“Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”
— Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
A decade ago, as catastrophic wars in the Middle East catalyzed a spike in immigration into Europe, a wave of far-right political movements and leaders emerged on both sides of the Atlantic. These movements often weaponized fears of safety and security and blamed an outsider community for bringing discord and turmoil to Western communities. In the United Kingdom, a far-right terrorist shouting “This is for Britain” murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, just a week before the country voted to leave the European Union during the Brexit vote. In the United States, candidate Donald J. Trump reacted to a terrorist attack in San Bernardino by calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
The movements, many of which have had lasting and sustainable success, sparked a renewed academic interest in fascism, totalitarianism, and demagoguery. Ruth Ben Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present compared modern would-be dictators to their historical antecedents. Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny, by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, examined the growing role of media savviness for new authoritarians. My own co-authored book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, reflected on how these modern revivals reawakened a dormant far-right terrorist underbelly in the American hinterland. During the 2024 presidential primary, Trump crossed a near-unprecedented threshold in American history when he declared that he “will be a dictator on day one,” openly admitting his intention to rule with an illiberal iron fist. Months into his second administration, his actions have only awakened more alarm.
These developments also reignited a perverse interest in history’s works of dystopian fiction. Such treatments have reflected not just on the specter of totalitarianism that always hangs over democracy, but played with the future: they gamed out worst case scenarios that made real otherwise abstract and foreign phenomena, and conceived of frightening next steps. George Orwell’s 1984, a book so wildly impactful it transformed his surname into an adjective, is the undisputed king of the genre. But two additional books have proved particularly popular in cataloguing the rise of totalitarianism in the English-speaking world. Compellingly, both also incorporated elements of irregular warfare (namely, insurgency and resistance) in their stories. Written almost 100 years apart, they straddle the actual emergence of totalitarian fascism in the Western world, showing that these fears are in fact real and valid. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, written in 1935, saw record sales after Trump’s first election, one reviewer at the time noting that “it is impossible to miss the similarities between Trump and totalitarian figures in American literature—in rhetoric, personal style and even substance.” Prophet Song, authored by Paul Lynch, described the entrenchment of a totalitarian government in Ireland, and won the 2023 Booker Prize.
From Denial to Defiance
Lewis’s ominous warning follows the plucky efforts of Vermont newspaperman Doremus Jessup to report on the rise to power and the presidency of senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. As Windrip implements sweeping reforms to neuter the power of Congress and the voices of critics and unleashes a paramilitary force knows as the “Minute Men,” Jessup responds by escalating his surreptitious critiques as a member of the recently formed New Underground. In Lynch’s work, biotech executive Eilish Stack desperately seeks to protect her dwindling family in Dublin in the face of repressive crackdowns and kidnappings from the National Alliance Party. Those targeted by the government in both crackdowns are largely ordinary men and women: union leaders, journalists, and doctors.
The stories follow remarkably similar plotlines, beginning with our heroes finding themselves witnessing the emergence of totalitarianism in their home countries, a sense of denial (“It Can’t Happen Here”) keeping them from escaping. The threat escalates, eventually resulting in family members disappeared or murdered—a chilling preview of the immigration detentions now taking place across the United States. As resistance brews, our protagonists are left with the heart-aching choice of remaining and fighting for their country (or at least staying to be proximate to fighting family members) and escaping, in both cases to Canada. Walter Laqueur, the prominent Jewish security scholar who fled Germany before the Holocaust began in earnest, was fond of mournfully reflecting, “Pessimists Live Longer.” The heroes in these two novels did not take his advice, and see family members murdered for the perceived crimes of their kin; in both stories, bereaved mothers bear a “still, dark hatred that was heavier to carry than many chests.” In the later book, the protagonist’s sister warns that “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.” Indeed, a New York Times review points out, “‘Prophet Song’ is less interested in ‘Could it happen here?’ than in the follow-up ‘Would you know when to leave?’”
Interestingly, the books vary in their descriptions of the leader’s policies, platform, or party. For its part, Prophet Song’s author angrily reflects on the apocalypticism casually dispatched by the word’s populists. In this case, the author declares through the perspective of a narrator, “what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight…” But where Prophet Song barely engages with the policies of the dictator himself, Lewis spares no creative expense, toying extensively with new manifestations of government bureaucracy, and even outlining the imaginary despot’s 15-point plan. As such, it repeatedly offers clear parallels to today’s political stage, even in its ruing of the means by which a populist speaks to the masses: “Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job. Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.”
Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Action
As their distant totalitarian specter begins to twist its knife, resistance brews around both Jessup and Stack, with members of their own inner circles slipping away to join the brewing underground. The fictionalized resistance depicted in both books provide interesting thought experiments for what might happen should a totalitarian, fascist government truly take hold in the United States. Eilish Stack’s elder son, Mark, proudly joins the resistance. Her second son, Bailey, ends up executed by the regime for the crimes of his brother. In the real world, too, family members are often made to pay for the perceived disloyalty of their kin. A Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow was recently arrested and held in an immigration detention center in the deep South because of his father-in-law’s decade-old affiliation with Hamas.
In Prophet Song, the fate of the insurgents and the regime is unclear. We only know that the insurgents made advances deep into Dublin, and the communities they liberated faced a flattening by the regime—their brutality extending to the torturing by cigarette burn, and drill boring, and the eventual murder of the protagonist’s middle son, the final blow that forces the now halved family to leave the blackening Emerald Isle for new pastures overseas. Some of the descriptions do appear far-fetched—at one point in Prophet Song, a sniper casually picks off civilians running between rebel and regime checkpoints, seemingly with no motive other than “just trying his luck.” It Can’t Happen Here follows an almost identical pattern, except in Lewis’s “Propaganda for Our Democracy,” the protagonist himself returns to his native homeland, enrolling in the resistance as propagandist and recruiter.
It Can’t Happen Here was already deemed prescient before the first Trump administration commenced, but perhaps the great irony of Lewis’s novel was that it in fact hinted at precisely the insurgent January 6 attack that Trump would eventually mobilize, and that now defines his first presidency. In Lewis’s prophecy, however, the authoritarian patriot was in fact the one “veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes.” Even Lewis, immersed in his dystopian world, did not venture to predict that an American president would actually eventually inspire an attack on his own seat of government.
No Hollywood Endings
It is noteworthy, too, that in both books, authors choose to “[zero] in on one family’s experience of the end of the world knocking on their door.” In portraying the creeping fascism as both a distant fait accompli and yet deeply personal, the authors humanize the threat. Those both fearing and welcoming a second Trump administration should read these works: they will, if nothing else, provide a personal look into how powerful overreaching governments might affect individual families. For his part, Lynch termed this approach “an attempt at radical empathy”—an effort to highlight the realities of both political and actual bombardments endured by besieged populations around the world. As Kristen Martin implores, “The lesson for readers is not necessarily to wake up to signs of totalitarianism knocking at our doors, but to empathize with those for whom it has already called.”
Conversely, those who would pick up either of these books in search of hope and optimism at a troubling moment will be dismayed. Neither story ends in the Hollywood fashion. Both authors are clear: in totalitarianism, there is no happy ending. It Can’t Happen Here ends heroically, portraying a Doremus Jessup who has returned into the American underground to spark uprisings in the Midwest. We don’t know how his story ends, except that he has no family, that “no one who loved him would have any stable address for him now any more.” Prophet Song ends shudderingly, with a not-so-veiled reference to the desperate refugees who have boarded unsteady boats in North Africa and the Middle East, to begin journeys that all-too-often have ended in catastrophe somewhere in the Mediterranean. In this story, the protagonist and her two remaining children cautiously set off for an undeclared destination, somewhere out in the darkness, the mother insisting, “we must go to the sea, the sea is life.”
If the Prophet Song itself is not enough of a warning of the dire possible future of the Western world, the conclusion offers a final allegorical thunderbolt: the sea, dark and unknown, nevertheless offers more light and more promise than the blackness left behind.
Jacob Ware is a nonresident fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program and a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. Together with Bruce Hoffman, he is the author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by Columbia University Press. He was previously a research associate for counterterrorism at CFR.
Photo made by John Chrobak using “Coat of Arms of Trump (Davies)” by Asþont licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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