You may have read the editorial in Newsweek by Tim Worth and Tom Rogers, entitled “How Trump Could Lose the Election — and Still Remain President.” In it, they lay out a plausible, albeit convoluted, scenario by which 45 could stay in office (more-or-less constitutionally) despite having lost the electoral college tally.
I’ve also been reading Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian satire, It Can’t Happen Here. If Worth and Rogers spin a believable yarn about how an authoritarian-minded populist demagogue might sidestep the electoral process, Lewis shows us what might happen once such a one is hell-bent on retaining and expanding his power. First, the premise. Sen. Burzelius “Buzz” Windrip is the favorite for President in 1936. The narrator describes him as “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic” — which, with the exception of the “almost,” reminds me of someone I know. Buzz presents the electorate with a kind of folksy, friendly, can-do brand of fascism. Windrip, in his book Zero Hour: Over the Top, writes things like: “I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, . . . plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good . . . .” And of course Buzz excludes Jewish and “Negro” people from the category of “true Americans.” The shock of the Depression has made the electorate hunger for easy answers and exciting story lines, and so they elect Buzz (fair and square, apparently). On the day of Windrip’s inauguration, his private army, the Minute Men (MMs), arrest 150 members of Congress and place them in the DC jail. An angry mob marches on the jail, which is surrounded by MMs. The MMs waver — until, through a loudspeaker, Windrip addresses them, thus: “To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again. You have been scorned. They thought you were the ‘lower classes.’ They wouldn’t give you jobs. . . . They said you were no good, because you were poor. I tell you that you are, ever since yesterday noon, the highest lords of the land — the aristocracy — the makers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help me — help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you — give the swine the point of your bayonet!” A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose. The mob began to drop. Our hero, Doremus Jessup, is a small-town Vermont newspaper editor. Intellectually, he knows Buzz and the MMs are bad news — that it can indeed “happen here.” But emotionally, psychologically, he has a hard time believing it can happen in his sleepy rural valley. Until it does. As one of his associates puts it, “it’s like reading about typhus [or raging floodwaters] in China and suddenly finding it in your own house!” All of which prompts Doremus to reflect on the causes of the dictatorship. He thinks: “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. “A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil. But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn’t be stirred up otherwise. . . . “It’s my sort, the Responsible Citizens who’ve felt ourselves superior because we’ve been well-to-do and what we thought was ‘educated,’ who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship . . .” He closes by wondering “Is it too late?” And the book doesn’t give us any easy answers. Fortunately for us, IRL, Roosevelt and not a Buzz Windrip secured the Democratic nomination in 1936 [yes, Windrip runs as a Democrat, in the novel] and then won the general election; and he was prevented from packing the Court. Unfortunately, there was another World War; fortunately, the War broke out before “it” could happen here. It Can’t Happen Here is a rather-too-believable (even -familiar), and therefore chilling, scenario. But we’re in a different situation now. The current economic crisis was not brought on by a financial house of cards (though it may knock one over). It was brought on by our confrontation with Nature — or, perhaps better said, with Gaia. If you push farther into the forest and raid the animals, you’re going to get diseases from them. And if a pandemic breaks out, it is going to send the economy into a tailspin. If you keep doing what you're doing, there will be still more pandemics in the pipeline. And if, on top of all that, the weather becomes more chaotic, unpredictable, and violent, you’re not going to come out of the economic and social tailspin. So what happens if a demagogue says they’re going to right the ship of state? What if that demagogue will stop at nothing to retain and expand their power? And what if, on top of all that, humans’ relation to the rest of Nature has changed so fundamentally that nothing can be counted on except disruption, for the foreseeable future? Climate Change is the gift that keeps on giving — a de facto permanent revolution in everyone’s life. Taken together, all of this might make people yearn to transform a supposed strongman into a President-for-Life. And I must say that Lewis makes this scenario easy to imagine. What will you do, Doremus?
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |