I have taken a day to mull over ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ before writing my review, because I wasn’t quite sure if it would be a five star, but it just made the cut. Sinclair Lewis’ dystopia imagines an America where an anti-immigration right wing dictator called Buzz Windrip is elected by the American people, sound scarily familiar? The most horrifying thing is that Lewis published this in 1935, before the true horrors of Nazi Germany had occurred and been exposed to the world, though Lewis almost perfectly imagines the course of actions following Hitler’s rise to a dictatorship within his imagined America. Equally, it serves as a harsh warning to the modern day; that in the environment of the USA, so fuelled by hatred and capitalism, it is feasible for fascist power to slowly manipulate the country to their pleasing. I did also find fascinating sections of remarks that the election of Buzz would bring America back to its glory days, when there wasn’t “the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours” - and that quote is so ironic in that it proves the ‘better past’ to be nothing but a myth. 

The first half of the novel focused on Buzz’s campaign and then a political recount on how he spent his first months in office, and the subsequent changes to laws and the governance of the USA. Once again, the early policy changes and the messages pushed by Buzz are so reflective of what we are seeing in America today, and such is terrifying. The latter half of the book more closely follows the protagonist Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor who is censored by the regime and attempts to fight against it. Doremus wasn’t the most interesting of protagonists which was the cause for a lot of my initial reluctance to give five stars, however then I remembered the character of Winston has never held back ‘1984’ for me and in that philosophy the political worldbuilding and applicability to the modern day absolutely deserves the merit. 

If the state of right wing politics is of any worry to you, please pick this up! You’ll see a scarily large amount of Donald Trump in Buzz Windrip!