In the 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, an ignorant US demagogue called Buzz Windrip becomes president, promising to make a depressed and fearful country proud, rich and safe again.
Eight decades later, the satirical piece of fiction by Sinclair Lewis has gained a new lease of life, becoming a bestseller online following US president-elect Donald Trump’s victory at the polls.
Observing Windrip at a presidential campaign event, a journalist describes him as “almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.”
Written as virulent nationalism spread disastrously in Europe, and to a lesser extent in the US, the book’s revival reflects a surge of interest in one of the 20th century’s darkest decades.
The parallels between the current time and what one writer describes as the “Morbid Age” of the 1930s has led to a fierce debate between historians about how far the comparison can be taken.
“We are facing a cataclysmic moment,” renowned British writer Simon Schama said following Trump’s election, recalling that Adolf Hitler came to power via the ballot box in the 1930s.
Antony Beevor, another best-selling heavyweight on European history, rebuked him.
“It is too easy for alarmists to fall for the temptation of lazy historical parallels,” he wrote.
So, as the return of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia and anti-elitism spur Trump, anti-EU voters in Britain and a host of far-right parties in Europe, does history offer comfort or cause for concern?
Some historians point to several striking parallels.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, sparked by the Wall Street crash of 1929, has echoes of the global financial crisis caused by the sub-prime crash of 2008.
Seething with anger at the financial and political elite, struggling or unemployed workers in the 1930s grew bitter and despondent and openly questioned the future for their children.
Many blamed foreigners or Jews, became attached to an idealized past, and worried about the spread of their enemies, abroad and at home. In the 1930s, the threat was communism, now it is radical Islam.
Governments reacted by trying to protect their economies with tariffs and barriers, sparking an international trade war.
On the other side of the world, a nationalistic Asian power with territorial ambitions added to concerns. It was Japan, which invaded the present-day Asian hegemon China in 1931.
In Austria, where the far-right came within 31,000 votes of winning a presidential election in May and could still win in next month’s re-run, a far-right chancellor came to power in 1932 and destroyed the country’s democracy.
As fascism spread, the decade was defined by Germany looking to avenge its humiliation after World War I. Could President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, pained by the decline of the Soviet Union, be the modern equivalent?
Ian Kershaw, a world authority on the rise of Hitler, admitted to reporters that during his research for a new book on Europe from 1914 to 1949 some similarities “make the hair stand up on the back on your neck.”
“But I don’t think we are returning to the dark ages of the 1930s because there are big differences as well as superficial similarities,” Kershaw said.
Chief among the differences is the role of Germany, now a beacon for liberal democracy, committed to peace and a lynchpin of the stabilizing force that is the EU, Kershaw said.
The Europe of today, “admittedly flaky in parts when you look at Hungary and Poland,” bears no comparison with the authoritarian states of 80 years ago, he said.
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