BONUS: `It can happen here' is happening right now
Here is what I wrote last June when warning readers about the end of democracy
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EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote the following two-part column on June 3 and June 5, 2024 after reading Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel. My darkest thoughts are about to come to pass. This is the second part that ran on June 5.
"It can't happen here" are the words we often whisper in our darkest moments of despair.
And deep down, we believe it.
We can't imagine it.
After all, we survived one term of Donald Trump. When he left office in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, we sighed with relief.
Our worst fears were not realized.
We had dodged a bullet.
We would return to normalcy.
Yet, the next four years have sometimes been more turbulent, more political and more divisive. Our future remains uncertain with Trump still refusing to concede the 2020 election.
The news media is regularly filled with stories of what Donald Trump's second term would look like and why our democracy is even more at risk, but there is a malaise over those reports, an inability to take them seriously.
Again, we can't imagine it.
It can't happen here.
But we are surrounded by institutions that have failed us.
Congress was first with its inability to do almost anything to solve the pressing issues of our time. The current Congress has passed fewer laws than any previous body. Our current congresswoman has stopped working in our best interests long ago while positioning herself for greater power. Just yesterday the house committee investigating the weaponizing of government continued its mandate to "weaponize" the government. The elected Republicans with scruples are mostly leaving government while being replaced by those who will do Trump's bidding.
It can't happen here, we repeat.
Our newspapers are shells of what they once were with fewer reporters doing fewer stories. Television stations such as Fox News have paid millions of dollars in damages for reporting the 2020 election was stolen, and yet it continues to mislead its viewers and rarely points out the lies of Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court has ruled consistently against the rights of minorities, voters and women while showing a disdain for even a minimal ethics policy for its own members. Polls show the public has little confidence in it anymore.
The legal system has proven to be slow and cumbersome and the only resounding lesson is that white-collar criminals can delay their fate for a long, long time if they have the financial resources.
More and more of us do not trust the institutions that provide the basic checks and balances for our democracy.
Even Trump's conviction this past weeks does not seem to concern half the country, despite the fact that a jury of regular people heard the evidence and found him guilty 34 times.
Trump's 2016 campaign manager is a a convicted felon, so is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, one of his chief strategists, his first national security adviser, a trade adviser, a foreign policy adviser and the Trump Organization's chief financial officer.
At some point, you'd like to think that voters see a pattern here and realize there is nothing wrong with the system.
But let me get back to where I left you on Monday with a presidential candidate appealing to the working class voters by promising an equitable distribution of the wealth with the promise their problems will be addressed.
He appears to be a man of the people.
Sinclair Lewis told the story in 1935 before World War II, before Nazi Germany and before we know the happily-ever-after of the story.
It Can't Happen Here is the name of the book.
The candidate surrounds himself with a private unarmed, mostly ceremonial, security force called the "Minute Men" to perform at political rallies.
They are mocked as toy soldiers, adults who like to play dress-up and march in parades to give their lives some meaning. Presidential candidate Buzz Windrip's rallies become a carnival, a show that leaves the electorate smililng, but unable to articulate what the candidate will do once in office.
Buzz Windrip wins the election.
His first act as Commander-In-Chief is to order that the Minute Men be recognized as unpaid but official auxiliary of the regular Army. He then armed them.
He demands Congress pass a bill giving him complete control of all legislation while also suspending the judicial oversight of the Supreme Court.
In less than a half-hour of debate, Congress rejects the demand of the new president.
President Windrip then declared martial law.
More than 100 members of Congress are arrested by the Minute Men and those that resist are charged with "inciting to riot."
People riot all across America.
The press continues to report on the story, but those journalists who condemn the new president's actions are jailed.
The chief of staff of the regular Army is deposed.
President Windrip promises peace if the country will be patient for a few months.
Meanwhile the Minute Men put down riots and strikes all across the country with bloody force.
For context, former President Trump said in an Fox News interview just this past weekend that he would fire generals who refuse to do his bidding and that he would use local police to round up and deport immigrants. There was no mention of due process.
But back to our story of Buzz Windrip.
The four liberal members of the Supreme Court resign and are replaced by unknown lawyers familiar to the president.
Members of Congress who continue to object to Windrip are being "protected" by the Windrip administration in the District of Columbia jail.
It takes the new president eight days to dismantle our democracy.
It can't happen here.
If you don't have a knot in your stomach, you should.
Reading the book reminded me of the many close calls during the Trump reign when just one or two people stood up to the president to prevent a calamity.
Ninety years later, those realizations make Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here plausible.
In the novel, those who don't go along with the new administration are sent to concentration camps with inhuman conditions that appear to be stolen from the pages of Nazi Germany, except those conditions would not be revealed for another 10 years.
The newspaper editor Jessup says this early in the story:
"Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists and who do not feel they must dash right in and do something about It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated - tortured - slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!"
It's a reminder that we citizens have to be active participants if we want to protect our country from the unimaginable.
Jessup blames himself for not doing more as editor, of not sounding the alarm for what was coming. It is a reminder to all journalists, including locally.
"The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor the demagogues who do their dirty work. 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."
I'm proud to report that Jessup becomes the face of the opposition and one of the heroes of the story. He escapes from a concentration camp, flees to Canada and becomes part of an underground movement to fight back.
But Sinclair Lewis does not give us a happy ending.
"Even two-and-a-half years of despotism had not yet taught most electors humility, nor taught them much of anything except that it was unpleasant to be arrested too often," Jessup says near the end of the book.
Perhaps, Lewis was was not optimistic about that future.
But he does leave us some things to consider 90 years later.
"More and more, as I think about history,” the editor Jessup ponders, “I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”
We need to remember that.
It's that spirit that makes so many of us worried about the future for our children and their children.
It can't happen here.
Sorry, but Sinclair Lewis showed us why we can no longer believe that.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
I attribute the re election of the diabolical sociopathic narcissist to complacency, ignorance and resentment. Trump is a master of manipulation which was most evident in his first campaign. He blamed those who looked different than him as the ultimate villain and continues to do so. By scapegoating those whose complexions don’t match his own, he gave permission to others whose lots in life have not turned out as expected to do the same. It is easier to blame someone else than to determine true causes of your problems.
Trump was counting on people being preoccupied with resentment and it worked.
They ignored the warning and labeled those who were screaming from the rooftops as left wing loonies because their rights and privileges were never under attack before. They ignorantly thought what was granted by the Constitution would never change. Many who voted for him didn’t sign up for the devastation that has begun. When this fiasco is truly realized what are they going to do? They will either vote differently or continue to vote against their own best interests. Trump and the Republicans are counting on later. Seeing what is transpiring keeps me up at night. The nightmare is real and the reoccurrence of what history has shown us and what Sinclair Lewis wrote about is actually happening.
...today, April 15, is the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, in 1912 / America has struck something, too-- and is taking on water: no longer walking on it...