IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, one of his later novels, following Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith and others. The New Yorker called it “ … one of the most important books ever produced in this country.” Lewis had already won the Nobel prize in Literature in 1930.

Sinclair Lewis 1914

The novel is set in a fictional town and follows an American politician, Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip. He rises to power to become the country's first outright dictator, and Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor who sees Windrip's fascist policies for what they are and becomes Windrip's most ardent critic. It could have been written yesterday.

It Can’t Happen Here can be read and enjoyed as a trenchant send-up. But Lewis’s exquisite needle, jabbed into the pink hide of American classism in the ‘30s, is prescient. Can “it” happen here? It can! And it is , in front of our noses.

"Trusk," (the portmanteau regime of Trump, Herr Musk and their craven, gutless Republican allies in Congress) is committed to scuttling the authority of the federal judiciary through specific personal attacks on judges and outright contempt of court. Even Chief Justice Roberts was moved to caution their excesses.

Still, so far unstopped and without penalty, T&M are going after major law firms and attacking individual lawyers Trump doesn't like. As bad or worse, they are determined to undermine the tripartite legislative, judicial and executive functions the constitution defines. They are attempting to curtail protected speech with which they disagree; they are rolling cannon up to the gates of the elite universities.

The ill-considered mass firings in the federal workforce engineered by Herr Musk and his DOgGiEs even has Trump calling for a stiletto instead of a hatchet. The abject surrender of global leadership; the return to isolationism; the bent knee to Russia; the coming tax hike on Americans as tariffs take effect; the suspension of due process; the myriad conflicts of interest of both these guys: turning Musk loose in the Defense Department to check out the Pentagon's war plan on China was averted only when the NY Times broke the story. What else? WTF!?

The stock market slide with only an occasional uptick; inflation; the refusal of hens to lay eggs (in scarcity, there is profit); a possible melt-down of the strong economy Trump inherited. Who’s to  blame? The bro-dudes? The incels? The diminished Democrats? Seventy-seven million Trump voters voted against themselves. Why? Blame it on anyone you wish.

Burning Teslas is not the answer. Still there is a cold-blooded frisson impossible to ignore.