Review: It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this book up, largely because I was teaching 1984 for the first time to high school students and so was on a dystopia kick. And this one interested me because it is quite an early political dystopia and because it has been touted as being eerily reflective of the political landscape today.

Written in 1935, amid the totalitarian revolutions in Europe which saw the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany as well as the continued threat of the Soviet Union, Sinclair Lewis takes us through how quickly a democracy could be overthrown amid the economic dislocation and political instabilities so endemic in the Great Depression. Starting with Roosevelt being displaced as Democratic candidate for second term by a populist rabble rouser with the preposterous name of Berzelius Windrip, Lewis charts the failure of the various fail-safes in American democracy which allows for the setting up of a fascist dictatorship. It follows the adventures of Doremus Jessup, a small time journalist as he navigates the crisis, eventually emerging as a resistance leader to the fascist government. It presents a frighteningly effective blueprint of what happens to people, families and communities in the midst of such a political takeover.

The premise of the book is really interesting and, of course, prescient for today's politics in the US. There are, of course, glaring flaws with this book. It is difficult to warmup to Jessup, who is difficult to take seriously as a hero because, frankly, while having good principles, is rather too comfortable in his life, until it is gradually taken away. He is tougher than one might expect at the beginning of the book, but, honestly, that is such a low bar that he rarely ascends past mildly perturbed. The writing also has a certain 1930s folksy journalist tone which really rings false almost a century later. And the plot really does limp along.

In addition, our knowledge of how the Fascist and Nazi story ended in real life also creates a certain amount of dissonance with this book. Lewis' understanding of both systems was good for his time and he was influenced by his journalist wife's work in this area, but knowing that these two systems also dragged much of the world into the spectacularly destructive Second World War changes modern perspectives about how to view those systems. Lewis is hardly pro-totalitarian, but one misses the horror that the Second World War instilled in much of the world .

Still, with those caveats, this book is still worth reading, partly for those interested in how the worked in the 1930s and for this book's genuine political savvy.

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