It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis is a prescient, prophetic, visionary novel, that embarks on a cautionary tale of a fascist, misogynist, racist leadership that manages to get democratically elected in the United States. The novel was written in 1930s when fascism was on a rise in the Western Europe while communism was growing stronger by the day in the Eastern Europe, and back when, most of the European nations, the US and Japan harbored strong colonial aspirations. Central to the story is the character of Buzz Windrip, the man who becomes the nominee of a major party, then the president, and then a dictator, "in order to save the nation from the welfare cheats, from crimes and sex, from drinkers and bootleggers, from the rising power of women who had just got the right to vote and work in offices and factories, from the ascendant African-Americans, businessmen Jews and the immigrants, from a liberal press, and imports". Buzz Windrip is brought into power with the help of evangelists and with the help of miners, laborers, and the so-called hardworking middle class American who believe in his promise that everyone would make more money under his leadership. In the first quarter of the novel, as the drumbeats around the nomination and subsequently the election of Buzz Windrip get louder and louder, the confounded intellectuals around the country go on mumbling "It can't happen here!"

The novel is a razor sharp political satire from another era, and it imagines the rise of both a dictatorial president and his henchmen from a fully-functioning democractic set-up. The scenarios imagined with a cold accuracy of a truly imaginative and creative writer appear to the a script many leaders around the world have emulated over the past few decades. Sinclair Lewis was the first American novelist to win a Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, for his major, more famous novels like Main Street, Babbitt and Arrowsmith. Although America narrowly escaped the wave of nazism and fascism in 1930s, the script of the novel stays as fresh and as foreboding as ever. Buzz Windrip, who eventually wins the vote, within this novel is said to have ghost-authored a book, written in a folksy, funny, simplified language, with choicest examples and phrases meant to echo in the minds and hearts of common people. Many chapters open with a paragraph drawn from the imaginary book, (titled Zero Hour) and each paragraph seems to have inspired words and phrases we have heard in our times from the leaders who are said to be in touch with the public, the masses, the working classes.  

The novel has a very memorable cast of characters, and works well both as a political satire as well as a saga of families and friends trying to make sense of events and changes around them. The primary actor and thinker in the story is Doremus Jessup, who is an editor of a small New England newspaper. Doremus both bears a witness to the emergence of Buzz as the president and a dictator, and becomes a victim to the influence of Buzz, exercised through handpicked cast of men in administration, each one more cunning and capricious than his predecessor at the job and also the incredible "Minute Men". Minute Men refers to a parallel  armed force of followers created by Buzz, with help of Sarason, his confidant and the supposed brain behind many of the popular songs, sayings and policies of Buzz. Minute men run the labor camps (similar to concentration camps), seize what they will, and they control justice system, and the minute men, with their marches and uniforms inspire awe and obedience in the masses.  Without giving away the thrilling and chilling plot points, including the inspiring and equally well-written female cast, I would add that the friends and family of Doremus, and his foes, provide a perfect orchestra of voices and choices through which the grand drama of the demise of a democracy is played out. I think it is the honored duty of every individual and every intellectual to read books like this one. Highly recommended.