When Fascism Comes to America
Bill Durston for Common Dreams
Although no one’s actually sure that Sinclair Lewis ever wrote or said this, his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, centers around a flag-hugging, Bible-thumping politician named Berzelius (”Buzz”) Windrip.
Despite having no particular leadership skills other than the ability to mesmerize large audiences by appealing to their baser instincts (and to bully those people who aren’t so easily mesmerized), Windrip is elected President of the United States.
Shortly after Windrip takes office, through a flurry of executive orders, appointments of unqualified cronies to key governmental positions, and then a declaration of martial law, Windrip quickly makes the transition from a democratically elected president to a brutal, fascist dictator. The novel’s title, It Can’t Happen Here, refers to the mindset of key characters in the novel who fail to recognize Windrip’s fascist agenda before it’s too late.
Written almost a century ago during the rise of fascism in
Europe prior to World War II, It Can’t Happen Here is
disturbingly prescient today. Buzz Windrip’s personal traits, his rhetoric, and
the path through which he initially becomes the democratically elected U.S.
president, and soon afterward, the country’s first full-fledged fascist
dictator, bear an uncanny resemblance to the personality traits and rhetoric
of Donald Trump and
the path through which he has come thus far to be the 47th President of the
United States, and through which he appears to be on course to become our
country’s first full-fledged…. But no! It can’t happen here! Or can it?
Trump’s uncanny resemblance to the fictional dictator in
Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel is disconcerting. The far more important concern,
though, is the degree to which Trump resembles real-life fascist dictators,
past and present. A study of notorious 20th- century fascist dictators,
including Hitler and Mussolini, concluded that they and their regimes all had
several characteristics in common. (The current regimes of Vladimir Putin in
Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong Un in North Korea also share these
characteristics.)
Fascist Dictators Encourage and Condone Violence Against Their Political Enemies
After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump urged a large crowd of supporters on the morning of January 6, 2021 to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” After the violent assault on the Capitol had been going on for more than three hours, when Trump finally posted a video message urging the rioters to go home, he told them, “We love you, you’re very special.” On his first day back in office in 2025, he granted clemency to the more than 1,500 rioters who were charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers and rioters with past convictions for other violent crimes, including sexual assault.
At the beginning of his second term, Trump appointed Elon Musk, reportedly the
world’s richest man and the CEO of companies that have received tens of billions of dollars in federal funding,
to head the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency,” with
the power to summarily fire vast numbers of federal employees without cause and
to potentially steer federal funding away from other companies and
toward his own.
Fascist Dictators Promote Bold-Faced Lies and Other
Propaganda
Some of Trump’s most notorious lies include his claims
that he won the 2020 presidential election; that the January 6,
2021 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol was a “day of love;” and that the Ukrainians themselves, not
the Russian invaders, are responsible for starting the war in Ukraine. The
Washington Post catalogued more than 30,000 other demonstrably false or misleading
statements that Trump made during his first term as president.
Currently, a special team within the Trump administration is spewing out
pro-Trump propaganda at a prodigious rate on social media, including a portrait
of Trump wearing a golden crown with the caption, “Long Live the King,” via Elon Musk’s “X” platform.
Fascist Dictators Promote the Myth That Their Citizens
Are Being Threatened by Scapegoats
Trump’s favorite scapegoats are undocumented immigrants whom
he frequently refers to as “criminals,” “gang members,” and “killers," and who he
claims are stealing jobs and benefits from U.S. citizens. In fact, undocumented
immigrants do the work that most U.S. citizens are unwilling to do;
they pay far more in federal taxes than they receive in federal
benefits; and, unlike Trump himself, they are convicted of committing
serious crimes at a lower rate than the U.S. population as a whole.
Fascist Dictators Put Grossly Unqualified Sycophants in
Key Governmental Positions
The many grossly unqualified sycophants who Trump has nominated
or appointed to key government positions in his second administration include
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a favorite Fox News interviewee
who has himself been accused of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, and mismanagement of
nonprofit financial funds, and who has spoken in defense of U.S. soldiers charged with war crimes; Secretary
of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. who seeds doubt concerning vaccine effectiveness and promotes other
medical quackery; and FBI Director Kash Patel who endorses the “deep state” theory and who has previously described
jailed January 6 insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”
Fascist Dictators Exhibit Flagrant Sexism
Trump boasted in a 2005
video recording about not only groping women and kissing them without
their consent, but about an incident involving a married woman in which, in his
own words, “I moved on her like a bitch.” He added, “I failed, I admit it, I
did try and “f—k her.” Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during their final 2016 presidential
debate; he has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
as “Pocahontas;” and he entertained a joke during a 2024 campaign rally
implying that past Vice President Kamala Harris once
worked as a prostitute.
The list of common characteristics in the study of
20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all,
and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most
of these categories. One common characteristic not mentioned in the study is
the fact that all the 20th-century fascist dictators met ignominious ends—but
not before they had caused enormous damage, including the deaths of millions of
innocent people.
Questions about what fascism might look like when it comes
to the United States of America and whether it can or cannot happen here are no
longer merely hypothetical. Fascism has come to the USA.
It is happening here. The question now is whether the people
of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral
compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country
before further harm is done, or will we be like the characters in Sinclair
Lewis’ 1935 novel; the people in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and
the people in current day Russia, China, and North Korea and allow our system
of government to devolve into a full-fledged fascist dictatorship.
Bill Durston, MD is a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran of the Vietnam War, decorated for "courage under fire." After completing his military service, he became an emergency physician. He retired from working in the ER in 2014 but continues to volunteer as a preceptor at a student-run clinic associated with the University of California Medical School that provides free medical care to underserved members of the community.
