.A Democratic Moment

By Steve Kettmann

When word circulated a couple months ago that Bookshop Santa Cruz would join a national effort to warn voters of impending dangers with a live reading of the Sinclair Lewis classic It Can’t Happen Here on July 19—one of 62 readings in 22 states that day organized by Writers for Democratic Action, just after the Republican National Convention—not everyone was electrified by the news.

Politically active younger people, focused more on the horror unfolding in Gaza, found it hard to fathom why they should care about the imaginative vision of a white male who nine decades ago summoned the specter of an American dictator. In short: Big yawn.

What a difference a few weeks of domestic political news can make: By the time Bookshop Santa Cruz sent an email to its mailing list on July 9 announcing the event, interest had soared. Between a Supreme Court session that pushed a right-wing agenda to new extremes to detail about the Project 2025 blueprint former Trump officials laid out to rip loose key guardrails of democracy, the sulfur smell of danger is in the air.

More recently, shots fired at a Trump rally and the raised-fist instant-T-shirt image of him mouthing “Fight” with his bloodied ear, the attempt in the aftermath to blame Democrats for inciting the violent action of a young registered Republican and Aileen Cannon’s Monday-morning bombshell of dismissing the Trump classified-document case.

Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty Protti sees the store’s July 19 event—in local Congressman Jimmy Panetta, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley and others will read aloud from the play Sinclair Lewis helped adapt from his own 1935 novel—not so much as a warning as a call to action.

For Coonerty Protti, the live reading can function as the beginning of an effort to find new ways to work together to save our country. “In times of chaos, and today definitely qualifies as that, the most important thing we can do is come together as a community,” Coonerty Protti said in an interview. “What I’m seeing in this event is something that has historical meaning and allows us to come together and make plans and decide where we go from here.”

The surge in interest has been dramatic. “I was wondering if people would show up, and we put out one email and all of a sudden we have 300 people who want to come,” prompting a decision to move the event to a larger venue, the 418 Project on River Street, she said. “What that tells me is people want to take action and they need a place to start. In my mind, Bookshop’s mission is to create those types of moments where you can bring together history and ideas and community and action and partnership.”

Yes, it very much can happen here, and in fact, at this point, a range of political experts I’ve canvassed on the subject put it at better than 50-50 that it will happen here this year. Barring a surprise plot twist or two, there is a strong likelihood that we will find our country sucked into the muck of authoritarianism with Donald Trump back in the White House next January. A would-be dictator can be a risible self-caricature with a hilariously bloated ego and still be very, very dangerous.

“In 1936, It Can’t Happen Here, a stage adaptation by Sinclair Lewis of his own bestselling novel, opened simultaneously on 21 stages in 17 states across America on October 27, one week before that year’s presidential election,” Writers for Democratic Action explains at its homepage, writersfordemocraticaction.org. “It served as a warning against the rise of fascism in America. It Can’t Happen Here—Again by Writers for Democratic Action is both an homage to the 1936 production as well as a call to action now, in 2024. Thank you for joining us for your own version of this reading.”

James Carroll, a National Book Award-winning author and a founder of Writers for Democratic Action, discussed in a phone interview the sense of panic running rampant this month about the chances of defeating Trump. “There are surprises ahead of us,” Carroll said last Friday, before subsequent events dramatized the accuracy of his prediction. “There are things that we cannot imagine that will happen in the next 100 days. Trump is golden at this moment, but the shadow is going to fall on him.”

Everyone has an opinion on what ails us and I’ll offer mine, updating a memorable Strother Martin line from Cool Hand Luke: What we’ve got here is failure to imagine. I’m serious: For reasons both obvious and hard to fathom, all of us, from creative types who write books and think way too much to someone taking your coffee order and teachers and students on the hill at UCSC, find our ability to imagine, freely and in color, to be grievously impaired.

I think of it a little like having too many apps open on your computer, sucking up bandwidth. A shutoff valve is activated. Which we tend to understand. But a hidden cost of that shutoff is a down-powering of imagination.

“We’re so inundated with information, no matter what that information is, it can be exhausting,” Jimmy Panetta, one of the readers for the Sinclair Lewis event, said in an interview. “That can lead to people disengaging. That’s exactly what our democracy is not about. We are a nation of ‘We the people,’ so therefore it is up to we the people to determine our future. That’s why an event like this is important.”

Panetta makes a point about the failure of imagination defining our times: It starts with a failure of memory. For example, on the same day President Joe Biden endured a fraught press conference in which he earned plaudits for his knowledge of foreign policy and headlines about a slip-of-the-tongue he quickly corrected, a messenger boy visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound, like Sal Tessio in The Godfather bringing a message from the Big Boss.

I’m referring of course to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who had just met with Vladimir Putin. To see the threat of Putin in vivid, blood-curdling imaginative detail, it helps to have a working knowledge of Stalin and his runaway regime early in the short, bleak history of the Soviet Union. Absent that, it’s all just reality TV. Personalities. Quick takes. Funny mustache! He was short! The millions dead? Hard to fathom.

Panetta, first elected in 2016, the year Trump won, would like to focus on some more recent history. “For one, we can take a moment to remind people of the chaos we went through, my first year as a Congressman, 2017, and dealing with someone like Donald Trump in the White House, his narcissism and what we’re hearing about his plans for retribution, in addition to some of his policy positions.”

And, sure, how about remembering some facts about more recent history? The old guy in the White House, whatever his future, has in fact overachieved as President in terms of actual, tangible policy accomplishments.

“We have to find a way to give people another sort of memory about what has been done when it’s not Trump, the major investments this administration has done,” Panetta continued. “And in a very bipartisan way, bringing Democrats and Republicans together to get us through Covid and reenergize the investment that was needed in our infrastructure, and to bring back manufacturing, especially when it comes to silicon chips.”

OK, that’s a Democratic Congressman talking up the accomplishments of his President, including appointing the first African-American woman to the Supreme Court, but Panetta does have a point that the unending focus on doom-and-gloom gets old and there has to be other ways of seeing.

“An event like this can remind people of how bad it can be but also remind people of how good it can be,” he said. “We need to put people in office who know it’s not about themselves. In order to do that, it takes us getting involved. The more we engage, that’s how our democracy endures. To remind people, but also to get them reinvigorated as to the responsibility of living in our democracy.”

I myself am an optimist. I think that with every passing week before Election Day a sense of urgency will build and people will get involved. The reaction so far to the nationwide Sinclair Lewis readings has been over-the-top positive.

“The places where people are holding these readings are overbooked,” Carroll told me. “There are five of these things happening in Milwaukee, because that’s where the convention is. The people of Milwaukee are on fire with this thing. We’re on to something—and it’s not going to end on July 19.”

Here’s where we come back to Casey Coonerty Protti’s point about shrugging off all the doubt and worry and putting your energy into action, potentially positive, constructive action. I for one am going to help Carroll and Writers for Democratic Action do more organizing. I believe in the power of story-telling and story-framing to make a difference. 

I asked Carroll how he thought those of us opposed to a Trump takeover could break through to more people on the stakes of this election. “All I can tell you is open your eyes and look,” he said. “It is so blatant. We are in the thick of just a major, major assault on what is most important in this country and our capacity for denial is just breathtaking, breathtaking, but we have the capacity to wake up. Suddenly life slams you in the head with a two-by-four. What is it going to take? I cannot believe this country is going to elect Donald Trump. I do believe we might have such a divided election that Trump will be able to exploit the cracks.”

Here’s the Writers for Democratic Action game plan: “This is all part one of a two-part plan,” Carroll said. “We’ve hired a social media team to put together a stunning video based on the film we get from different folks on July 19 (reading from It Can’t Happen Here), and we’re going to use that as the basis for a social-media campaign targeting young people in particular.”

Then in October, more readings/productions will take place all over the country—and you can get involved and help organize one in your community. “The focus is on high school seniors and drama departments and amateur theater groups,” Carroll said. “The whole thing is going to happen again.”

There are limits to what anyone can do, obviously. Not long after Trump was elected in November 2016, I reached out to Bookshop Santa Cruz and suggested that we partner on a live-reading of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 as a warning about Trumpism.

As I wrote in these pages four months after that election, “On Nov. 9, we all woke up to find that we had jumped inside a book, and the clocks had finally struck 13. Reality as we knew it had shifted on its axis, and we were living in a garish comic-book version of George Orwell’s masterpiece of a novel, 1984. Only if we overcame our shock and revulsion and came to terms with the specter of a petty, petulant Big Brother holding sway over our lives could we possibly aspire to change the plot of this nightmare story.

Months later, most of us continue to play catch-up, still baffled and demoralized by the inescapable feeling that our reality has been hijacked, bracing for a long struggle of fighting for our beliefs, and opposing bigotry and authoritarianism.”

As the one who came up with the idea, and given my role as co-director of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods writers retreat center, I had the honor of reading the opening of the book to start our live-reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz. It was a great day, we brought the community together, and yet, reading the words I wrote at the time now brings me a sickening feeling of not much having changed. We are still living with the nightmare of Trumpism. We are all overwhelmed and strung out.

“There’s so much stuff coming at us,” Jimmy Panetta told me. “I say that not just as a representative, but as someone who lives in this society with so much overload, I really think it prevents people from having the bandwidth to look back at history. If you don’t have that sense of what can happen, you sort of are dismissive of what we are seeing, going down that line. It prevents you from sparking that memory and therefore that fear of: We need to watch this! And we need to do something about this. Versus just kind of thinking, I don’t like either candidate. People aren’t voting based on their knowledge of history. They’re voting based on their gut. It’s our responsibility—in part with events like this—to help people think beyond our gut and think about the future.”

I find Lewis an oddly perfect voice to turn to for inspiration in this national crisis. He was born in Minnesota and educated at Yale, but the fiery sense of justice and disturbingly fecund imagination that would make him the first U.S. winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1930) seem to have ignited during his years living here in our part of the world, starting in September 1908 when he moved to Carmel. (“He was one of these people who lived in the fledgling artist colony in Carmel, California, back in the 1900s,” Panetta says. “You can only imagine what that was like!”) By the next year Lewis was a staff reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin.

Lewis used fiction as a lens through which America could help see itself, and it was often a painful look. That was true in his breakthrough novel Main Street (1920), zooming in on small-town America, which sold an incredible 180,000 copies its first six months, and Babbitt (1922) and Elmer Gantry (1927), the mere mentions of which, for some readers, still stir devastating satiric portraits. May this round of events spur future Sinclair Lewises to take an (even more) painful look at the America of today.

Due to overwhelming demand, the 7/19 event “It Can’t Happen Here—Again” will now be hosted at the 418 Project (155 River St. in The Galleria). This venue change means additional seating and an improved event experience for more folks who want to attend. Tickets cost $3 at tickettailor.com.