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It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
Viktor Orbán. After winning an absolute majority in 2010, Orbán launched a series of 'reforms', fundamentally undermining the country's twenty-year, post-Cold War liberal consensus. For supporters and foes alike, the rise and rise of Hungary's prime minister is a vivid example of how democracy can be subverted from within.
Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics) . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Sinclair Lewis enjoyed a brilliant career in the 1920s portraying and satirizing what he regarded as the mediocrity, materialism, corruption, and hypocrisy of middle-class life in the United States. His five major novels of the twenties—Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929)—were all bestsellers that served to hold a mirror up to the parochialism and provincialism of that decade. A good many Americans winced at their own in those novels, but they eagerly bought Lewis’s iconoclastic books, because, however much they flinched at his representations of their middle-class lives, they were finally snugly, if not smugly, comfortable in the economic security that produced their prosperous confidence. After the stock market crash of 1929, however, there wasn’t much left of the middle class of the early 1930s. Many who were previously solid, respectable breadwinners found themselves on bread lines, soup lines, and relief rolls. “Normalcy,” a twenties password synonymous with security, gave way to the “jitters” as profitless corporations laid off millions of workers who drifted across the country like Oklahoma farm dust.
Szelényi, Zsuzsanna. Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary . Hurst. Kindle Edition.
Introduction Viktor Orbán’s Revolution At The Polls
Tense and expectant, we sat in front of the TV. Slowly the election results from the single-member constituencies rolled in. This election was simply never going to have a positive outcome. Hungarian public life had been a scene of chaos for years. The left-wing government had lost its legitimacy; the liberal party was in the throes of disintegration; and a new extreme right-wing party was gathering traction. In opposition, Fidesz had been engaged in constant, radical street-level mobilization for years. But there was no doubt that Fidesz would win a majority. On the evening of the 2010 general election, I had some friends over for an election night party. We had been founding members and friends of the Fidesz movement and had all lived through the 1989 change of regime. A few of us had gone into active politics, while others worked as experts in the field of economics or as communications consultants alongside the party. But, by the end of the 1990s, everyone in that group had left front-line politics. Some had joined public opinion pollsters, think tanks and newspapers. Others found attractive challenges in the liberalizing financial world, and some dived into academia. At the time of our meeting, in 2010, we comprised a group of successful folk who, together, had set out on their professional careers with the world as their oyster. In 2010 the results started coming in at around 10 pm. An enormous lead was immediately apparent, and it became clear that Fidesz would be forming the country’s new government. In view of the highly disproportionate election system,1 the 52% victory on the party lists effectively meant that Fidesz had won a two-thirds majority of seats in Parliament, giving it full power to rewrite the constitution. We all knew Viktor Orbán well and, on seeing the results, pondered what he would use this new-found power to do. The more optimistic in the group believed that although Orbán was audacious, he would genuinely seek to address our country’s problems.
Ryback, Timothy W.. Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power (p. 9). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. x
Introduction
On a cloudless Tuesday night in mid-August 1932, Adolf Hitler sat on the veranda of Haus Wachenfeld, his alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg, just above the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, stargazing with Joseph Goebbels. The previous week had seen winds and rain of apocalyptic proportions. Hillsides collapsed, burying roads and railway lines with as much as four feet of mud. Some 50 percent of the Mosel Valley wine harvest was destroyed by hail. Brandenburg lost 75 percent of its cherry crop. The tobacco fields in Schwedt were obliterated. In Posen, a farmer and a female laborer were killed by lightning, and a woman and child hospitalized. The German newspaper Vorwärts reported in a headline, “Death Descends from the Clouds.” Then the skies began to clear. “With Hitler on the Obersalzberg. Wonderful sunshine,” Goebbels wrote in his diary that Sunday. “Spirits high. And why not?” If all went according to plan, by week’s end, Paul von Hindenburg, the Reich president, would have appointed Hitler as Reich chancellor. In the Reichstag elections on July 31, 1932, the National Socialists had claimed thirteen million votes, more than 37 percent of the electorate, with 230 seats in the 600-member Reichstag, doubling their legislative mandate. “We have won a great victory!” Hitler proclaimed on election night. “There has never been anything like this in the history of our people.”