TAITMAIL It IS happening here
This offering was to have been about collaborative community art and lessons to be learned from the Bayeux Tapestry, but I make no apology for changing the plan and refurbishing a piece from a few months ago which suddenly has become even more starkly relevant. - ST
How horrifyingly life can mimic fiction. The new President takes the Oval Office, and he goes into action immediately. He has won his election by riding on a populist mood for patriotism and traditional values, with some religious fervours thrown in, having mounted carefully constructed rallies spreading fear and promising drastic social and economic reforms. He has pledged each citizen a gift of $5,000 for their vote.
Now with the reins of office firmly in his grasp, the President carries out a “self-coup”, and with the help of the armed forces, of which he is commander-in-chief of course, he imposes totalitarian rule. Elections are abolished.
The President has presented himself as the champion of the left behind, who puts right the personal wrongs ordinary people feel they have been subjected to in a national economic quagmire.
To neutralise opposition, the President outlaws dissent and puts his political enemies in prison, with a new military force to drive home his regime. He abolishes the Congress, which causes protest demonstrations with which the new force - known as the Minutemen, after the zealous militia of the 1779 Revolution - deals with bayonets. He abandons states, dividing the country into new administrative sectors managed by corporate officials appointed by the President. Crimes against the government are dealt with by hand-picked judges. Many offenders are executed, and Americans on the whole approve, seeing that iron-fisted measures are the only means of making America great again.
But this is not the nightmare image of the path of a new President Trump in 2025. This is the world of President Berzilius “Buzz” Windrip, and the year is 1935.
It was the scenario painted for us by the novelist Sinclair Lewis in his book It Can’t Happen Here, the title meaning “It shouldn’t be allowed to happen here” rather than “It’s not capable of happening here”, as Fascism rose in Europe and Depression enveloped the world. It’s still in print as a Penguin Modern Classic.
It shouldn’t be confused with It Happened Here, a 1964 largely amateur-made film with an equally bleak message that imagines that Nazi Germany has successfully invaded Britain and Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts hold sway over the land as a proxy government. Lewis’s book, it turns out, is less fanciful.
Sinclair Lewis, born in 1885, was a successful journalist, playwright, short-story writer and novelist who in 1930 became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for Arrowsmith, and also wrote Elmer Gantry, which became an Oscar-winning movie, before writing It Can’t Happen Here.
It is likely that the book was written in an attempt to stop the progress of another populist politician, the left-wing Democrat Huey Long, celebrated by some as the champion of the poor and denounced by others as a Fascist demagogue, who did not shy away from violent action to reach his goals and who believed that America’s foreign policy was run by large business interests. He challenged Roosevelt and his New Deal, and had plans to run against FDR in 1936 but was forestalled by a gunman who evaded Long’s bodyguard, his “Cossacks”, to shoot him dead in September 1935. It was a few days before the publication of Lewis’s book.
The parallels are inescapable – Trump has even seemed to promise electors that if they vote him into office they will never have to vote again, suggesting that there will be no more elections. And there are groups of political thinkers all over the United States from all sides of the political divide exploring scores of different scenarios. None of them seem to be checking out Lewis’s prognostications. And on Trump’s behalf the richest man in the world has offered not $5,000 but $1m to those in strategic swing states who pledge him their vote.
Trump is believed to be planning an Insurrection Act in which he will deploy the armed forces to deal with “anarchy and crime” (he hasn’t yet mentioned creating a praetorian guard of “Cossacks:” for himself, though that may come following at least three recent attempts to assassinate him). He intends to politicise federal agencies, perhaps to the extent of abolishing the FBI. He would weaponise the judicial system against his political opponents, something he had already begun in his first term with his appointments to the Supreme Court. And one retired general said he wasn’t sure that we could “count on the military in a Trump world”.
There are no more restraints on extreme behaviour now in the United States constitution than there were in 1935, and all parties, the judiciary and the military should read Sinclair Lewis’s book and learn.
And what, I hear you ask, happens to President Buzz Windrip and his totalitarian United States? Well, his inner cabinet falls out with him, the military start to question orders, his economic plan fails because, Truss-like (why do all the players in this have music hall comedy names?) he relies totally on free markets, there is fight back (led, naturally, by a heroic journalist), and the country descends into civil war. As Trump has all but promised.
It may look like fiction, but 90 years, a world war and cold war on, how close are we to it being allowed to become fact?