We have reached an historic fork in the road, a choice between facts and lies. Here’s the titular leader of one of our major parties: “An honest propagandist for any cause, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks – it just confuses them – to try to make them swallow all the true facts.”
So said fictional candidate Buzz Windrip, shortly before he was swept into the presidency in 1936. Hailed by many as The Savior of the Forgotten Men, he and his followers speedily transformed our fragile democracy into an authoritarian thugocracy, swathing despotism in red, white, and blue.
This was the plot of Sinclair Lewis’ bestselling 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here.
The hell it can’t.
It can happen in the midterm elections this week if a critical mass of voters – be they naively oblivious, feckless, well-meaning but credulous – decide to reward a cult-party that incites violence, that gives aid and comfort to anti-Semitic extremists, that builds a wall between truth and disinformation, that attacks the legitimacy of our entire election process.
If this is truly the path we prefer – an authoritarian sensibility, a strongman cult, a further breakdown of our democratic institutions – then, by all means, the MAGA Republicans can make it happen here.
Buzz Windrip was the fictional protagonist of a cautionary tale, a former huckster-salesman who (in the author’s words) had the mystifying “power of bewitching large audiences,” despite being “a vulgar fraud…almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” Windrip told his followers that “lowdown crooks, liars, and schemers” were trying to rig the election against him; that journalists “without thought of public interest” were coming out of their “spider dens” to plot his downfall; that members of the “Nordic” race should rule over “people of inferior races.”
And yet, life could imitate art this week if midterm voters are not vigilant about the traditional American values that are imperiled by 291 election deniers on ballots nationwide; in fact, they’re already busy gnawing away at our grassroots election machinery. Our traditional values are further imperiled by amoral abetters of political violence who think it’s funny that the House Speaker’s husband was skull-hammered. (Speaking of election denial: One House incumbent who’s cruising to re-election, Pennsylvania Republican Dan Moul, was recently asked whether he agrees that the 2020 election was free and fair. His reply: “Who’s ever going to know?”)
Millions of well-meaning decent people intend to vote MAGA Republican. But authoritarian movements are often successfully fueled by well-meaning decent people who think “democracy” is just an abstraction, by people who think (in full denial of factual reality) that “both sides” are equal threats to democracy (many Republicans fear “socialism” and immigration) – and that, in essence, they think that a lower price for bread is worth the selling of the nation’s soul.
So yes, it can indeed happen here. That dark future beckons at the fork in the road. If we take it, we own it.
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With the exception of some updates and sentence tweaks, everything you’ve just read first appeared in a column that I wrote on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. Have we not learned anything these past six years?