It Can't Happen Here was a successful novel by Sinclair Lewis, selling some 300,000 copies in the Depression for the first American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Lewis struck a rich vein of material as he deconstructed the faults, foibles, and failures of the period, examining the sometimes rotten underbelly of a somewhat free-market American society struggling to right itself and move forward into the modern era after a general worldwide economic collapse.

It Can't Happen Here chronicles the fictional devolution of America into a right-wing fascist hellhole via the election of an unscrupulous demagogue as president.  Lewis wrote his book as a warning to Americans that their nation could easily follow the path of Weimar Germany, where Hitler and his Brownshirts threatened and manipulated their way to power in a shamed, defeated, and angry nation.

This unhappy novel was resurrected by the always imaginative American left with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, where Trump was depicted as the lying demagogue and his voters as the crypto-fascist, racist cellar-dwellers who were being brought to power with him.  Trump's call for a re-emergence of American spirit and greatness after decades of denigration and retreat, selling out, and hollowing out by a succession of Democrat and Republican administrations was drawn as a parallel to the revanchist rhetoric and plans of Hitler.

What a handy trope this was to galvanize the stunned American left as it, along with that paragon of personal revanchism, Hillary Clinton, struggled to explain their electoral loss to the capitalist Orange Man.  They did what the left has always done to denigrate its opponents: insult and attack them as cruel monsters, Nazis, fascists, murderers, and exploiters.  And, unfortunately, this big lie technique works over time, especially when you can have it echoed by socialist university faculty, Hollywood dunderheads, public employee union leaders, and a suborned legal profession.  Eventually, even the directors of giant corporations think they are following the preferences of their customers as they join in.

The horrible problem here is that the American left has pulled a fast one.  Leftists have erased the fact that the Nazis and fascists were actually socialists.  True, they were usually involved in a struggle for power with their nation's avowed socialist and communist parties, but these were more like rival gangs fighting over territory and power than actually different political ideologies.  Both groups had almost identical plans to subjugate and control their populations.  They used different titles, sang different songs, and wore different colors, but their destructive ends were the same: constrict and eliminate individuality and initiative.  Break the human spirit in the name of some higher good.

Now this fascist-socialist-communism has come full force to our nation, courtesy of vote-riggers, foolish and treasonous politicians in both parties, and several generations of ill educated students and teachers.  What a blessing that these "useful idiots," as Lenin named them, have been concentrated mostly in our larger coastal cities and the "enlightened" host towns of major universities — until now.  This is why our electoral vote maps tend to be mostly red, with concentrated blue splotches where heavy urban populations reside.

Donald Trump beat back the rising tide of ignorant leftism by speaking to the proud hearts of Americans in the great heartland of our nation.  He believed in and presented the hopeful miracle of our constitutional republic, which has birthed the American Dream for nearly 250 years.  That dream is alive and well in our people, and in the hearts and minds of billions of others around the world, who know that America is not a dark and evil mistake.  It is Reagan's shining city on a hill and perhaps the last best hope for humanity.  Our noble Constitution is a distillation of thousands of years of trial and error by humans to find a dynamic and humane form of governance that allows them to live and progress together as respected individuals.

The blatant electoral fraud that was implemented to steal the 2020 presidential election, and, I believe, the Georgia senatorial runoffs, must not be allowed to stand.  The theft occurred in many ways, some small and some huge, but all now obvious to any honest observer.  Shame upon our feckless Judiciary, and upon many elected officials, for averting their eyes from this monumental crime and refusing to acknowledge what their intelligence and common sense, and the mountain of evidence now accumulated, tells them.

The behavior of our courts and judges here threatens to destroy our republic.  Four years of malignant behavior have shown us that our Department of Justice and our FBI are hopelessly compromised, and that one of our great political parties has lost all scruples and conscience in its hunger for power and spoils, even if it brings down our nation and causes a collapse into violent strife or even civil war or, now weakened, our destruction by a foreign enemy.  Our nation cannot survive the corruption of its voting system, which is the central mechanism undergirding our entire constitutional edifice.  Weakened, we can repair it.  Corrupted, our society is built on sand and it will fall.

Tricia Henry is the pen name of an old political hand who has engaged in the political wars at many levels on both coasts.