Bluesky

Amid the country’s general collapse into fascist squalor, culture has struggled to keep up. Pop music may have been central to the New Left, but today’s listeners are mostly reduced to hunting for Easter eggs, finding anti-Trump messaging in the likes of octogenarian Neil Young’s tossed-off anthems. The eager critical embrace of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, based on a 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel steeped in the backwash of curdled 1970s left-wing militance, serves chiefly to underscore the film industry’s studious disregard of the way America lives now. A cultural scene reduced to elevating Jimmy Kimmel as a surrogate Dalton Trumbo is clearly running on fumes.

This state of political inertia is probably most advanced in American fiction, where MAGA encounters are routinely transposed into domestic fables of errant masculinity. When I took on the thankless assignment of charting the themes of this subgenre, slogging through fare like Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill and Jess Walter’s So Far Gone, I found myself turning to a long-discredited work of fictional anti-fascist prophecy as a striking counter-text: Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here.

Lewis’s novel was a response to the initial power grabs by fascist movements in Spain, Italy, and Germany; its title, drawn from a standard refrain of liberal reassurance about the exceptionalist character of the American republic, was meant to shake readers out of their complacent state of Yankee self-congratulation.

Judged by this de facto mission, Lewis’s book was mostly a failure. It did launch the 1920s bard of small-town folly back onto the bestseller list, but its ripped-from-the-headlines prophesying was badly off the mark. It imagines a 1936 presidential election in which the incumbent, Franklin Roosevelt, is muscled off the Democratic ticket by the folksy authoritarian Senator Berzelius Windrip. Windrip’s gospel of phony populist uplift is cribbed from the dogmas plied by old hard-right constituencies like the KKK and the Daughters of the American Revolution and packaged for mass consumption via the broadcasts of Bishop Prang, a Catholic prelate modeled on the antisemitic scourge of the New Deal era, Father Charles Coughlin, who commands a mass following called the League of the Forgotten Men. Windrip calls his new movement Corpoism—“Corpo” for short—and he promises to use it to smash the faithless elites prospering at the expense of the plain white American working class. Once elevated to the presidency, he wastes no time in reorganizing the country along a grid of tight ideological submission, abolishing former state boundaries, erecting new universities and media organs to parrot Corpo propaganda, and banishing dissidents to concentration camps—when not simply executing them.

The book’s protagonist, a small-town Vermont newspaper publisher, Doremus Jessup, is a classic Yankee individualist given to deploring the homogenizing logic of mass culture. The book traces Jessup’s political migration toward violent resistance against the country’s Corpo masters as they seize control of his newspaper, visit terror on his family, and intern him in a concentration camp. From his stalwart New England standing as “a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal,” he comes to at least a provisional accord with the apocalyptic worldview of John Brown, a man whom his father taught him to regard as “insane and a menace.”

The main character’s transformation into a liberal-minded guerrilla, together with the broader botched prophecy of the narrative, consigned It Can’t Happen Here to the antiquarian bin of American letters. It had been out of print for decades before New American Library decided a reissued edition would have topical relevance for the George W. Bush years.

The novel suffers from some of the excesses of overeager topicality. Lewis populates it with scores of real-life 1930s political and intellectual luminaries, from FDR’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, to America First press baron William Randolph Hearst. But for readers in the MAGA era, the long-­neglected novel makes for bracing and prophetic reading. Windrip bears an uncanny resemblance to Trump, apart from his claim to humble log-cabin beginnings. Like Trump, he is largely a creation of the media; like JD Vance, he rises to national prominence on the publication of a quasi-memoir, which endorses a wide range of punitive and reactionary positions cloaked as true-blue American patriotism. And like Trump, he demonizes journalists, claiming they sit above the fray “in spider-dens…plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions.”

Windrip also translates his pseudo-populist appeal into an oligarch’s policy wish list: His version of Project 2025 is a program called “The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.” It includes directives to revoke the franchise of Black voters and banish women from the workforce, while punishing socialists and dissidents for high treason and banning all labor unions that aren’t sponsored by the federal government. It also calls for constitutional amendments to further consolidate power in the executive branch “during this critical epoch,” consigning Congress to “serve only in an advisory capacity” and stripping the Supreme Court of any powers of judicial review. (One difference between Trump and Windrip, apparently, is that the latter strongman didn’t have a quisling Roberts Court to do his bidding.)

And Windrip peddles his fascist program in the familiar patois of the pandering American huckster. He was “a Professional Common Man,” Lewis writes: “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a travelling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of the country store.” His “stagecraft” could “make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-­libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.”

Lewis’s predictions may not have come to pass in the decade after the book’s publication. But the myopic complacency summed up in its title continues to eat away at the country’s political culture more than 80 years later. All that remains to be seen is whether the pusillanimous Democratic leadership caste will come to heed Jessup’s grim warning that Windrip’s rise was the fault “of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”