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I just finished reading It Can’t Happen Here, a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis that imagines an alternative timeline in which FDR fails to be renominated in 1936 and instead a populist demagogue known as Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip becomes president and very quickly sets up an undemocratic authoritarian regime in the United States. It’s what these days the critics call a dystopian vision, but to Lewis, living through the political and economic turmoil of the 1930s, it was a clear and present danger. Need I say that the same thing is true for us in the 2020s? In fact, a fair number of the dire events Lewis predicted 90 years ago have already taken place in our time, and some of the others are plausibly on the horizon.
Consider the following:
  • Windrip’s platform includes a fifteen-point plan to consolidate power in the executive branch and limit the courts’ ability to declare laws and executive actions unconstitutional.
  • Windrip is an outsized personality with a great deal of charisma and a strong populist following.
  • The new administration creates scapegoats, especially among Blacks and Jews, in order to gain and hold the loyalty of the White population, because, as Windrip notes, “Nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down.”
  • Truth becomes malleable in the hands of Windrip and his minions, so that the novel’s protagonist, Doreumus Jessup, can say, “It was maddening that it seemed impossible now to know anything surely.”
  • During his campaign Windrip promises to provide $5,000 to every American to help them through the economic squeeze of the Great Depression, but that pledge is quickly forgotten, while his cronies clean up on sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts with the government. Jessup observes, “Windrip had promised to make everybody richer, and had contrived to make everybody, except for a few hundred bankers and industrialists and soldiers, much poorer.”
  • Windrip takes over the mass media—radio, newspapers, and magazines—and brings action against any journalist or editor who dares speak out against the regime.
  • A system of concentration camps is set up, and a heavily armed militia loyal only to Windrip serve as enforcers of political orthodoxy. They raid houses and offices in the middle of the night, try suspects before kangaroo courts, and send undesirable elements to the camps (when they don’t summarily execute them).
  • The administration finds much of its support in jingoistic Christian clergy. Lewis writes, “While there were plenty of ministers who … considered it some part of Christian duty to resent the enslavement and torture of their appointed flocks, there were also plenty of reverend celebrities, particularly large-city pastors whose sermons were reported in the newspapers every Monday morning, to whom [Windrip’s philosophy] had given a chance to be noisily and lucratively patriotic.”
Clearly, some of these things have not happened yet in our time, but there are enough parallels to give us pause. Windrip’s Fifteen Points are mirrored in a lot of ways by Project 2025. The enrichment of billionaires at the expense of ordinary people is a genuine phenomenon in our day, and we have seen the current administration’s efforts to control the narrative by pressuring, suing, or bullying media entities and institutions of higher education. We don’t yet have concentration camps for everyday citizens, but the establishment of “Alligator Alcatraz” and the “Cornhusker Clink” to house ICE detainees is not an innocent development. Neither is the deployment of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington DC and Los Angeles.
Sinclair Lewis was not an unbiased observer. He had political and philosophical axes to grind. But the dystopian vision of It Can’t Happen Here is unsettling in its predictive power, and we would do well to pay heed to Lewis’s conclusion that “a country that tolerates evil means—evil manners, standards of ethics—for a generation will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.”
Let that not be said of us.

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