[Becky Lindroos]

You’re right about  It Can’t Happen Here much less of a novel than 1984.   It’s more like Aldous Huxley’s Island for all its pontificating. 

The thing is that both the Lewis book and Trump fit the set of similarities set forth by Albright (in “Fascism") which authoritarian dictators use to attain power and keep it,  this is whether they are right wing or left.   They attack media, free speech, certain minority groups voting rules and the political opposition while tending to promote a militaristic form of nationalism with no avoidance of violence on any level and themselves as cult leader. They make up what they need as they go along so each regime/leader is unique in its own specifics.  

I’m still only about 1/2 way through.   

Becky
https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com

> On Oct 25, 2018, at 11:38 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I learned of it in an even earlier political and reprint cycle, Nixon's, of the late 60s-70s when I was a pup bookseller. Bet voracious reader, we think, TRP
> has read it. (You can't read and love 1984 and miss this one, although it is much less as a novel).
> 
> Just recently I got a copy of T. Harry Williams' HUGE biography of Huey Long, the model. Surely won't read it all but from his Preface to the paperback-that-hardly-holds together: ....TRP's/Weber's charisma is a defining quality..."Long went much further than creating a political "machine"--He was the first Southern leader, and very possibly the first American leader, to set out not to contain the opposition or to impose certain conditions on it, but to force it out of existence. ....Deliberately, he grasped the control of all existing boards and other agencies ..and then just as deliberately by creating new agencies to perform new functions, he continually enlarged the patronage at his disposal. His control of patronage, gave him control of the legislature, and his control of the legislature enabled him to have laws enacted that invested him with imperial authority over every level of local government.........he became so powerful finally that he could deny the opposition almost all political sustenance, and if he wished, destroy it. .....but he did it differently. He created an arrangement in which the survival of any opposing organization would have to come into his to survive. He defined the terms and the rewards.  He also campaigned for sympathetic judges and they were winning so, all three branches. And he had effectively set it up before he died.
> 
> Arendt totalitarianism. What is at least at stake in the upcoming US elections, as Trump has packed the Supremes, is still the patronage President, the Senate--McConnell has surely studied Long's career-- will probably not turn Dem therefore.......
> 
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 9:40 PM Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Yup -  but written in 1936 so Lewis would be limited in some ways including the bomb as well as the environment.   Life is much more dangerous for many more people now.  (But it was in the days of the Shrub, too.) 
> 
>  I’ve read about some post-WWII and post-WWII totalitarian tactics and strategies (Fascism by Madeleine Albright) and we’ll see how he does on those. This was written in 1935,  way prior to Pearl Harbor.  just after Hitler became Fuhrer.  I don’t know what I’m reading for - parallels to current times or historical interest.  
> 
> I read Lewis’ Main Street a few years ago.  It’ll be interesting if nothing else.   
> 
> 
> Becky
> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
> 
> > On Oct 25, 2018, at 3:08 PM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I remember fifteen years ago, the LAST time It Can't Happen Here went
> > through a cycle of current-events-spawned popularity. It even had the
> > Dubya Bush / Buzz Windrip synchronistical nomenclature to help sell
> > its ostensibly prophetic nature.
> > 
> > It's a pretty good novel, very "readable", but the lack of nuclear
> > weapons in the mix means it can only go so far as a satire that can be
> > shoehorned over the contemporary realpolitik.
> > 
> > Jerky
> > On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 6:03 PM Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >> 
> >> Interesting as I’m just starting to read “It Can’t Happen Here” (“What Will Happen When America Has a Dictator?”)  by Sinclair Lewis - (1936).  A the time, the book was thought to be directed at Huey Long, a Mississippi populist, governor/senator who was assassinated as he was getting his campaign for president together.  Sinclair’s novel is a satire and really aimed at its own times,  but it resonates what with all the fictional Windrip does *after* he gains office.  (hush the critics, etc.)
> >> 
> >> "Keith Perry argues that the key weakness of the novel is not that he decks out U.S. politicians with sinister European touches, but that he finally conceives of fascism and totalitarianism in terms of traditional U.S. political models rather than seeing them as introducing a new kind of society and a new kind of regime.”
> >> 
> >> Also:
> >> "A number of writers have compared the demagogue Buzz Windrip to Donald Trump. Michael Paulsonwrote in The New York Times that the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's rendition of the play aimed to provoke discussion about Trump's presidential candidacy.[2]”
> >> 
> >> 
> >> And: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/books/review/classic-novel-that-predicted-trump-sinclar-lewis-it-cant-happen-here.html
> >> 
> >> or:
> >> http://time.com/money/4573801/sinclair-lewis-it-cant-happen-here-amazon/
> >> 
> >> very curious -
> >> 
> >> Becky
> >> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
> >> 
> >>> On Oct 25, 2018, at 2:37 PM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> Nice.
> >>> 
> >>> And true.
> >>> 
> >>> J.
> >>> On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 3:09 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>> From Charles Pierce
> >>>> https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a24174810/cnn-obama-clintons-bomb-donald-trump/
> >>>> 
> >>>> "The bomb has been as essential a part of American political history as
> >>>> were the knife, and the pistol, the high-powered rifle, and the rope."
> >>>> --
> >>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>> --
> >>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >> 
> 
> --
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