The adage is old enough to have been lampooned in the title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel: “It can’t happen here.”
That “it” back then was an imagined fascist takeover of the United States. Writing 13 years after Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy, barely a year after Adolf Hitler installed himself as dictator of Germany and just before Francisco Franco and his Nationalists overthrew the Spanish republic, Lewis spelled out in dystopian detail how it, indeed, could well have happened in America, too.
Nine decades later, that “it” is also what dozens of Republican donors, campaign consultants, pollsters and others interviewed by HuffPost say cannot possibly happen. They scoff at any analogy between former President Donald Trump, a man they support with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and the infamous dictators of the past. They insist that worries about Trump remaking the country as an autocracy are overwrought and designed solely to keep a Democrat in the White…