One novelist who brought to life a fictional demagogue was Sinclair Lewis, the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature . In his 1935 tale of a dictatorship in America, “It Can’t Happen Here,” Lewis imagined America under the iron heel of an authoritarian president named Buzz Windrip, a homegrown fascist who rallies his base with bellicose speeches, soaring promises and shifting facts . Windrip and his supporters are challenged by a small-town newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup, who speaks words in fiction that still are relevant in fact today: “Where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours !”If Sinclair Lewis were alive today, he would find plenty of material in Mr. Trump and the people who continue to support his presidency. Ed TantAthens, Ga.To the Editor:In his short satirical tale “Zadig, or the Book of Fate,” Voltaire describes the fictitious great lord Irax: “The peacocks are not more vain, the doves more voluptuous.” He is, we are told, “corrupted by vanity and voluptuousness” and “breathed nothing but false glory and false pleasures .”Zadig, the prime minister of the kingdom, undertakes to rectify the bad behavior. He does this with the cooperation of a vast entourage of the court’s sycophants and via such an uninterrupted litany of praise for Irax for all the good qualities he lacked, that after five days Irax, exhausted and chastened, begged for it to stop .

Source: New York Times January 19, 2019 18:00 UTC