Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the Chronicle, “I have a recommendation: Find a copy of It Can’t Happen Here and give it a read. It’s the most relevant commentary I’ve encountered in this crazy election year.”
First edition, 1935
[Doubleday, Doran and Company]
The book is set in 1936 when, in reality, the incumbent president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would claim the Democratic nomination and go on to win his second of four terms. But that’s not how things work out in Lewis’ version.
In both worlds, the country is still deep in the great Depression and FDR’s controversial new policies have yet to make much of a dent. There are other political models to choose from, and a substantial number of Americans see some promise in Germany and Italy, where Hitler and Mussolini have replaced the uncertainties of democracy with something more robust.
FDR is challenged for the Democratic Party’s nomination by a charismatic blowhard, Senator Buzz Windrip, as Lewis tells it, “a tireless traveler, a boisterous and humorous speaker, an inspired guesser at what political doctrines the people would like, a warm handshaker, and willing to lend money.”
Windrip isn’t Trump exactly. Wrong party. No jet plane. No germ phobia. No wacky comb over. But there are enough similarities to make the connection. “At the Democratic Convention, after endless balloting to break a deadlock,” Braithwaite explains, “Windrip heads for his hotel room, leaving behind a letter for the delegates. The letter does the trick, and Windrip wins the nomination.” What’s in the letter? Very Trumpish stuff, actually. Lewis writes:
Summarized, the letter explained that he [Windrip] was all against the banks but all for the bankers — except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for labor but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World . . . and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly.
Note the all-caps cover line on the first edition of Lewis’s novel. It asks the question: “WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN AMERICA HAS A DICTATOR?” Come this summer at the Republican Convention, we’ll likely get a prequel to the answer, and come November we’ll find out whether the question still applies.
I’m not sure why people are surprised about Trump. Isn’t he the natural result of what American culture has long been? Who could listen to American talk radio and not see that Trump is the result? Who can watch the Hulk Hogan tackiness of American television and not see that Trump is the outcome? Who can observe America’s destructive form of unmitigated capitalism and not see Trump as its natural embodiment?
If people are debased for half a century, how could Trump not be the consequence?
Trump holds up a mirror that obligates us to see what America has become. And now we are shocked that our thin veneer of respectability has been punctured.
What is surprising is not that Trump is a reflection of American culture — which he is to the highest possible degree — but that an electorate, which we’re told is so angry about being betrayed by a privileged class of corrupt pols, would so readily adore an ultraprivileged billionaire who is just as corrupt even though he’s never been elected to office. But should that really be surprising, given that voters have often misunderstood their best interests, when they’ve understood their interests at all? Trump’s march toward a would-be coronation gives me the creeps, but so does the stately adoration of a revolting jerk like Ronald Reagan by no less than Barack Obama (who said of him that “he tapped into” what people wanted: “… clarity … optimism … dynamism and entrepreneurship”). Sounds a helluva lot like Trumpified horseshit.
The public seems to feel that a gangster businessman is a useful change from a gangster politician. As one Trump voter in Manchester, New Hampshire put it who was quoted in the Spectator: ‘He’s a mobster, sure, but what’s the difference between a politician and a mobster? A politician is just a 25-cent mobster. Trump is the real deal.’
How does someone who got thrown out of Harvard for blatant cheating become President? How does a man end up President who would have his operatives break into the offices of his political opponents? Why would a President have an Intern give him a blow job in the Oval Office? Why would we have a President so weak that he becomes a pawn for people like Cheney and Rumsfeld? You are right. Trump is a manifestation of a long cultural devolution.
Correction. It was Ted Kennedy, not JFK, who was expelled from Harvard for cheating, though one could use JFK’s philandering as an example of the lack of Presidential behavior.