It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

The M.M.’s saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

All the while he loved the People just as much as he feared and detested Persons, and he planned to do something historic.

Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology, he was a strict orthodox Christian.

But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.