NYT book review: It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here is the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel that predicted the rise of fascism in America. From a Jan. 2017 NYT book review, Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump:

“It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. Today, Lewis’s novel is making a comeback as an analogy for the Age of Trump. Within a week of the 2016 election, the book was reportedly sold out on Amazon.com.

At a moment when instability seems to be the only constant in American politics, “It Can’t Happen Here” offers an alluring (if terrifying) certainty: It can happen here, and what comes next will be even ghastlier than you expect. Yet the graphic horrors of Lewis’s vision also limit the book’s usefulness as a guide to our own political moment. In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a pseudo-fascist candidate to the presidency of the United States. Today’s readers, by contrast, are playing catch-up, scrambling to think through the implications of an electoral fait accompli. If Lewis’s postelection vision is what awaits us, there will be little cause for hope, or even civic engagement, in the months ahead. The only viable options will be to get out of the country — or to join an armed underground resistance.

Lewis’s book sold 320,000 copies, becoming his most popular work to date. Reviewers agreed that the book’s success had little to do with its literary merits; though “a vigorous anti-fascist tract,” one critic noted, it was “not much of a novel.” What propelled its popularity was a sense of urgency, the worry that the United States — like the nations of Western Europe — might contain dark forces yet to be unleashed.

milo mentioned this book in a comment today. I was unaware of it. This seems appropriate for the interesting times we are going through. Some other reviews say that the book did not predict Trump, but most all the reviews out there talk about disturbing parallels, similarities and the like between Trump and the fictitious bad guy, US Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. The bad guy rises to power to become America’s first outright dictator.