Don’t let its tongue in cheek nature fool you. “4 Sinclair Lewis Novels More Relevant Than ‘It Can’t Happen Here’” is an article published not in The Nation, nor in The Huffington Post, but in… The Weekly Standard:
Hot on the heels of 1984, Sinclair Lewis’s speculative satire It Can’t Happen Here is surging to the forefront of a suddenly very popular genre, prophetic dystopian lit. It Can’t Happen Here will probably be the next novel to sell out on Amazon; right now, it’s the number-two recommended read by booksellers capitalizing on the current craze.
It happened last summer too: Donald Trump was an unassailable force leading into the primaries with his populist pitch and authoritarian-sounding promises that resonated with Americans who felt they’d been forgotten. Neo-fascist comparisons cropped up. And think pieces remembered It Can’t Happen Here—because the rise of such a leader meant we might actually be hurtling toward an authoritarian American dystopia, I guess.