I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

by S.T. Joshi

The greatest peril to civilised progress—aside from an annihilative war—is some kind of basically reactionary system with enough grudging concessions to the dispossessed to make it really work after a fashion, and thus with the capacity to postpone indefinitely the demand of the masses for their real rights—educational, social, and economic—as human beings in a world where the great resources should be cornered by none. . . . Unsupervised capitalism is through. But various Nazi and fascist compromises can be cooked up to save the plutocrats most of their spoils while lulling the growing army of the unpropertied with either a petty programme of panem et circenses, or else a system of artificially created and distributed jobs at starvation wages on the C.C.C. or W.P.A. idea. A regime of that sort, spiced with the right brand of hysterical flag-waving, sloganeering, and verbal constitution-saving, might conceivably be as stable and popular as Hitlerism—and that is what the younger and more astute babbitts of the Republican party are quietly and insidiously working toward.[39] It is as if Lovecraft had a crystal ball and saw Ronald Reagan in it.