to the main thrust and personally I have these chivalric ideas of romance that find such things extremely distasteful. Sure I understand that in real life people are up to such shenanigans but why does it need to be in this book where the protagonist having an affair does not have anything inherent to do with fascism in America? I could see how it could have been worked in as a corruption of an institution or something but its not, its put in like something we should be totally okay with, and I'm not.
(3) I thought it was funny how at pains the author was to ridicule and discredit communists at every opportunity. It makes sense at the time, I suppose the author was anxious to make sure their anti-fascism wasn't labeled as communism but reading it from the modern perspective you can't help but notice how much he shoehorns in the communists being laughably ridiculous and no good to the resistance or anything else.
But more generally on the it-can-happen-here-ness of it. It had me thinking of a moment in Ms Lesowitz' English class in 9th grade. I don't remember why it had come up in English class, or what she had even said specifically, I just remember that the teacher had just said something about Nazis, and the entire class was loudly expressing their disapproval of nazis. And yet, and yet. I remember looking around and thinking, feeling quite definitely, that everyone was expressing their hatred of nazis not because they understood and hated nazis, but because they knew that they were expected to hate nazis and therefore they did. It was a slightly surreal moment for me, because of course getting groups of school kids to hate broad groups of people on principal is exactly what the nazis DO, and here, unironically, all my classmates were doing exactly that. Nevermind that nazis ARE hateable, but I felt I was the only one there who hated their beliefs from actual examination and understanding of them. It was at that moment i realized in fact how very easily it could happen here.
And/or fast forward to another memory from high school, this during summer school (I had to take summer school every summer to make up classes I'd missed during my year abroad in Sweden), English class again, and our teacher asked us to write what we would have done if we had been in Germany during the rise of fascism. I'm sure most of my classmates wrote they would be partisans or something heroic like that. Probably in fact most of them would have been nazis but that's not the point of this paragraph. I wrote that honestly I probably would have just left the country at the first sign of it all and moved to Brazil. Sure I'd like to think I'd be some heroic partisan but to think about it really really realistically its hard to feel that would mean anything other than a death without accomplishing much. Thinking about that now, in light of the Trump administration and not-completely-implausible future Trump administration, its hard not to see what I had written as coming true -- I have indeed left the country, and if Trump gets back in power I don't exactly see myself rushing back to the states to become a partisan.
Anyway, it was a good book, it does do well at driving home the point that it could happen here and while reading it one will be constantly thinking about how it almost did. Really I think we were only saved by Trump's colossal incompetence, he so almost got away with it and if he'd just had more coherent cold blooded pragmatism we'd have been living in the world of It Can't Happen Here. I think someone could write a really good book updating it to modern times and inserting the elements of things we actually saw happen ... and reworking that affair plotline please.