Hell, yes.
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/09/far04030.htmlSeptember 14, 2004
Can It Happen Here?
by Maureen Farrell
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis penned the cautionary tale, It Can’t Happen Here, chronicling the fictional rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who becomes President against the protests of Franklin D. Roosevelt and America’s saner citizens.
A charismatic Senator who claims to champion the common man, Windrip is in the pocket of big business (i.e. Corpos), is favored by religious extremists, and though he talks of freedom and prosperity for all, he eventually becomes the ultimate crony capitalist. Boosted by Hearst newspapers (the FOX News of its day), he neuters both Congress and the Supreme Court, before stripping people of their liberties and installing a fascist dictatorship.
One might argue, of course, that since It Can’t Happen Here was written nearly seven decades ago and America has yet to succumb to fascism, the book is the product of a novelist's runaway imagination, with an interesting yet less than probable theme. But then again, the same might have been said of George Orwell's 1984, before most realized that the book is brilliantly prescient -- and merely off by a couple decades.
Like 1984's warnings about perpetual war, doublespeak and Big Brother, It Can’t Happen Here describes conditions for totalitarianism that exist to this day. There is the usual ignorance and apathy ("most of the easy-going descendants of the wise-cracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ meant anything more than a high school yell or a cigarette slogan."); blind faith in American exceptionalism ("Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, "If there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe. . .All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just as sorely in the clear American air as in miasmic fogs of Prussia."); and a sense of the surreal ("It’s not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply could not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can’t happen here, said even Doremus – even now.").
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