The Shrine

Malcolm Harris wrote:With his careful mix of plainspoken honesty and reactionary delusion, Trump is following an old rhetorical playbook, one defined and employed successfully in the 1936 presidential campaign of Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. In his campaign’s promotional book “Zero Hour,” Windrip laid out the classic nativist call to action that Trump would pick up nearly word-for-word:

Buzz Windrip wrote:My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to realize that whatever apparent differences there may be among us, in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength–though, of course, all this does not apply to people who are racially different from us–we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful bond of National Unity, for which we should all be very glad.

After Windrip’s coup at the convention, he won a three-way race when the other two candidates split the reasonable vote. Once elected, President Windrip appealed directly to his core constituency of unprosperous and resentful white men to help him repress dissent and bring fascism to America. It’s a chilling historical lesson, even though it didn’t actually happen.

Windrip’s election is the beginning of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” rather than actual American history. A wonderful example of prophylactic fiction, Lewis used his position as one of the nation’s top novelists to show his countrymen exactly how authoritarianism could rear its head in the land of liberty.