Berzelius "Bush" Windrip and the March of the Toady Patriots

"Poster for the stage adaptation of It Can't Happen Here, Oct. 27, 1936 at the Lafayette Theater as part of the Detroit Federal Theater" Taken from WikiCommons.

In 2000 I read a battered library copy of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. I lived in Vermont, where the novel was set. It was February, snowy and very cold. The story of the American people electing a dictator, as seen through the eyes of local newspaper man, Doremus Jessup, was a perfect read amid the winter hours. Jessup watches Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip run for President, get elected and impose a fascist regime not dissimilar to those in Europe in the 1930's.

It Can't Happen Here was published in 1935, and was out of print for years when I read it. That was before George W. Bush and 9/11. By 2005, for whatever reason, it was back in print. When I happened upon it in Barnes and Noble during Christmas of that year, I took it as a sign of the times. The regime of George W. Bush and his handler Dick Cheney had played out as if blueprinted by Sinclair Lewis seventy years before. I wasn't the only one to notice. Joe Keohane, then editor of Boston's Weekly Dig, hit the comparison on the head when he wrote of how Dictator Windrip...

"...executes his rise by relentlessly attacking the liberal media, fancy-talking intellectuals, shiftless progressives, pinkos, promiscuity, and welfare hangers-on, all the while clamoring for a return to traditional values, to love of country, to the pie-scented days of old when things made sense....

Through a combination of factors – his easy bearing chief among them (along with massive cash donations from Big Business; disorganization in the liberal opposition; a stuffy, aloof opponent; and support from religious fanatics who feel they've been unfairly marginalized) – he wins the presidential election.

Once in, he appoints his friends and political advisers to high-level positions, stocks the Supreme Court ...declaws Congress, allows Big Business to dictate policy, consolidates the media, and fills newspapers with ''syndicated gossip from Hollywood.''

There are more similarities: Windrip's secretive and cunning #2 is a Dick Cheney dead ringer; "Few men doubted that the Democratic candidate would be...Windrip as the mask and bellowing voice, with his satanic secretary, Lee Sarason, as the brain behind." [Remember, dear reader, that this was before the Democratic and Republican parties effectively switched places in the post civil-rights era, but that matters little.] Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin have a stand-in in the form of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, the anti-suffragette and feminine traditionalist. Pat Buchanan could play a passable Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways. Our hero, Doremus Jessup, ends up kowtowing to his shiftless, brutish former gardener, Shad Ledue, whose unflinching patriotism and his joy of hurting others brings to my mind the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage.

These correlations are important. Lewis wrote his book in a blind heat, urgent to warn that the tendencies he saw brewing in 1930's Europe, especially in Germany, were also present in the United States. The marching, the pageantry, the faith in nationalist principles; the economic crisis, the legions of dissatisfied WWI veterans itching for a change; even the popular desire to perform a eugenic cleansing of the racially, physically, mentally and economically (read 'poor') unfit; all of these were present in 1930's America.

Americans, ever eager for religious parallels, tend to romanticize that time as a struggle between good and evil. We suffer under the notion that Hitler was solely responsible for Nazism, that it was a peculiarly German phenomenon. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Germans took to extremes ideas that were the prominent intellectual, pseudo-scientific and religious notions of the time. The extortionist conditions of the Versailles Treaty acted as an almost perfect incubator for Nazism, and the now infamous death camps were the end product of a eugenics movement that was deeply entrenched throughout Western society. The atrocities were carried out mostly by people who had been ordinary until the right psychological triggers were set off. We've seen this demonstrated in the experiments of Phillip Zimbardo and in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, where regular people act monstrous. The thing that is scariest about Nazis, and the thing we are often loathe to admit, is that we are all capable of becoming them. We are often completely unaware of the descent.

Enter the "It can't happen here!" crowd, the one Sinclair Lewis warned us against. They are the toady patriots, for whom reality is merely a set of icons. Hitler is a stand-in for the the Devil, for inexplicable evil, and "Nazi" is a catch-all epithet for saying a person or group is acting evil, with no context or explanation. "Bush" Windrip, a failure until he entered politics, who might have gone to jail under his own intolerant legal interpretations had he not been the son of an ex-President, becomes an icon of Americana, an immutable symbol of good. In the wake of 9/11, the message rings, "Support your president!" even if all the world comes crashing down around his ineptitude and the nefarious designs of his handlers, who work on "the Dark Side."

In the finest tradition of Newspeak, words are reorganized to tap into our emotions instead of our reason – a Nazi trick. They become symbols instead of concepts. Left and right; liberal and conservative; free-thinker and traditionalist: stand-ins for good or evil, depending on who is saying them. Though toady patriotism may seem to strive for unity, for one vision, it is rather designed to be divisive, to create an enemy, to define the other. In the tradition of Leo Strauss's "noble lies," the great national epic must have a villain. If one does not exist, one must be created. For the Nazis, this villain was the Eternal Jew, the Gypsy, the Trade Unionist, the pacifist. For toady patriots in the American era, it is rapidly becoming the Eternal Liberal, the Muslim, the Mexican and the welfare mother.

Michael Savage, whom I mentioned above, typified this Newspeak during a November 2007 broadcast, saying that a critic of his neo-nationalist talk program was "...the type that stuffed ovens in Hitler's concentration camps." Perhaps. Mostly captive Jews – Sonderkommando – did this before they, themselves, were murdered and burned. But Savage would not know or care. Anyone can commit an atrocity. It takes a special kind of mind to think up concentration camps, where atrocity is daily organized, and where ordinary people are driven to stuff ovens with human bodies. The public dialogue is rife with references to our struggles against Nazis, against Stalinists, against Islamofascists, and presently the Eternal Liberal is always to blame – and by correlation counted among America's arch-enemies.

They are always there, toady patriots, no matter the time, waiting for the right circumstances to act. They are embodied by the Savages and the O'Reillys and the Coulters and the Hannitys, and their lip servants within public, the Shad Ledues, if you will. Their's is a special breed of patriotism that exists outside of context, demanding only the ravings of the subconscious as proof of immutable opinions. You will hear them using the word "Nazi", not as a tool for introspection, but as a psychological trigger. Had there been "Nazis" before the Third Reich, the Third Reich would have been the first to use the word "Nazi" to condemn its enemies. The first person to cry Wolf! in politics is usually the other wolf.

It is no good to honor the Office of President if its occupant is destroying the Office itself. "Bush" Windrip is the toady patriot figurehead, the Bully-in-Chief, the bellowing voice, the bad example par excellence. We have allowed he and his rabble to commit the inexcusable offense to reason of marketing their ideology as equal to those of civilized society. Just when we should have been fighting hardest, we have let toady patriotism grandstand in the ethically relativist effort to be "fair." The toady patriots have been using this "fair and balanced" shtick ever since.

They talk of freedom and liberty, but damn free speech and defend the evisceration of the Constitution. They reference WWII and the sacrifices our ancestors made, "Cause freedom isn't free...," but cheer the bits and pieces of Third Reich theology seething within our government. They hate you for being a Bush-hater/America-hater/freedom-hater. They damn your lack of Christian values and then call you a bleeding heart, a liberal, a socialist: the message of the Gospels. They rightfully damn terrorists beheading one person, but cheer our military as it decimates hundreds-of-thousands of Iraqis indiscriminately over a set of now obvious lies.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," said Samuel Johnson. We do no honor to those that died defending freedom to use their sacrifice as a fetish before which "Bush" Windrip and his Shad Ledues burn our rights and disavow human dignity. If patriotism is the imperative of the toady patriots, then patriotism be damned. If the United States is to become "Bush" Windrip's America, then America be damned. Freedom, liberty, justice: these concepts existed long before there was a United States around to pretend to have invented them. Our nation is only as great as the people within it. It is time to abandon this notion that America is some "Great Id," a national intelligence within which we all are cells that may be brushed aside as the Commander in Chief sees fit. It HAS happened here, and it has been going on for far too long.

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It Can't Happen Here is now in the public domain, and you can read it or download it for free from Project Gutenberg Australia. Also of value to the discriminating reader are Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt by Umberto Eco

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