Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in It Can’t Happen Here, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Fascism
Liberalism and Tolerance
Morality and Resistance
Political Communication and Mass Media
Summary
Analysis
In Zero Hour, Windrip writes that when he retires, he wants to move to a place like Florida or Santa Fe and spend his time reading classic literature. Even though Doremus Jessup knew that Windrip would win the election, he’s still alarmed. “Hell with this country,” he thinks, and he decides to lock up in his study and read the classics. He tries and fails to relearn Latin, and he starts feeling guilty for disengaging from politics. Windrip is trying to form a congressional majority by blackmailing his opposition, challenging election results, and even making one congressman disappear.
Unlike in Windrip’s epigraph, Jessup retreats from the world not to relax, but because he feels powerless. He doesn’t know what, if anything, he can do to fight Windrip’s coming tyranny. He tries to bury his head in the sand—but, tellingly, he fails. He feels such a strong moral obligation to act that he cannot stop thinking about the country’s descent into fascism. Ultimately, this sense of morality is what sets Jessup apart from most of the people around him.
Themes
Since the Depression started in 1929, Jessup has felt stuck and insecure. For centuries, capitalism and the U.S. government gave Americans “the privilege of planning.” Jessup’s minister grandfather planned to give Jessup’s father a theological education and build a new family house. Then, Jessup’s father saved money so that Jessup could go to college and pursue his dream of working in publicity. But now, Jessup has no idea what the country’s future will hold, so he can’t make any plans for his family. As an editor, he’s used to knowing all about history, politics, and economics, but he suddenly feels like he knows nothing—and like nobody else does, either.
Lewis argues that stability and order help a society develop by enabling people to make and execute long-term plans. In this kind of society, people can choose their own life paths and freely pursue new, innovative ideas. The Depression already disrupted this stability by destroying people’s livelihoods and confidence in the financial system. Then, the American people elected Windrip because he promised to end the crisis and bring back the stability of the past. But Jessup thinks that Windrip will do the opposite instead: he will undermine stability further by taking away the fundamental freedoms on which it is based.
Themes
Julian Falck visits Fort Beulah on Christmas break, and Jessup gives him a ride home one night. On their way, they stop at John Pollikop’s garage for gas, and they meet Karl Pascal, the communist mechanic. Pascal tells Jessup that he’s actually excited for Windrip to take office, since there’s nothing like a “pro-plutocrat, itching militarist dictator” to start the revolution. Falck asks how Pascal can reconcile communism with loving the U.S. Pascal replies that he loves the U.S.’s informality and democratic spirit but hates its extreme inequality and low wages. Jessup asks if Soviet forced labor camps are any better than the U.S.’s poverty wages, but Pascal calls this a weak comeback and insists that Americans will “do [communism] a whole lot better.”
Even though Jessup and Karl Pascal are friends, Jessup is just as wary of Pascal’s politics as he is of Buzz Windrip’s. In fact, Lewis suggests that communists and fascists share many traits, including their hope to build a utopia through a political revolution and their belief that everything else in the world is just a stepping stone towards this utopia. (This is why Pascal is happy about Windrip’s election: he thinks it will make everyone else join his communist revolution.) While Lewis clearly takes Pascal’s concerns about inequality seriously, he seems to believe that the best way to create a more equal society is by strengthening democracy and giving everyone a say in politics (rather than dismantling it through a revolution, so that a few communist leaders can run the economy for everyone else).
Themes
The theatrical John Pollikop, the garage’s owner and Jessup’s former bootlegger, stops in to chat. He makes fun of Karl Pascal and says that the socialists would have defeated “Buzzard Windrip” if they had the communists’ support. Pascal jokes that Pollikop has never really read Marx and declares that Windrip’s election is just a reflection of the country’s deeper economic issues. In fact, Pascal and Pollikop are still merrily debating when Jessup and Julian Falck drive away.
Lewis uses Pollikop and Pascal’s friendship to satirize the endless factional divisions that prevent left-wing politics from gaining traction in the U.S. While the fascists rally around Windrip, win the election, and start planning to replace democracy with dictatorship, the leftists are too busy bickering about theory to actually take action. By showing Pascal and Pollikop enjoy their lively debates, Lewis suggests that leftists might ultimately get involved in politics for the same twisted reason as fascists: because they view it as a source of entertainment.
Themes
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Doremus Jessup has always sought alone time in his study, where his family and the townspeople can’t bother him. Now, he spends his evenings there, meditating, editing articles, and avoiding Windrip’s supporters. After returning home from Pollikop’s garage, he finishes an editorial about the threat to democracy from communism, fascism, and all the other utopian ideologies that believe they can save the world. Society can never be perfect, Jessup writes, and people will always envy their neighbors and face the same issues, like aging, disease, and natural disasters. Only arrogant “rabble-rousers” think that they know the definitive solutions to these problems.
Jessup starts to clearly formulate his critique of illiberal politics—meaning any political movement that claims to have the formula for a perfect society and demands highly concentrated power so that it can enact that formula. Thus, while Lewis saw fascism as the most imminent threat to the U.S. in the 1930s, he also clearly saw communism, religious fundamentalism, and other ideologies as just as dangerous. Followers of these ideologies also believed that they could save the world and thought that this special ends would justify any possible means, including violent and repressive ones.
Themes
Jessup notes that people have believed they can save the world for centuries, from Peter the Hermit (who led the Crusades) and John Ball (who led a rebellion to redistribute wealth in the 14th century) to the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and utopian religious leaders like John Alexander Dowie. He decides that Brigham Young was the only “rabble-rouser” who actually created something enduring. And he concludes that he respects the non-idealists who don’t think they have the solution to everything, and who don’t rush to murder everyone who disagrees with them.
Many journalists, politicians, and social scientists think of fascism as a uniquely modern phenomenon. But Lewis carefully links it with other social and religious movements throughout history, going back centuries. He argues that they all follow the same pattern and share the same root cause: “rabble-rouser[s]” convince idealistic, gullible, or desperate people to hand them power by promising to save the world. Then, they abuse their power and fail to fulfill their promises. Jessup believes that liberal democracy is the solution because it ensures that nobody ever gets this kind of power.
Themes
Jessup even starts to wonder whether the American Revolution and the Civil War were worth it. Couldn’t the U.S. have gradually abolished slavery, Jessup asks, instead of sending a generation of men to die in the Civil War, which fueled a Southern racist backlash and eventually led the U.S. into the Spanish-American War? Couldn’t the Thirteen Colonies have stayed in the British Empire and helped establish true world peace? Is the U.S. really any better off than Canada and Australia? Of course, conservatives are just as bad as the radicals—especially when they scorn everyone who wants to improve society. Above all, Jessup admires the Abolitionists. He just wishes they were less idealistic. He concludes that “idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress.”
Lewis exercises his freedom of speech to the fullest by showing Jessup question the two wars that most Americans view as noble, necessary, and core to their national identity. While readers may see him as cynical, in reality, his thoughts show a profound optimism about human nature. He believes that people can solve their problems democratically through cooperation, tolerance, and foresight. In a way, he is imagining a utopia of his own: a world where war is no longer necessary to settle human conflicts. But it’s not clear whether this approach will be enough to defeat Windrip’s dictatorship. In fact, while Jessup will always remain committed to liberal democracy, the tactics he uses to fight for it will change radically over the course of the book.
Themes
