Eighty-five years ago (1935), the American author Sinclair Lewis published a political novel titled, It Can't Happen Here. This is Wiki's description:
The novel was published during the heyday of fascism in Europe, which was reported on by Dorothy Thompson, Lewis' wife. The novel describes the rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a demagogue who is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values. After his election, Windrip takes complete control of the government and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force, in the manner of European fascists such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The novel's plot centers on journalist Doremus Jessup's opposition to the new regime and his subsequent struggle against it as part of a liberal rebellion.1I would suggest that totalitarian rule HAS happened here, BUT with a twist. The twist is this:
To the puppet-masters everyone is a useful prop — rabble-rousers in the making; gangsters of opposition (birthing gang / counter-gang strategies3): maskers v. anti-maskers; vaxxers v. anti-vaxxers; trackers v. anti-trackers; believers v. skeptics; police v. defunders; obedients v. disobedients; sleepers v. conspiracy analysts; and on and on.
Lewis saw the inevitable déjà vu outcomes (Right or Left) of "well-intended" rabble-rousers :
[Doremus] recalled an article in which Neil Carothers asserted that the “rabble-rousers” of America in the mid-’ thirties had a long and dishonorable ancestry of prophets who had felt called upon to stir up the masses to save the world, and save it in the prophets’ own way, and do it right now, and most violently: Peter the Hermit, the ragged, mad, and stinking monk who, to rescue the (unidentified) tomb of the Savior from undefined “outrages by the pagans,” led out on the Crusades some hundreds of thousands of European peasants, to die on the way of starvation, after burning, raping, and murdering fellow peasants in foreign villages all along the road.How much has happened already? Just look around. Listen to the exposés, the witnesses. Consider the new laws. Consider the threats, fines, shaming, censorship, smears, bullying, harassment, intimidation, arrests, unlawful prosecutions, convictions, disappearances, countless impossible suicides, secret murders, and on and on.
There was John Ball who “in 1381 was a share-the-wealth advocate; he preached equality of wealth, the abolition of class distinctions, and what would now be called communism,” and whose follower, Wat Tyler, looted London, with the final gratifying result that afterward Labor was by the frightened government more oppressed than ever. And nearly three hundred years later, Cromwell’s methods of expounding the sweet winsomeness of Purity and Liberty were shooting, slashing, clubbing, starving, and burning people, and after him the workers paid for the spree of bloody righteousness with blood. Brooding about it, fishing in the muddy slew of recollection which most Americans have in place of a clear pool of history, Doremus was able to add other names of well-meaning rabble-rousers:
Marat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control of France from the moldy aristocrats to the stuffy, centime-pinching shopkeepers. Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate Russian peasants the privileges of punching a time clock and of being as learned, gay, and dignified as the factory hands in Detroit; and Lenin’s man, Borodin, who extended this boon to China. And that William Randolph Hearst who in 1898 was the Lenin of Cuba and switched the mastery of the golden isle from the cruel Spaniards to the peaceful, unarmed, brotherly-loving Cuban politicians of today.
The American Moses, Dowie, and his theocracy at Zion City, Illinois, where the only results of the direct leadership of God— as directed and encouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more spirited successor, Mr. Voliva— were that the holy denizens were deprived of oysters and cigarettes and cursing, and died without the aid of doctors instead of with it, and that the stretch of road through Zion City incessantly caused the breakage of springs on the cars of citizens from Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka, which may or not have been a desirable Good Deed.
Cecil Rhodes, his vision of making South Africa a British paradise, and the actuality of making it a graveyard for British soldiers.
All the Utopias— Brook Farm, Robert Owen’s sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Hall— and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion. All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause was world-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot down violators.
It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build permanently had been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon captains, who not only turned the Utah desert into an Eden but made it pay and kept it up.
Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated— tortured— slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!4
Let us admit: It can and is happening here at this very hour. Trump is no more a savior than Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Hillary or whatever other counter-force should arise to take the "win." How much more are we going to allow?? How long will we insist that this is a two-sided show when, in real time, the DNA has become a single, twisted strand?
Perhaps it's time to review:
Tragedy and Hope 101: The Illusion of Justice, Freedom, and Democracy by Joseph Plummer / Carroll Quigley5
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here (footnotes ommitted)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_and_Judy
3. For a discussion on the gang v. counter-gang strategy see Thursday Trio with Professor Hamamoto and George Webb. 081320 (McDuff: Kennedy's Man to Smash the CIA | August 13, 2020 | Time - begin about min. 25:00 of 58:41) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3WkkvF-ps8
NOTE: I see these astute men as being blind to the real Trump despite their otherwise valuable information. On the other hand, the Democrats also seem utterly blind to the hypocrisy of their own leaders.
4. Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics) (Kindle Locations 1926-1953). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Bold emphasis added)
5. https://www.joeplummer.com/ (free audio available here) | See also: http://tragedyandhope.com/
