I’ve read many novels set in Europe in the years before and during the Second World War. It seems its own sub-genre. The Dutch writer Harry Mulisch’s “The Assault” is my favorite and, I believe, one of the great literary works of the 20th century. At this moment I find these books too hard to read. Often, they begin with fine people who looked the other way as questionable practices began or not so fine people who tried to position themselves to benefit from these changing practices — no Jews allowed in public schools, that sort of thing. What makes the books so hard to read at present is that they don’t seem imagined but rather all too real. They seem not to recall 1934 but to report 2024.

In this year of a presidential election in the United States, one candidate has been convicted of civil fraud and sexual abuse and defamation. Yet, he and his party continue with his run for our nation’s highest office. How can this be? I know this has been noted by others, but still — how can this be? Across the world humanity saw him egg on a violent insurrection and then retreat to a comfy room where he watched TV and ate copious snacks. And yet, he can run for office? No fiction writer could conceive such a plot. This bizarre occurrence continues with too many people looking the other way — even the nation’s Supreme Court has been an enabler for this perverted mind. We look the other way at our peril.

This odd circumstance reminds me, too, of the early American novel “Weiland” by Charles Brockden Brown and published in Philadelphia in 1798. The story concerns an established family living in neo-classical splendor. The scion of the family, Theodore, becomes unhinged by a strange visitor, Carwin, a showman of sorts. Theodore murders most of his family. Rather than laud this grand decade of the new republic, Weiland criticizes Americans’ all too easy acceptance of extremism and fanaticism. The cult of Donald Trump will destroy the family of America.

We are “sleepwalking toward dictatorship,” Liz Cheney has said of this troubling situation that is far beyond logic, reason and level-headed explanation. The documents and Jan. 6 cases have been delayed and postponed, for it is clear to all which way the evidence points. It points arrow-straight to conviction. My God, we saw it!

How can people so easily forget — already not just a felony conviction, but also civil fraud and defamation. Do Americans desire anarchy and chaos, a Bible held up-side-down, paper towels thrown at a hurricane, bleach shot into veins, a change in the cabinet every morning? Years ago, a scholar from Canada wrote a book entitled “The Puritan Origins of the American Self.” As a graduate student at the time, I thought a more accurate way of thinking might be “the sadomasochistic origins of the American self.” Who knows? Before the year is out, we might just beat ourselves out of existence.

Dennis Barone is a longtime Connecticut resident and an Emeritus English Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Saint Joseph in Hartford.