Recently, on an impulse driven by the craziness of the times, I took out a dog-eared volume from the Maine library system (last lent out sometime in the 1970s) of It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. The book, published in the 1930s when Europe was being subjected to Hitler’s brand of Nazi fascism, is a satire on a small town in America ultimately experiencing and finally acknowledging a transition to a fascist state under a new president. The new regime is under the flamboyant and theatrical populist, President Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who portrays himself as an anti-politician and advocate for the common man.

The theme is one of a democracy in America evolving, in a relatively short time, to a fascist state where the legislative and judicial branches of the government have been effectively eliminated and their power absorbed into the executive branch. A militaristic constituency of President Windrip ultimately evolves into a volunteer army of considerable size and brings about a de facto state of military government. Opponents of the new regime are either imprisoned or exiled while at the same time an underground partisan effort is opposing the new regime.

Today, with the growing consensus that President-elect Biden will take office in January, this scenario might seem more than a trifle extreme. However, the fascist-like rhetoric and behavior we have observed from President Donald Trump and his administration’s cohorts in our own non-fictitious American democracy should give us pause. The warning signs of increasing autocracy have been there for Trump’s entire term of office and his final days are replete with trickery, lies and the narcissistic claims that he will really be the president for another four years. We may have escaped by the skin of our teeth a trajectory that would send us into a fall toward dictatorship and a disintegrating democracy.

Jason Stanley, a philosopher from Yale University in his book, How Fascism Works, indicates that fascist politics, usually a nationalist narrative indicating the decline of the country, lead people to accept a fantasy version of reality and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness. The anchor isn’t the world around people, but rather it’s the leader. Stanley further proposes, in subsequent interviews, that President Trump is very clearly using fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions. Hannah Arendt, a psychologist and philosopher who lived through the Nazi form of fascism, recalls that fascists don’t just lie but transform their lie into a new reality, i.e., a kind of magical thinking that draws in the people.

Let’s consider President Trump’s behavior and style of leadership in light of some known aspects of fascism: An administration based on fear and retribution, self-glorification of the leader, obsession with crime and punishment, attacking unsupportive media, encouragement of conspiracy myths, rampant cronyism, glorification of the military and use for domestic

control, fraudulent elections, protection of corporate power, flags as symbols, comingling of religion and politics, bombastic speeches at rallies, etc., etc. Do any of these aspects of fascism more than vaguely remind us of Trump’s rhetoric and behavior? It seems clear that any or all of these characteristics manifested in the Trump administration could result in the treatment of politics as war, and anything goes, to gain and hold power, including cheating and lying away the Constitution of the United States.

Finally, back to Sinclair Lewis’s novel. Maybe “it can’t happen here” for now, but the signals are alarming enough for us to be mindful of a trend in Trump’s administration that was tending beyond rhetoric, and a second term could have brought a real threat to American democracy. This is not a new threat to any democratic state. Plato, in his Republic, warned of the fragility of democracy and the high probability that it could end up as a dictatorship without continuing vigilance.

Edward W. Lovely, Ph.D., lives in Topsham.

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