Authoritarian movements are rising in democracies around the world, in ways not seen since the 1930s. And contrary to the title of a famous dystopian novel from that era, it can happen here. In lots of small ways, it’s already happening.
In Missouri, one state official is trying to dictate what library patrons can read, while another is demanding to see journalists’ emails. In Florida, people are being arrested for voting. In red states around the country, legislators energized by the reversal of Roe v. Wade are pondering how to prevent women from crossing state lines. And in Washington, the party that tried to overturn a valid presidential election could be about to retake control of Congress.
But by all means, let’s talk about gas prices.
Polls show that even in an era roiled by some of the most dangerous politics in almost a century, inflation remains far and away Americans’ top concern going into next month’s midterms. This is unsettling but unsurprising. The situation is still better here than in much of the advanced world, but that doesn’t placate voters.
Imagining how worse it could be was the point of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” about an Adolf Hitler-like politician seizing power in the US. The title is ironic, of course, reflecting Americans’ confident assumption (then as now) that their democracy couldn’t possibly be engulfed by a fascist movement like the ones then rising in Europe. Until it is.
As Jacob Weisberg wrote in Slate in 2016, Lewis’ putatively classic novel is “more referred to than read.” But Weisberg aptly correlated the already-obvious autocratic instincts of then-candidate Donald Trump with Lewis’ fictional president, who “understands how to manipulate the media and considers the truth an irrelevancy. His constituency of economically dispossessed white men moos at his xenophobic nationalism and preposterous promises. After he wins the 1936 election, (he) moves to assert control over the press, lock up his opponents, and put competent businessmen in charge of the country.”
Sound familiar?
Still, it didn’t happen here, right? Trump’s blatant attempts at autocracy during his term were mostly girded by Congress, the courts and other institutions, then he lost the 2020 election, then his brownshirts tried and failed to overthrow the results. He may have been such a textbook would-be fascist that a decades-old novel was able to predict him like Nostradamus, yet democracy held. End of story.
Well, until Nov. 8, anyway. And November, 2024. Anyone who thinks this particular dystopian tale is over isn’t paying attention to what’s happening in Missouri and across America and around the world. And how eerily familiar it’s starting to look.
Most Americans probably have a hard time imagining future historians ever footnoting American democracy with beginning and end dates. It can’t happen here.
Citizens of the ancient Roman Republic (509-27 BC) presumably thought the same thing during the almost 500 years their democracy endured, before falling to the dictatorships of the Caesars. The democratically elected leaders of Germany who abetted Hitler’s rise in the early 1930s believed they could control his relatively small but frenzied political movement for their own purposes. Again: Sound familiar?
Now, as then, once-stable democracies around the world are teetering like dominoes against far-right agitation from within. In such dissimilar countries as Italy, Brazil, Hungary and the Philippines, economic resentment, anti-intellectualism and xenophobia are stoking movements in which Trump-like figures are chipping at democratic norms -- to the cheers of American right-wingers like the Conservative Political Action Coalition crowd that invited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to speak “we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race” at their Texas convention.
It can’t happen here? Tell that to Missouri politicians like Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is using his state office to pry into emails between Mizzou journalism professors and media fact-checkers who might complicate his US Senate run. Or state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, who wants to censor abortion information to Missouri women and legally threaten any out-of-state doctors who might help them. Or Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who last week announced his office wants the power to “certify” what kinds of books state-funded public libraries are allowed to carry.
Tell it to Florida’s governor and likely presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, who is crowing about the arrests of ex-convicts who inadvertently violated Florida’s confusing and selectively enforced law allowing some ex-cons to vote.
And tell it to the 147 members of Congress (most of them running for re-election next month) who tried to disenfranchise millions of Americans on Jan. 6, 2021, at the behest of a lawless president who has all but vowed that his second term, if it comes, will usher in an authoritarian America. The question facing voters isn’t whether it can happen here -- it clearly can -- but whether cheap gas is more important than democracy.
Kevin McDermott
Kevin McDermott is a member of the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board. -- Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)
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