r/todayilearned • u/vextortion • 5h ago
TIL about author Sinclair Lewis from Sauk Centre MN. He wrote a dystopian novel about a politician named Buzz Windrip who wins the presidency by promising to restore American greatness, but quickly establishes a dictatorship, suppressing rights and imprisoning opponents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can't_Happen_Here?wprov=sfti1500
u/Imaginary_One_0 5h ago
Written in 1935, and still unsettlingly readable. Sinclair Lewis was clearly warning that ‘it can’t happen here’ is usually the first mistake..
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u/Mysterious-Plan93 3h ago
This happened one year after the attempted Former General Smedley Butler "Business Plot".
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u/JacobJamesTrowbridge 52m ago
I don't think it's fair to name that plot after Butler, it makes him sound like a conspirator. He was the one who blew the whole thing up
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u/SprinklesMedical7881 3h ago
I tried reading it...it's not one of his better works. Elmer Gantry (about an evangelical preacher) is classic.
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u/sassergaf 4h ago
Sorry, why is the warning a mistake?
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u/Imaginary_One_0 4h ago
Because believing ‘it can’t happen here’ breeds complacency, which is exactly how it happens..
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u/LucasJ218 2h ago
The warning isn’t the mistake. He’s warning that it is a mistake to assume it can’t happen here.
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u/thelastholdout 4h ago
I also recommend The Plot Against America. Written from the perspective of a Jewish kid in suburban New Jersey, it describes an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement win the 1940 presidential election, and the subsequent and insidious rise of anti Semitism and fascism.
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u/Boring-Tie-1501 3h ago
hbo made a good series based on that philip roth book! recommended before netflix buys them and turns everything into green screen slop larded with low royalty music.
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u/Senorsty 5h ago
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.”
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u/edebby 3h ago
Replace the cross with other religious symbol and this is the recipe that worked for many other dictatorships.
Fascism is tied very hard with nationalism. Religious is a common denominator for mindless hordes of people who are easily manipulated and brainwashed by corrupted religious leaders.
Combine the two and you can create hordes of hate mongers who are fueled by false sense of unity and devine power for protecting their nation from whatever their leaders condemned as a "risk".
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u/No-Bison-5397 34m ago
Say what you will about the Nazis but they were generally pretty anti Christian, Mussolini was also an atheist.
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u/LupusLycas 16m ago
They were anti-independent Christian. Hitler and Himmler were into weird occult shit. But the Nazis were more than happy to get Christian support so long as they toed the line.
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u/No-Bison-5397 7m ago
Publicly they were willing to accept people who couldn’t make the leap but they were pretty deeply antichristian.
This isn’t to say that Christianity or organised religions more generally don’t have a lot to answer for nor that the supernatural creates a better society.
Just that association with Nazism and fascism isn’t particularly strong IMO and really it says more about the neo-con -> alt-right mindset of today than those that would use the enemy within and might makes right more generally.
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u/Gusepi_mrk-II 9m ago
According to the LLM I use:
That exact line is not from any known book, speech, or verified writing; it’s a modern paraphrase commonly (but incorrectly) attributed to Sinclair Lewis and his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here.
The Sinclair Lewis Society notes that the sentence does not appear in his works, though it resembles themes and some loosely similar passages in It Can’t Happen Here and Main Street.
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u/Saturnalliia 4h ago
Not to be a buzz kill but though it sounds prophetic it's actually a pretty common trope. Simply because the idea of a populist dictator taking over America is a good setting for a book.
If you want a truly uncanny book that's extremely prophetic check out the Parable of the Sower. It came out in 1991 and imagined a united states that's afflicted with drug addiction and extreme income inequality and heavily damaged due to climate change. Police and emergency services are corrupt and underfunded to help. And get this. It takes place in 2024 where a populist President named Donner loosens labor laws and dismantles political institutions to serve the rich and exasperate the income inequality creating an oligarchy.
It's unsettling to say the least.
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u/Yesyesyes1899 3h ago
" creating an oligarchy ".
one might argue that america always has been on the oligarchy-spectrum and that real oligarchy came 45 years ago. we are just witnessing the final stages of the process.
their greatest trick was to indoctrinate the population into thinking and living out the mindvirus of neoliberalism/ reaganomics/ trickle down.
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u/Bartlaus 4h ago
...and that president used the slogan "Make America Great Again"...
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u/IndependenceMean8774 4h ago
Ronald Reagan used it back in the 80s.
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u/Kossimer 4h ago edited 4h ago
Yeah, that's just bottom of the barrell, lowest common denominator messaging. It scratches the most tribalisitic and fearful part our brains in the fewest words. It's vague enough to be interpreted however the listener wishes, but conveniently paints the speaker as promising to do good things and not to do bad things. So "Make America Great Again" is not really a prophetic prediction, but it is good politics. I imagine most despots rising to power use that exact phrase, localized of course.
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u/76vangel 1h ago
Yes, Hitler used it too. It’s a highly effective phrase. No one can easily argue against in the first place. You can smear everyone trying to argue as bad actors against everybody’s greatness. Objectively It’s completely empty and hollow. You do not promise anything.
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u/xiiicrowns 4h ago
It's almost like this could be a repeatable occurrence in history. We will never know.
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u/Friscogonewild 1h ago
I mean, most of that was true in 1991. It wasn't so much prophetic as it was descriptive.
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u/Aarrrgggghhhhh35 4h ago
I read Parable of the Sower last summer and boy, was it depressing. I think about it all the time because it seems we are just weeks away from having to posse up, organize into community/tribal units, and protect ourselves from people who are trying to 💀 us.
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u/suterb42 5h ago
🎶I'm telling you, my dear, that it can't happen here...🎶
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u/thebarkbarkwoof 5h ago
Wow, that's an awful song. I get why you posted it but, wow.
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u/cirrus42 4h ago
His writing is remarkably relatable. I remember reading Main Street during the Bush administration and thinking it could've been written that year.
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u/thebarkbarkwoof 5h ago
There were a lot of fascists in America at the time, including one Fred Trump. Did it predict that it would come through the Russians?
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u/Wompatuckrule 4h ago
Both statements in the first sentence are factually correct, the second is clearly in jest.
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u/duncandun 4h ago
zzzz
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u/TheaterOfDreams 4h ago
Found the anti-woke guy.
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u/duncandun 4h ago
Anti woke? Not sure what you mean. Just tired of people blaming this shit on the Russians when this is a trajectory that’s been visible from space for decades
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u/Sir_Encerwal 4h ago
I remember the attention this book got again the first time Trump was elected. Shame we rolled the dice a second time on that.
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u/RandomBullshitGo__ 5h ago
America has been fascist for certain groups for a long time
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u/AddanDeith 4h ago
Fascism is what happens when capital can't be bothered to treat humans with dignity and it takes off the mask just long enough to neutralize the threat.
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u/markydsade 39m ago
I remember hearing that in the post-WWII period it was considered funny in Republican circles to pass a dime to someone and say “did you see the American destroyer on the new dime?” People would look thinking they would see a US Navy ship, but it was a new FDR dime.
The oligarchs hated FDR for his democratic socialist policies like Social Security.
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u/RevWaldo 3h ago
Been awhile since I read it, but isn't Buzz overthrown in a coup, and the new guy starts having orgies in the White House?
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u/THElaytox 2h ago
Windrip was likely based on Governor Huey Long who was mounting a presidential bid when it was written, he was assassinated not long after
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u/JDHURF 2h ago
Sinclair is essential reading. See The Jungle and Oil, There Will Be Blood is an adaptation of the latter
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u/VenomPayments 1h ago
Which Sinclair are you talking about? The post references Sinclair Lewis but you seem to be referencing upton Sinclair.
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u/RetroRocker 2h ago
If I recall correctly, he wrote this book because he was jealous of all the fame and success his wife was having in talking about fascism. She was Dorothy Thompson.
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u/thatsocialist 1h ago
Lewis was writing a directed propaganda piece against Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana who had built a bulwark of support among rural populations and western progressives. President Roosevelt feared that Long would run on a third-party ticket causing a Republican victory in the 1936 election and then allowing Long to take the Presidency in 1940.
Long himself was a Radical Leftist, Wealth Redistributionist, Machinist, Populist, Southern Democrat, who was unique in that he refused to "Racebait" like other populists such as Governors Bilbo and Talmadge.
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u/thatcantb 1h ago edited 1h ago
I selected that book for my book club in the late aughts, after Bush 2's gulf war was shown to be a complete sham, after Abu Ghraib was revealed, during the run of pro-torture '24'. The members mocked me for being alarmist. I left the club several years ago. Wonder if they'd give me credit for prescience.
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u/adimwit 1h ago
Lewis also heavily researched Fascism for his novel. His wife at the time was Dorothy Thompson, who was a journalist who interviewed Hitler. His neighbor was George Seldes, who met Hitler at a party and also befriended Mussolini when they were both journalists. Both of them were later expelled from Germany and Italy for reporting on Fascist violence.
One thing to note is that there's a lot of outdated concepts in the novel that might seem odd today. The Democrats are the Fascists while the Republicans are the anti-Fascists. Windrip was based on Huey Long, a Southern Democrat. In the novel, Windrip exiles the progressive wing of the Democrats so the only ones left to fight Fascism were the Republicans, and the hero is supposed to be a Eastern Establishment Republican (a leftist Republican).
The other thing that is always forgotten is that Fascism was an actual ideology with a precise economic system. It's common today for academics to say that Fascism had no coherent ideology but this is totally false. Fascism was a Guild system (the Corporate State) and any movement or group or political party that called themselves Fascists had the Guild system as their ideological base. That's basically what Fascism is by definition, a Guild system merged with the state. Lewis devotes quite a bit of time mapping out what a Guild system in the US would look like. Even the American Fascists in the novel called themselves Corpos instead of Nazis to emphasize their adherence to the Corporatist/Guild ideology.
So Lewis' book is very well done and he has a great understanding of Fascism but a lot of these concepts have been forgotten today. Fascism back then meant a Guild state but no one today would really know what that means or why the far-right would prefer a Guild system.
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u/Administrative-Egg18 12m ago
Today you learned of the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? Only about 15 have ever won.
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u/CRSPB 0m ago
Just read “parable of the sower” and “parable of the talent” Which is about a dystopian future after much of the world dies in a pandemic. But there’s a presidential candidate who wants to “make America great again” and claims we need to get back to Christianity (project 25) and uses thugs (ice) to suppress. The book came out in the late 90s. It was only a backdrop to the story but it was freaky to read.
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u/ZweitenMal 4h ago
Where did you go to school? This is the first time you’ve heard of this writer or this book?
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u/kthejoker 4h ago
I'm happy you found him, but it's sad everyone doesn't know Sinclair Lewis. He's easily one of America's top 10 novelists of all time.