This can happen here
A recent survey warns that 59% of the Catalan population feels democracy is threatened, mainly by the fake news, the rise of the far right and economic inequalities. This fear, which is entirely well-founded, has been heightened by the arrival of a "new sheriff" in Washington: Donald Trump, an apprentice dictator (or absolute monarch) who does not hesitate to tweet – on an account on the X network that has more than 100 million "followers" – that "He who saves his country does not rape. His co-pilot, Elon Musk – who has more than twice as many followers – has hammered home the point by saying that "democracy" is that the president can do whatever he wants. This makes many wonder, despite the substantial differences between the two historical moments, about the parallels that the situation today presents with that of the 1930s.
It was precisely coinciding with the rise of fascism in Europe that Sinclair Lewis, an American writer 30, published in 1935 a dystopian novel entitled It can't happen here ("It Can't Happen Here"), in which a demagogue is elected president of the United States and, through a self-coup, imposes a totalitarian regime. The fear that fascism could happen there has not ceased to be present, even if intermittently, in American political culture. In 2004, the writer Philip Roth published Plot against the United States, an uchrony in which he imagined that the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh – a philo-Germanic anti-Semite, opposed to "the dilution of the white race" by other races – won the 1940 elections in Roosevelt. But it was with the toxic irruption of Trump that the warning that "this can happen here" took on a new relevance. It is no coincidence that the Penguin publishing house brought out a new edition of Lewis' novel on the same day in January 2017 that Trump took office for his first presidency.
On that occasion, Philip Roth himself, denouncing Trump's lack of decency, underlined his ignorance at all levels and sarcastically claimed that he had a vocabulary of seventy-seven words (sorry, we could think that there are even fewer). This poverty of expression – one of the keys to his electoral success – should not surprise us if we take into account what a journalist who visited his ostentatious penthouse in the Trump Tower in Manhattan pointed out, where the most notable feature is not the bad taste, with a golden decoration that tries to emulate that of the Palace of Versailles, but rather the entire im.
And books are dangerous: this has been confirmed by the Israeli police, after breaking into a Palestinian bookstore in Jerusalem, taking dozens of books and arresting their owners, with the excuse that they "incite and support terrorism." In the protests that followed this police raid, a demonstrator, a Holocaust researcher, recalled that one begins by burning books and ends by burning people. A reminder that no one would have imagined that this would be the case, precisely, in Israel.
Are we, then, in a period comparable to that of the 1930s? If so, the optimism of the will leads me to think that together we will be able to find a way out of the crisis that will be more similar to that of 1945, with the triumph of democracies, than to that of 1933, with the rise of Nazism. But the more immediate question is another: how can we do it to stop the onslaught of the new demagogues? American film director Todd Haynes recently warned, from the Berlinale, about the destabilising strategy of Trump's first weeks in the White House: create a sense of destabilization and commotion among the people that delays the response, the various forms of resistance that will arise. In this regard, the director of the New Yorker, David Remnick, used the phrase "this could happen here" again, but he cleverly turned it around: recalling Václav Havel's fight against Soviet totalitarianism, for which he was imprisoned and which ended with the achievement of democracy, the American journalist said that we are now living in dark times.
And speaking of books, allow me to give you a spoiler: rest assured that in the medium term, Trump and his oligarch friends will not get ahead. Now, the suffering they will cause in the meantime can be very great: of that, too, there is, unfortunately, little doubt.