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It Can’t Happen Here?
Afghan women now have American counterparts
During the great depression, Sinclair Lewis wrote a dystopian novel about a charismatic populist candidate that captured the US presidency and then became a fascist dictator.
The title of the book was It Can’t Happen Here.
When Donald Trump ran for President in 2016, a handful of literary critics compared Trump’s rhetoric to the fear-mongering main character in Lewis’s novel and assumed the similarities would prevent Trump from gaining traction.
Yet, Trump won the Republican nomination.
The Republican Party was split over their presidential candidate. Half felt Trump didn’t represent their conservative values and his racist public persona would destroy the Republican brand. The other half supported Trump to make sure a Democratic president didn’t appoint the next slate of Supreme Court justices.
Trump won the presidency.
The literary critics were shocked and felt it finally happened here. Except Trump ended up a self-destructive one-term anomaly compared to the all-encompassing demagogue in the novel. Trump did appoint three supreme court justices to the bench, giving the conservatives the majority. Though Trump lost reelection, his supporters believed the long-term effect of his…