It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis

nIt Can't Happen Here. Are we so sure? Many would suggest that it certainly could happen 'here, ' which is precisely the point that Sinclair Lewis was making when he wrote this book in 1935.

This, incidentally, was still a few years before the worst fears would unfold in Germany, giving the book a somewhat prophetic flair. n n nn nBased on the American Democrat, Huey Long, it has been, despite that, often been associated with 'right wing' movements. This is ironic, as only a few years later it would be the Democrat FDR that would put American-Japanese citizens into concentration camps using 'emergency powers, ' much as the book's protagonist, Berzelius Windrip, was portrayed as doing, after beating FDR in 1936.

In case you miss the irony: the real-life FDR actually did what the fictional Windrip was portrayed as doing!n n nn nThe long history of abandoning civil rights using emergency powers was reprised more recently during the COVID pandemic, when Western nations and individual US states, ostensibly 'democracies, ' nonetheless invoked emergency powers to enact all sorts of authoritarian measures.n n nn nThus, when pondering whether or not 'it can happen here' (which all assume it can) we are perhaps left with a more intriguing question: Why hasn't it happened here? And then, once this has been answered, work to ensure that the factors that have prevented a full-blown authoritarian regime from materializing in the United States are retained and strengthened.n