The political novel by Sinclair Lewis:
I have the impression the president in the 1937 book, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, is sort of a buffoon, given to signing executive orders such as, the Supreme Court has no authority to restrict the president in anyway.
Perhaps this is because the fascist president of the novel was meant to be based on the rather loud and eccentric Huey Long.
chatgpt:
Your impression is spot on—and quite intentional. In It Can’t Happen Here (1935), Sinclair Lewis models his fictional fascist president, Buzz Windrip, in large part on Huey Long, the flamboyant and authoritarian Louisiana governor and senator who was a rising populist threat to FDR at the time Lewis was writing.
Buzz Windrip is indeed portrayed as a buffoonish demagogue—folksy, theatrical, prone to bombast, and deeply manipulative. He ascends to power by appealing to the “common man” with vague promises, charisma, and a platform of nationalism, Christian values, and economic revival. Once elected, Windrip quickly dismantles constitutional norms, including issuing executive orders like the one you reference—claiming the Supreme Court has no authority over him. This absurdity is both comic and chilling, a key part of Lewis’s satirical warning.
Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth” rhetoric and his penchant for spectacle, coupled with a ruthless consolidation of state power in Louisiana, made him a natural prototype for Windrip. Long was widely seen as both a populist savior and a would-be dictator. In fact, Lewis was so concerned about Long's influence that he sped up the novel's completion after Long’s assassination in 1935, fearing the urgency of the novel’s message might fade.
So yes, Windrip’s buffoonery is not just a literary device—it’s a political alarm bell. Lewis shows how fascism might come to America not under a cold, foreign boot, but under a grinning populist with folksy charm and a penchant for executive orders.
Although dangerous, Hitler and Mussolini were also a bit buffoonish.
Absolutely—and Sinclair Lewis was acutely aware of that tension. One of the most chilling insights of It Can’t Happen Here is that buffoonery and brutality are not mutually exclusive. In fact, Lewis suggests that the buffoonish qualities of figures like Buzz Windrip—and by extension Hitler and Mussolini—are part of what allows them to rise.
Both Hitler and Mussolini often appeared absurd to foreign observers during their early ascent. Mussolini’s strutting theatricality and inflated self-image seemed like overacting. Hitler’s rants, mustache, and obsession with symbolism were mocked as clownish by many in the West—until it was too late. Their personas combined comic affectation with deadly ambition, allowing them to be underestimated while they methodically dismantled democratic institutions.
This duality—the clown who becomes tyrant—is central to Lewis’s warning. Windrip is ridiculous, but he has a lethal machine behind him. The satire sharpens the horror: people laugh off the absurdities, assuming institutions will hold, until the fascism becomes irreversible. That’s part of why It Can’t Happen Here remains so resonant—it reminds us that despots don’t always arrive wearing jackboots and scowls. Sometimes they arrive cracking jokes and glad-handing crowds.
