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  • Chapter 16 - It Can’t Happen Here (1935): Sinclair Lewis

  • from Part III - Case Studies
  • Edited by Bryan M. Santin, Concordia University Irvine
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
    Published online:
    07 October 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023, pp 248-260

  • Summary

    Revisiting Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, this chapter argues that the novel is still valuable for gauging the distinct contours of American fascism. On the one hand, the novel provides a remarkably prescient reading of the complex class dynamics and populist coalitions that remain crucial to understanding white nationalist politics and successful neofascist movements. It also strikingly captures the nature of American fascist rhetoric and how it is registered by those outside the fascist “base.” On the other hand, in projecting white Midwestern farmers as the main site of resistance, the novel shows the serious limitations of the early twentieth-century socialist populism that animated Lewis’s political imagination. The chapter concludes with a reflection on possibilities and constraints of populism as an antifascist political frame.