So pardoning dark-web drug traffickers and January 6-ers (not just nonviolent offenders, but the violent ones, too, who assaulted police officers with baseball bats), getting rid of diversity in government, making illegal the children born here of illegal immigrants ... allllrighty.
I don't know why people are acting surprised, that's what he said he'd do?
Except he DID say he wouldn't pardon violent Jan 6-ers, but then did anyway.
All of these things Sinclair Lewis predicted in the 1930s - not because he's psychic, but because he's smart.
Perhaps you have heard the quote "When fascism comes to America, it will be carrying a cross and wrapped in an American flag," attributed to Sinclair Lewis.
It's a great quote, and it sounds like something Sinclair Lewis would've said in his book "It Can't Happen Here," - but unfortunately, he never literally said it - that's just the synopsis gist of the book.
It was written in the 1930s as Lewis was watching the rise of fascist regimes in Europe under Franco, Mussolini, and particularly Adolph Hitler, and it's written as a cautionary tale about how when fascism came to America, it would look differently than in Europe - and thus, people might actually vote for it.
And what we know he did say is this:
“But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”
Note he said that in America, the fascists will always disown the word "fascism" (or deflect off it), instead calling it Americanism or patriotism.
“I just wish people wouldn’t quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.”
(The 3 golden balls mean essentially pawn shops, which were also moneylenders, during his day)
The closet quotes scholars have ever been able to find are these quotes from others, one of whom cited Sinclair Lewis:
"If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any “shirt” movement, nor with an “insignia,” but it will probably be “wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution”
“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.'”
Harrison Evans Salisbury in "The Many Americas Shall Be One "(1971)
“Sinclair Lewis aptly predicted in It Can’t Happen Here that if fascism came to America it would come wrapped in the flag and whistling ‘The Star Spangled Banner'” (29).
(This was the quoter's synopsis of Lewis's novel)
All great quotes and warnings from days gone by of what a fascism dictatorship would look like in America, that it would be sold differently, in that it would be hiding behind the false pretense of Christianity and patriotism, and thus people would vote for it, with only some to realize it it too late.
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