Even where history and It Can’t Happen Here diverge, those differences tell us something about recent events. Crucial to Windrip’s emergence is the role played by his strategist, Lee Sarason, the President’s “satanic secretary.” A former journalist, Sarason’s eyes are “sparks at the bottom of two dark wells.” Eventually, he topples the President and leads society even further to the right. Trump doesn’t have one single man doing his strategic thinking for him, but one reason so many commentators fixated on Steve Bannon during Trump’s first term was that they saw him not just Trump’s guide but as his possible replacement.
In Lewis’s book, a population which has lived through the New Deal demands the taxation of the rich. Windrip comes to power by making dishonest promises to limit their power. In our own time, by contrast, it is the success of plutocracy and the seeming inability of any mainstream politician to imagine even small acts to limit their power which has encouraged the American oligarchs and made them greedy for more.
In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Roosevelt is replaced not in 1936 but 1940 by “America’s international aviation hero,” Charles Lindbergh. The pilot storms into the Republican Convention as a charismatic outsider. He departs the event as Presidential nominee, the beneficiary of the mutual antagonism of rival factions. His subsequent election encourages any number of village Hitlers who torment the family of the novel’s protagonist.
In most respects, democratic institutions survive Lindbergh’s capture of power. Congress remains important, and not until late in the manuscript are any attempts made to restrict the speech of Democrats. There is no glut of Executive Orders, no clearing-out of cultural bodies, no rewriting of US history. Elections remain free. There are no seemingly no moves made against women, foreigners, or any racial minorities except for Jews.
The worst threat facing the latter is the relocation of a small minority of people from the northern cities to the Southern states which are the redoubt of Lindbergh’s movement. That move is narrated as sinister—the step before ethnic cleansing—but preparatory. In terms of using the state for violence, Roth’s imagined fascist USA does less in months than the new administration managed in its first weeks, in placing shackled green-card holders on deportation flights, in jailing students in immigration prison for editorials criticizing US foreign policy.