A book summary is below, and here are a few links to learn more. The story is a little unrealistic in the speed of the governmental collapse given its satire vs historical fiction, but if you map it to the pace of 2026 then to me it tracks.
If you want to buy it, which I highly recommend, you can go to to Bookshop.org. A small % goes to Chicago Commons, but more importantly the rest all goes to independent booksellers
And share an alternative take. I’d love to be wrong. Especially given the way things shake out for Jessup the journalist. Read it quickly.
(Disclosure, I haven’t actually read it but I already know the lessons. It Can’t Happen Here and (fantasy books) help you if you don’t).
“It can’t happen here”: a warning tale for an age of populism | The Letterpress Project
Plot summary (co-written with Smart Claude)
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is the story of Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a folksy leader who rises through the Democratic primary on a platform of $5,000 for every American family, a return to “traditional values,” and promises to restore national greatness. Once in office, Windrip moves fast: he strips Congress of real authority, establishes the Minute Men (MM) as a uniformed paramilitary enforcement arm, jails dissenters, and rolls back rights for women and Black Americans. The country becomes a dictatorship on the Hitler-Mussolini model, but made of American parts: Rotary-club boosterism, Protestant revivalism, frontier violence, and commercial hucksterism.
The title is the argument. “It can’t happen here” is what Doremus Jessup’s neighbors keep saying at dinner parties. Lewis’s target is not Windrip. Lewis’s target is the educated, comfortable, mildly-liberal American who treats fascism as a foreign disease, a category error, a thing that belongs to Europeans and Germans and poor whites, not to people like us. The whole book is a sustained prosecution of that confidence.
Windrip wins because the Depression has left millions materially desperate and emotionally unseen, and because the response from FDR’s establishment – however materially competent – reads as technocratic and morally thin compared to what Windrip is offering: recognition, grievance, permission, and a $5,000 check. His “League of Forgotten Men” isn’t just the unemployed. It’s also status-anxious middle managers, small-town shopkeepers, veterans, evangelicals, and men whose wives earn more than they do. He doesn’t offer them policy. He offers them standing. He’s backed by Bishop Paul Prang, a radio preacher modeled on Father Coughlin, which means he arrives wrapped in Protestant moral authority rather than against it.
The novel’s viewpoint character is Doremus Jessup, a mild Vermont newspaper editor – a liberal who sees the risk but underestimates the danger. He and his friends laugh at Windrip. Their taste substitutes for strategy. By the time they stop laughing, Congress has folded and the Minute Men are on every corner. Jessup keeps publishing editorials attacking the regime until the MM shuts down his paper, and eventually imprisons and tortures him. He escapes to Canada, where he joins the New Underground, a resistance movement led by exiled former presidential candidate Walt Trowbridge, and returns as a clandestine operative smuggling anti-regime pamphlets back into the U.S. Meanwhile, the regime eats itself and the country slides into civil war. The novel ends mid-collapse, outcome unresolved.
The parallels people reach for in 2026 write themselves: economic grievance fused with cultural resentment; a folksy demagogue dismissed as ridiculous by the credentialed class until he isn’t; religious authority providing moral cover rather than moral resistance; paramilitary violence treated as local color until it’s the law; institutional collapse happening in weeks, not years; friends and family shading from scoffing to shrugging to enforcing. Lewis’s structural claim is the one that ages best — that the thing preventing American fascism is not the Constitution, not the courts, not American character, but the willingness of specific people to refuse specific orders at specific moments. Most of his characters don’t.