There’s a quote that’s been flying around the internet since President Donald Trump was reelected: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Attributed to Sinclair Lewis, it’s usually posted by people who don’t much like the flag or the cross, and so they would love to blame both for fascism, which they also don’t like.
The problem is that Lewis never actually said it. In the annals of lazy apocryphal quotes, it’s up there with “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” by Edmund Burke, who never wrote a sentence that short in his life. Lewis was an early 20th-century writer and the author of such acerbic satires as Elmer Gantry and Main Street. The first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, he’s best known for It Can’t Happen Here, which Salon.com called “the novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal.”
It Can’t Happen Here was published in 1935, with a front cover blaring: “What will happen when America has a dictator?” Set in a dystopian United States only slightly removed from the real U.S. of the 1930s, a demagogue named Buzz Windrip challenges and defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936 Democratic presidential primary and then wins the White House. He promptly sets about turning the presidency into an emperorship and implementing a fascist program that one of the characters says sounds like “a combination of Norman Thomas and Calvin Coolidge.”
Such idiosyncratic politics reflected the book’s author, who was by no means a proto-pussy-hatted leftist. Lewis’s political beliefs were both complex and strikingly simple. He was a mild supporter of the New Deal who opposed both fascism and Marxism, a distaste felt in the novel. The communists in It Can’t Happen Here hate the Windrip regime but they’re too fanatical and divided by foot-measuring purism to get out of their own way. The eventual leader of the antifascist underground is, of all things, a Republican, the senator who lost the 1936 election to Windrip.
The novel’s protagonist is a small-town Vermont newspaper editor named Doremus Jessup. One of Lewis’s most glaring weaknesses is his character names — when we meet a Marxist named Karl Pascal, it’s hard not to throw the book at the radiator. Doremus is a “mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal” and an agnostic “convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit.” The story centers on his struggle to maintain his freedom against the looming menace of the concentration camp but also to maintain that critical spirit against the iron-fisted ideologues of his age.
This leads to some cloying, passion-of-the-freethinker laments: “We don’t like murder as a way of argument — that’s what really marks the Liberal!” Doremus huffs. But it also keeps the book from being a dreary ideological broadside a la, say, Upton Sinclair. Windrip is elected not by true believers but by the Daughters of the American Revolution who want to restore national glory, veterans still resentful over World War I, and workers fed up with the bare cupboards of the Great Depression. They don’t warm to fascism so much as they seek hope in its sweeping promises. They imagine a President Windrip’s worst impulses will be restrained by some invisible force in the national character. “It can’t happen here” is their refrain, and they sing it right up until it does.
But could it happen here? Is it happening here now? The eeriest line in the book from a 2025 standpoint is: “Senator Windrip played the finale of his campaign at a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New York.” That was written, by the way, not just before Trump’s closer but before the infamous American Nazi rally that took place there in 1939. But then while Trump’s rally is best remembered for a dumb joke about Puerto Rico, Windrip’s gathering is marked by, you know, actual fascism. In the best scene in the book, Doremus winds through Manhattan while Windrip’s thugs, known as Minute Men, descend on the city, picking fights with communists and beating up fans of FDR. It’s Weimar unleashed on the streets of New York.
In this, It Can’t Happen Here is rooted firmly in the 1930s. Americans who think of that decade tend to conjure up Babylon Berlin or Homage to Catalonia, but our own politics were unsettled too. There were rampant assassination attempts — FDR was almost taken out — fringe political movements, rowdy street demonstrations, and fanciful campaign promises to end the Great Depression. Windrip was most closely modeled not on Hitler but Huey Long, the Louisiana populist who was himself assassinated in 1935.
Lewis’s novel does a fine job capturing this turbulence — the problem arises when it departs from near-reality, when Windrip’s dictatorship comes to Washington. What would fascism with American characteristics look like? Lewis mostly just transplants the European version. Windrip’s agents are known as Corporatists, or Corpos, after the Italian idea of the corporative state, and they’re pretty generic jackboots. The second half of the novel is set largely in Vermont as Doremus tries to evade the Corpos, and there are the usual spies and prison camps. What of America’s pioneer spirit? The most armed and defiant population in the world?
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Therein an important reality: Dystopias are always better at capturing broad truths than providing detailed blueprints. If Lewis’s novel is short on specifics, its value lies in its universal warning about barbarism. Lewis makes no bones about how cruel the Minute Men are, and it’s chilling to read of atrocities happening in places such as Little Rock, Arkansas, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Lewis both shows how conditioned Americans are into thinking it can’t happen here and how easily the beatings can start once the tissue of norms is torn away. “In the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain,” he writes, “Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central Europe.”
In the end, what reigns in fascist America, both in Washington and Vermont, is the cruel whims of men loosely affiliated with the state. Windrip demolished the old world but he couldn’t and wouldn’t build a better one, leaving only the law of the jungle. It all happens a bit too easily, but it’s still an important reminder for our own harried time. It Can’t Happen Here is a callback to an old and venerable and restrained liberalism, as foreign to the online rage monkeys retweeting the fake quotes as it is to the Corpos. Like A Handmaid’s Tale, it’s a howl against all forms of authoritarianism, and much less partisan than the inevitable Hulu miniseries will make it out to be.
Matt Purple is a writer and editor whose work has been featured in the Washington Examiner, the American Conservative, the Spectator, and many others. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.