Tag Archives: Sinclair Lewis

The Revolt of the Grifters

There’s an element to the end of the Trump presidency that is more than vaguely reminiscent of waking up after a particularly bad college house party or a car crash. Upon scanning the damage and chaos there is a question that demands an honest and immediate answer- “What the hell happened?” Indeed, what the hell happened? It’s hard to remember, but I’ll try.    

Back in 2016, the United States, on the basis of its democratically flawed electoral college system elected a completely unqualified reality TV star (who had become famous by pretending to be a successful businessman) to the most powerful political position in the world. Donald Trump was elected even after he had on multiple occasions openly denied adherence to long standing democratic norms. That he won that election was partly the consequence of the leadership of the Democratic party having crowned as its presidential candidate one of the most unpopular and partisan figures in American politics- Hillary Clinton. But above all his victory came after a series of devastating failures either caused, or never properly addressed, by political elites- the Iraq War, the Financial Crisis, and the Opioid Epidemic- to name just three. Blowing up the system was the national mood, and Donald J. Trump was dynamite.   

The Trump years were every bit as whacked as the reality TV or New York tabloid scene that had made the man famous with one chaotic or disturbing incident replacing another in a never ending stream, so that yesterday’s outrage was always lost down the memory hole, shoved into oblivion by today’s. It was boom time for cable news, partisans, and sycophants meaning nothing much had changed at all except for the ratings. 

Many of us knew this couldn’t end well even before we were confronted by the images of children in cages while the first lady mocked them with her jacket reading “I ReallyDon’t Care, Do you?” We knew Trump would likely kill a lot of people, we just figured it’d be the types of people US presidents usually killed- people “over there”- who don’t look like us. Instead, we got 500,000 dead Americans from a plague Trump thought it was a president’s job not to panic us about. Thinking we could replace functioning, if flawed, institutions with televisual fantasy proved to be a bad idea after all.   

When as a result of his incompetence the American public decided it had had enough of Trump and voted him out of office he decided his show couldn’t actually be canceled. We then got to see a new side of Trump, and it was terrifying. What his loss in the election gave Trump, which he never possessed before, was a plot, a clear objective which he would pursue by utilizing characteristics that had always been apparent- his authoritarian and anti-constitutional impulses. But even then Trump found himself chasing after the subplot that was always his one and true love- the art of the grift.

Trump in many ways is the culmination of the long standing American desire to substitute make-believe for reality, and what he proved with his presidency is that even in the face of illusion induced catastrophe a large number of Americans are unwilling to give up their fantasies. Claire Malone put it very well: 

“Up until the Trump era, partisans had made studious attempts to craft their arguments in at least a simulacrum of fact. Trump didn’t bother much with that, and it turned out, the vast majority of Republican voters didn’t mind.”  

Indeed, perhaps the best way of understanding Trumpism as a political form isn’t through comparison with traditional political “isms” like fascism or populism but in light of a type of collective make-believe- professional wrestling- where Trump is very much at home. This was the view  laid out by Jared Yates Sexton in a Twitter thread back in November of last year, months before we got Trump’s deadly putsch at the Capitol. It’s a perspective which accurately predicted almost all of what was to occur during the harrowing months that followed the 2020 election. 

The grift of the stolen election was largely a work whose purpose was to fleece the marks, but over time it became a shoot and burst into reality as something real- but only in the minds of believers. Indeed, at one point the belief itself became its own justification, the election deemed illegitimate not because there was substantial proof of cheating, but because nearly one half of the country believed there had been. 

What Trump himself believed is ultimately an unanswerable question. I’m not even sure the man has what would normally be called beliefs. He’s not so much Asimov’s “Mule” throwing a wrench into the predictions of psychohistory by manipulating the crowd with his mesmerizing powers, much less the converse of Hari Seldon able to leverage the fissures of society to bend history in his direction, than he is a Dorian Gray like mirror both enchanting and horrifying the masses with their own reflection. A man created by television whose fans treated an insurrection like a reality TV show where they played starring roles. 

At least up until the day after the 2020 election when it was clear he had lost, the Trump show was always scripted in real time, written on the fly based on the reaction of its viewers on Twitter, and especially on shows like Fox and Friends and its related ilk.  And as with many hit shows accelerating towards its end this one became more and more detached from reality and bizarre. Instead of having a coup led by a figure like Kenan Evren we get one whose insane plot was drawn up by the MyPillow guy. The most loyal of Trump fans, like with any fandom, lost sight of the plot and found themselves holed up in subcults on Reddit and Gab where reality goes to die.

Very little about Trumpism as a political phenomenon was actually innovative. It was just louder. The most groundbreaking aspect of the show, which had formerly confined itself to televised propaganda, stadium rallies, and way too many flags with a splash of updated direct marketing via FaceBook, wasn’t hit upon until the last few months of the Trump administration after the election had already been determined. 

In his desperation Trump managed to turn a political conspiracy theory into a mass role playing game with feeder series on cable TV, and an online component where devoted viewers could document the “steal” and upload the “evidence” to YouTube- like some Bellingcat from hell. It was a show filled with cliffhangers that called for heroes who turned out to be villains in the form of the  Supreme Court and Mike Pence, reaching its climax with a live steamed, mass participatory, new American Revolution at the Capitol. 


If that sounds like a role playing game, or like it was unhinged, it’s because it was both. In large part this was a consequence of the Trump show in its final days having merged with the online Trump cult Qanon, itself a kind of demented RPG. Ross Douthat has probably explained it best: 

“But he wanted more, he wanted a way to actually stay in office, and since no Republican with real power would actually do a coup for him, he turned fully to the fantasy world — which gladly supplied him with story lines, narratives, first the Kraken and then the fixation on Mike Pence as a deus ex machina.

And because Trump is, however incompetently, actually the president and not just a character in an online role-playing game, by turning to the dreamworld he made himself a conduit for the dream to enter into reality, making the dreamers believe in the plausibility of direct action, giving us the riot and its dead.”

There was something very Gunpowder Plot-ish about the whole thing- the attack on the seat of government, the QAnoners’ blood lust for decapitating the entire ruling class so the supposed righteous could assume the seat of power. It was nuts, but not just nuts in the obvious detached from reality way that’s the source of much of the mockery against the cult, but nuts in a deeper theoretical way. 

The Qs are mistaken as to where they are in history and as a consequence have got their theory of revolution all wrong. You can’t overthrow a modern state by just cutting off a certain number of the elite’s heads. The state has long ceased to be an entity attached to the bodies of its rulers . Power no longer lies in persons but in systems, as some of them no doubt realized after they had been barred en mass from spreading their crazed conspiracies on social media.

Thankfully, Trump’s brand of demagoguery doesn’t deal well with systems. If one labeled it fascism it would have to be a very peculiar sort of stochastic fascism that makes use of all the standard fascist tropes to rile up the mob, but then lacks the discipline to actually do much of anything after its been crowd surfed into power.

For years now both the left and the right have terrified (and mobilized) themselves based on the twin boogiemen of the past century- fascism and communism- rising from the grave. The reason why such fear is largely misplaced is that the social conditions that gave rise to the totalitarian movements of the 20th century have largely disappeared in the 21st. The heart of fascism always lay in the millions of military veterans who had their souls deformed by the Great War and had been inculcated with a worship of action and obedience. The heart of socialism lay in an industrial proletariat who had been taught the dual lessons of mass organization and class war in the factories, while state communism only ever existed in societies that had been industrialized from the top down, their peasants forced into modernity at the barrel of a gun. 

These are social conditions that are largely gone, especially in the US and Western Europe, where warfare is no longer a mass phenomenon because it has returned to being a profession, while decades of neoliberalism, globalization, and automation have reduced the industrial proletariat to little but a shadow of its former self. Trumpism did indeed have some affinity with classical fascism- sharing its ethno-nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and affection for conspiracy theories. And like fascism, Trumpism was also a movement widely supported by the petit-bourgeois who both in the 1930’s and today, found themselves crushed in a vice between capital and the poor. Nevertheless, Trumpism lacked the core commitment of fascism to the power and legitimacy of the state.

In only a very limited sense, we ran Sinclair Lewis’ experiment from his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here and proved his hypothesis wrong. The United States with its heterogeneity of cultures and divided power centers would not fall prey to an American fuhrer. But we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too quickly. In the face of much less pressure, and with many more structural advantages, we proved ourselves just as ripe for a demagogue as any other people in history, and exactly the type of figure the country’s founders had designed our system of government to protect us from. Nor should we, even given all the historical differences between ours and the conditions that gave rise to the totalitarian movements, completely discount Sinclair’s warning. 

It Can’t Happen Here concludes with a populist, racist president- Buzz Windrip- who had overthrown the American government being exiled to France and a military figure- General Haik- seizing control of the government. What the rise, containment and fall of Trump signal is that there is a disturbing likelihood that such a scenario lies in our future as well.                       

If one party continues to put fantasy-obsessed maniacs into office the attempts by the institutional forces of the state to contain them might become more and more strained and contorted. The problem, for those of us who see it as such, is not that Trump’s ties to Russia shouldn’t have been investigated, or his irresponsible impulses in foreign policy contained, or his desire to use the security forces of the state against his domestic political foes stymied, or his possession of the nuclear codes after an attempted coup by his own loyalists nullified, it’s that these moves by the institutions of the state are in tension with the idea that power in a democracy is the product of elections. 

The fact that elections and the constitutional system itself appears to be no longer capable of empowering a responsible political class that polices its own members who are committed to that system beyond the horizons of their own personal power should terrify us. What is also deeply disturbing is how, at the same time, power has slipped from public entities who are subject to political sanction to private entities who suffer no such constraints. Public institutions, especially the parties, no longer act as a kind of bottleneck and lens through which the cacophonous voices and desires of the demos is filtered of noise and made coherent. The process of representation no longer works like it used to, indeed many have forgotten what representation, at least as conservatives have long defined it, actually means. 

Instead what counts as political reality is decided by private corporations, such as Fox and Twitter, or becomes a matter of direct pressure by hyper-mobilized groups who take their anger and desires directly to those in power through threats or protests (sometimes armed). Rather than reform our political system, or transform it into something that better reflects contemporary conditions, we seem bound and determined to compound its flaws until our only choices left will be between the rule of capital or the chaos of the mob.  

Even if the possibility for radical transformation is far-fetched in the US context, practical reforms are desperately needed. The flow of information between representatives and their constituents has become so distorted- through a gerrymandered electoral system, the influence of money, or by a primary and communications network that empowers only the most motivated and extreme voices- the pragmatic sanity of the supermajority is ignored. At the end of the day, Americans are a middle of the road people, attracted to common sense solutions to almost universally recognized problems. It’s a reality that doesn’t goose the ratings and that one wouldn’t guess existed by watching cable news.    

For a day or so after the events of 1/6 I had the naïve hope that the shocking spectacle of it would snap our political class and the American public back to reality. The Potemkin Civil War, which had proven so lucrative for media and political parties on both the left and the right had for a moment broken into reality, but sadly, its image wasn’t frightening enough for those propelling the conflict to let go of the grift.  

Trump’s acquittal by the Senate means the golden age of the grifter isn’t over quite yet, and may have even just begun. Whether that means Trump will go the dangerous route of claiming to be the president in exile like the popes of Avignon, is mortally wounded by lawsuits, or slowly disappears from public consciousness due to social media bans is anybody’s guess. At the very least I can stop worrying daily about what mischief he’s up to until 2024 even if I can’t say the same for the conditions that brought us Trump in the first place.        

How Sinclair Lewis predicted Trump, and how he didn’t

Pablo-Picasso-Massacre-In-Korea-1951

I have to admit I found Sinclair Lewis’ novel It can’t happen here painful to read. This was less because Lewis’ tale of a fascist takeover of America felt so close to home, which at points it did, than the fact that the book as a piece of literature was just plain awful.

I won’t go into details on that much, suffice it to say that if not for the novel’s importance as a dystopian thought experiment and political warning no one now, and in the future, would likely be talking about it. Perhaps it’s best to look upon It can’t happen here less as a novel and more of as a sort of political compass, for my guess is, as long as our American Republic lasts, we will return to it whenever we feel ourselves lost and in danger of wandering in the darkness towards dictatorship.

It can’t happen here depicts a 1936 presidential election won by a populist candidate named Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip who heads the League of Forgotten Men. After winning the election Windrip proceeds to dismantle the American system of government and create an authoritarian regime. The novel is told from the perspective of its protagonists, Doremus Jessup, a Yankee journalist who will eventually join the resistance against Windrip’s “Cor-po” state- a fusion of corporate interest, white nativists and the military. As Windrip’s presidency fails to resurrect economic growth he is replaced in a coup by his Secretary of State, Lee Sarason, who moves the country even further in the direction of European style fascism upon which widespread rebellion breaks out. The novel ends with the country in the grip of a second American Evolution/ Civil War.

You would not be remiss in seeing in Windrip, a populist president with the potential for authoritarianism with his blending of white nativism and corporatism (in addition to his affection for generals) a twentieth century version of Donald Trump. Indeed, Lewis begins a number in chapters of It can’t happen here with a quote from Windrip’s imagined autobiography entitled Zero Hour that seem eerily similar to the types of speeches Trump made at his infamous rallies, though Buzz uses bigger words.

Here’s how Windrip feels about the press:

I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne. (Chapt. 5)

Here’s one example of how he makes his appeal to the common man:

When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, “Buzz you’re the thickest-headed dunce in school.” But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township. The United States isn’t so different, and I want to that a lot of the stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly.  (Chapt. 11)

And here’s an example of the American dictator’s economic nationalism:

I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep our dollars at home. If we can do this and at the same time work up tourist traffic so that foreigners will come from every part of the world to see such remarkable wonders as the Grand Canyon, Glacier and Yellowstone etc, parks, the fine hotels of Chicago, & etc., this leaving their money here we shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3,00 to $5,000 per year for every single family-that is, I mean every real American family. Such an inspiring Vision is what we want, and not this nonsense of wasting our time at Geneva and talky-talk a Lugano, wherever that is. (Chap. 12)

ALL TOO FAMILIAR.

As a novelist, Sinclair Lewis is most insightful where the essential skill of the novelist is needed most, that is, in showing us how the foibles and weaknesses of human psychology can lead both individuals and societies towards dark choices and disaster. Here’s are the words justifying a vote for the demagogue Windrip which he puts into the mouth of an imagined banker R.C. Crowley who sees authoritarianism as a short road to efficiency and his own economic interest:

Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have ’em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. ‘Nother words, have a doctor who won’t take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!”  (Chap. 2)

In large part Lewis wrote It can’t happen here as a kind of political prophylactic against the populist demagogue- Huey P. Long challenging and beating president Roosevelt, whose policies had yet to really dent the suffering of the Great Depression, in the 1936 election. (Long would actually be assassinated in September, 1935). Yet Lewis’ novel was also a kind of mea culpa for a colossal political failure by his wife- the journalist Dorothy Thompson.

Thompson was one of the most influential women of the early 20th century who broke ground for women in journalism ever after. It is a great shame, therefore, that she seems to be largely forgotten. Unfortunately, this otherwise brilliant journalist also wrote a piece about Adolf Hitler that totally missed his import and the great dangers he posed. In 1931, before Hitler had become the German chancellor, but when it was already clear he was poised to gain a leadership role, Thompson had the opportunity to meet and interview the future dictator who would transform Germany into a totalitarian state and plunge the world into its second world war in a generation. It was a meeting which became the source for her infamous essay I saw Hitler. She was not impressed:

When finally I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not.

Thompson’s conclusion was that other political figures, parties, leading economic interests, and rival states would act to contain Hitler whom she considered a raving buffoon whose ideas defied common sense. In other words, his mania would be checked by its collision with reality.

I thought of this man before me, seated as an equal between Hindenburg and Bruening, and involuntarily I smiled. Oh, Adolph! Adolph! You will be out of luck!

She was, of course, horribly wrong.

So when Lewis writes It can’t happen here he is, in a sense, trying to undo Thompson’s mistake. Hitler has made the idea of buffoons like Long or Father Coughlin coming to power and overturning the American system plausible and Lewis is in effect pleading with readers to take the idea of an American dictator seriously. The question is, was it? And now, more importantly, is it?

To answer the first part of that question a little history is in order. The historian Arthur Schlesinger in his monumental history of the Roosevelt administration The Age of Roosevelt has several chapters devoted to “the rise of the demagogues” and a number of lessons can be drawn from it. One is just how experimental American politics became during the crisis years of the Depression and how Roosevelt, rather than having any preformed ideology about what should be done in response to the crisis proved himself a master at adopting experiments dreamed up elsewhere. Much of this experimentation and brake with the consensus of laissez faire economics came from populists such as Long or Father Coughlin whose position on the right-left spectrum is less than clear-cut- both were early supporters of Roosevelt, or in the case of Upton Sinclair were leftists but not to the point of embracing communism.

Long, the most well-known of these figures was himself a complicated character. He was more akin to a Hugo Chavez than a Hitler having established his own fiefdom in Louisiana, which at the same time it crippled the economic oligarchy that had formerly ruled that state and distributed its riches to the poor, also replaced democracy with one man rule and lined the very deep pockets of the “Kingfish”.

Yet even had Long lived, run against Roosevelt, and won the 1936 election it’s doubtful he could have be able to do the same thing to the US as a whole. Louisiana was a small, poor state. It’s institutions were too weak to withstand political pressure and they crumbled before Long’s political maneuvering. It was different for Roosevelt whose New Deal was often stymied by the Supreme Court and had his subsequent efforts to pack the court in his favor rejected. It’s not so much that Long would have found any attempt to do to the US what he did to Louisiana impossible, so much as resisted by one or another political or economic institution or group at every step along the way. Exactly the scenario Dorothy Thompson had expected to play out in Germany.

When Lewis imagines Buzz Windrip taking control of the presidency he pictures the whole American system being knocked over as easily as a deck of cards. US states are abolished and replaced with administrative districts, African Americans stripped of the right to vote, Windrip’s personal militia “The Minutemen” are granted the same status as the traditional US Army, both the US Congress and the Supreme Court are stripped of their veto power, and in the latter case legislative powers, and their members are actually placed under house arrest.

What Thompson got wrong was in failing to see that the relatively new and untried democratic institutions in  post- World War I Germany were vulnerable to complete collapse in the face of the mass unemployment and hyperinflation unleashed by the Great Depression and thus open to precisely the kind of manic gamble Hitler and the Nazis represented. What Lewis probably failed to see was that despite the depth of the Great Depression, the fact the the US had suffered no physical destruction or revolution on account of that same war left it far less vulnerable to any sudden overthrow of its much older institutions, which brings me back to Trump.

With Trump we get a chance, in a sense, to re-play Lewis’ imagined history in which a populist demagogue with a disdain for democratic norms breaks his way into the White House. My guess is that Long would have been heavily constrained by still functioning US political institutions and mobilized opposing interests, and that Trump will suffer a similar fate. Indeed, Trump’s position is even worse than Long’s would have been for perhaps a better 1930’s analog to Trump isn’t the Kingfish but the radio celebrity Father Coughlin. Long at least had a state’s political machinery under his thumb whereas Coughlin was merely used the new media of radio to do an end run around print media and the ruling political machines in the same way Trump has used social media an alternative news outlets to do something similar against mainstream media and the GOP.

That said, no one should want to repeat the same mistake as Dorothy Thompson which was to not see that a buffoon who would be dictator can successfully use a severe crisis to overturn a democracy. However unlikely such a scenario is with Trump (here a major terrorist attack, war, or even catastrophic scale natural disaster would play the role of Germany’s Reichstag fire enabling a lunge towards actual fascism) the best defense is to assume the worst and oppose Trump’s continued violations of democratic norms and ongoing moves towards a cruel carceral state with continued political and institutional resistance. Such opposition would make Lewis and Thompson proud and allow It can’t happen here to fulfill its true purpose which is making sure that it never happens here because we chose not to let it.