POST ELECTION, THE NEW YORKER’S DAVID REMNICK IS STILL FLUCKING THE “TRUMP IS A CRYPTO-NAZI” CHICKEN: It Can Happen Here.

The news of Trump’s reëlection did not come with the same shock as his first victory did. Joe Biden, for all his virtues and legislative achievements, was a conspicuously unpopular President. At least fifty-five per cent of voters in the major swing states disapproved of his performance in office. And, by the time Biden came to terms with age and finally stepped aside, Harris, despite all her energy and appealing intelligence, had precious little time to run a campaign that could reasonably outdistance both that dissatisfaction and her opponent. Trapped between her loyalty to Biden and the need to separate herself from him, she played it safe and depended on the electorate’s ability to distinguish between her manifest decency and the dark chaos represented by Trump.

Despite her thrashing of Trump in their one debate, and his campaigning at times as a disturbed man wandering from one rally to the next, the prospects of Harris winning were never more than episodically encouraging. When her aides were asked how they were feeling about the race, they would say, “Nauseously optimistic.” In the end, Trump seems not only to have won the popular vote and all seven battleground states but to have made inroads with Latino and Black men wide enough to shatter the Democratic Party’s long-standing and highly complacent understanding of its demographic advantages.

How you interpret and prioritize the cascade of reasons for Trump’s reëlection is a kind of Rorschach test. It will require a long reckoning before anyone can conclude which of the leading factors—economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’s late start—was determinative. In no way did Trump win a mandate as commanding as, say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and Walter Mondale, in 1984, but, according to an early analysis by the Times, more than ninety per cent of the counties in the country appear to have shifted toward him since the last election. Both major political parties are broken. The Republicans, having given themselves over to a cultish obedience to an authoritarian, are morally broken. The Democrats, having failed to respond convincingly to the economic troubles of working people, are politically broken.

Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are. Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.

Note Remnick’s title, with its callbacks to both Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, and perhaps unintentionally but ironically, Joe Conason’s 2007 book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Jonah Goldberg mentioned Conason’s book in passing in 2007’s Liberal Fascism, on the way to discussing the legacy of Lewis’s in depth:

“It can’t happen here.”

Any discussion of American fascism must get around this mossiest of political clichés. Most often used by leftists, it is typically also used sarcastically, as in: “George Bush is a crypto-Nazi racist stooge of the big corporations pursuing imperialist wars on the Third World to please his oil-soaked paymasters, but—yeah, right—‘it can’t happen here’” (though Joe Conason in typically humorless fashion has titled his latest book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush).

The phrase, of course, comes from Sinclair Lewis’s propagandistic novel of 1935. It Can’t Happen Here tells the story of a fascist takeover of America, and it is, by general agreement, a terrible read, full of cartoonish characters, purple prose, and long canned speeches reminiscent of Soviet theater. But it wasn’t seen that way when it was released. The New Yorker, for example, hailed it as “one of the most important books ever produced in this country…It is so crucial, so passionate, so honest, so vital that only dogmatists, schismatics, and reactionaries will care to pick flaws in it.”

The hero of the dystopian tale is the Vermont newspaperman Doremus Jessup, who describes himself as an “indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal.” The villain, Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, is a charismatic blowhard—modeled on Senator Huey Long—who is elected president in 1936. The plot is complicated, with fascist factions staging coups against an already fascist government, but the basic gist should be very appealing to liberals. A good Vermont liberal (a very different thing, however, from a Howard Dean liberal today), Jessup stages an underground insurrection, loses, flees to Canada, and is about to launch a big counterattack when the book ends.

The title derives from a prediction made by Jessup shortly before the fateful election. Jessup warns a friend that a Windrip victory will bring a “real Fascist dictatorship.”

“Nonsense! Nonsense!” replies his friend. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen…[I]t just can’t happen here in America.”

“The hell it can’t,” Jessup replies. And he is soon proven right.

The phrase and the phobia captured by It Can’t Happen Here have been with us ever since. Most recently, Philip Roth’s Plot Against America offered a better-written version of a similar scenario in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. But Roth’s was just the latest in a long line of books and films that have played on this theme. Hollywood has been particularly keen on the idea that we must be eternally vigilant about the fascist beast lurking in the swamps of the political right.

Peter J. Hasson of the Washington Free Beacon tweeted on Wednesday,  “People forget how truly insane 2017 was.” Including when leftists thought that the answers to their woes could be found in George Orwell’s 1984, which they bought en masse that year, but apparently never bothered to read, given their embrace, two years later, of AOC’s apocalyptic environmental ravings, out of which spawned her totalitarian Green Nude Deal proposals.

Followed of course in 2020, by Dr. Fauci’s actual totalitarian shuttering of the economy in March, which the left loved so much that Dr. Fauci action figures and bobblehead dolls can still be found on Amazon. At least they loved it until the spring, when Oceania declared it had never been at war with East Peoria, and decided large gatherings were perfectly fine, as long as they were happening in the name of “social justice.” Or as the Ministry of Truth NPR declared at the beginning of June: “Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. ‘White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,’ they wrote.”

It can happen here – and it did. (Just ask Shelley Luther.)