When a president goes rogue: In these books, it already happened

History knows many periods of dark times, [when] the world becomes so dubious that people have ceased to ask any more of politics than it show due consideration for their vital interests and personal liberty. — Hannah Arendt

The hottest subject in American politics at the moment is the battle between the president and the courts. As this article was being prepared for publication, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration, at least for now, may not deport Venezuelans now in detention without due process. But there is an obvious and dangerous contradiction: The highest court in the republic has no effective means of enforcing its rulings, although the constitutional power of judicial review was presumably settled in 1803 with the landmark decision in Marbury v. Madison.

A White House spokeswoman has called court orders blocking Donald Trump’s agenda “unconstitutional and unfair.” A federal district court judge began an investigation of the executive branch for potential contempt charges, although that has been temporarily halted. Two state judges have been arrested for allegedly defying immigration agents. The confrontation between two supposedly coequal branches of government has reached a critical stage.

In a recent conversation in the New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie observed that the Trump administration’s defiance of the Fifth Amendment right of due process demonstrated “a breathtaking contempt for the rule of law,” evidently designed to create widespread fear: “Once you give the power to place one group of people outside the law, you’ve effectively granted the power to place all people outside the law.”

This is headline news today, but more than a century ago American writers began to foresee such a crisis, and to prophesy what might happen next. Their uncannily precise predictions are inescapably relevant today.

As the second Trump administration lurches into its third month, moving fast and breaking government, I’ve been studying what American writers have suggested would occur if a demagogue were elected president. A next step, in novels such as Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” involves a direct attack on the Supreme Court if it declines to affirm a president’s agenda. Much the same forces are at work 90 years later. Alternative histories, particularly dystopias, reflect their societies’ radical pessimism, as Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore suggested in 2017:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and Infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness.

Dystopian novels, broadly speaking, recount alternative versions of history, imagining different versions of both past and future and exploring their ramifications. Science fiction is particularly rich with classic works like Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” and H.G. Wells’ “Things to Come,” to choose two British examples from the 1930s. The past may be debated, but the future is only limited by our imagination.

I hope to explore Americans’ shared possible future, by way of what American authors thought might happen if a totalitarian president were elected. Many of these examples are chilling, but they also remind us that resistance to fascism is always possible. This takes many forms, from espionage to sabotage to armed resistance. Where all these authors agree is in finding something basic in humanity’s revulsion to abandoning our ethical and moral compass.

None of these dark tales from the 20th century actually predicted the future; that doesn’t mean they won’t. Forewarned is forearmed. We benefit from understanding how American authors foresaw homegrown totalitarianism by learning how to cope in a dire era, as Jack London anticipated in his 1908 novel "The Iron Heel," which is where I begin:

We’ll become so roused up that — either we’ll be desperate and really cling to each other and anybody else in the world can go the devil or, what I’m afraid is more likely, we’ll get so deep into rebellion against [insert name of favorite demagogue], we’ll feel so terribly that we’re standing for something that we’ll want to give everything else for it, even give up you and me.

"The Iron Heel" by Jack London (1908)

London is better known for his tales of Alaskan adventure, such as the all-time boy favorite “Call of the Wild,” but here he tells the story of Earnest Everhard, a bemuscled young man from across the tracks. In the name of the people of the abyss, Earnest claims “all the mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks and stores. That is the revolution. It is truly perilous.”

In this melodramatic tale, the Peasant Revolt, as well as the Second, Third and Fourth revolts, are all brutally suppressed by the forces of oligarchy: “We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel.” The question London asks here is how bad things have to get, and how widespread the oppression must become, before Americans fall in line or massively resist.

At times, London sounds like the Democrats after Trump’s second election: “There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will.” Then he quotes Abraham Lincoln, just before his assassination: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign.”

In “The Iron Heel,” all of North America, from the Panama Canal to the Arctic, belongs to the Oligarchy. But it cannot quiet or control all it owns. From Florida to Alaska, Native Americans perform the Ghost Dance, anticipating their own messiah. In dozens of states, expropriated farmers march on their legislatures. In the Sacramento Massacre, 11,000 men, women and children are shot down on the streets, and the national government takes possession of California. Then, after 300 years, the Oligarchy finally becomes so corrupt and weak it collapses, and the era of the Brotherhood of Man finally prevails.

If there was a year of imagined American dystopia, it was 1934, when the next three novels were written or published. This was no accident: The previous year had seen the Reichstag fire and Adolf Hitler’s rise to full power. Those events clearly fired the imaginations of Edward Dahlberg, Nathanael West and Sinclair Lewis.

"Those Who Perish" by Edward Dahlberg (1934)

It’s late spring in America’s New Republic with a blustery wind bringing bad news. Banks are failing. “Wide Revolt!” proclaims a newspaper headline. We see this Depression turmoil through the eyes of Regina Gordon, a self-described “Jew by accident and by defense.” She rides the bus while Henry Rosenzweig, her superintendent at the Jewish Community Center, drives to work in his Cadillac considering which mortgages to foreclose on next.

He’s one of the well-heeled German Jews who left Europe early and look down on their ghetto brethren. Their response to antisemitism and Nazism is tame: Jewish women of German birth pass out ribbons reading “We Appeal to German Culture and Conscience.” One such character imagines: “When Hitler comes to his senses, he will know the German Jews will be his strongest allies and most loyal adherents.” Regina sees it differently:

If you are a Communist and a Jew, you’ll very likely be murdered on the spot, and if you are a Jew without any political opinions they will no doubt be merciful and only starve you to death. As for myself, I propose to fight this gravedigger’s menace to the finish.

America’s current president can barely slow the pace of fascism in the U.S.; it’s unclear how hard he’s trying. Headlines tell the story: “Food Famine Looms in Midwest”; “National Guardsmen Fire on Longshoremen in San Francisco.”

Dahlberg’s imagined news cycle resembles ours, even if the term “doomscrolling” had yet to be invented: “Each day she read the papers with her hair standing on end. The fragments of headlines had terrorized her and torn through her whole being like great bursting shells. . . . ‘I do not want this! I’m living in the most harrowing of times, and I cannot go on!’”

"A Cool Million" by Nathanael West (1934)

This relatively obscure novel by the author of “The Day of the Locust” tells the story of Lemuel Pitkin, a Vermonter who loses his house to foreclosure. In desperation, he turns to Nathaniel Whipple, a former U.S. president who has served a prison sentence (!) and now runs a local bank. In Dickensian fashion, Pitkin is told to “go out into the world and find your way for America takes care of the honest and the industrious.” Whipple then swindles the Pitkin family out of its last remaining asset, a cow.

From this point on, the book follows the bizarre, episodic structure of Voltaire’s “Candide,” crossed with Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.” Pitkin joins a traveling circus, the Chamber of American Horrors. Banks are nationalized (or rather privatized) by the restored President Whipple, who returns to power after his criminal conviction (!!) thanks to his ominous supporters, the “Leather Shirts,” an obvious echo of both Hitler’s Brownshirts and the Blackshirts of Italian fascism. America is delivered from Marxism, as the president seizes dictatorial power and proclaims, “America becomes America again.” No, I’m not kidding: That’s what happens.

"It Can’t Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis (1935)

In the summer of 1934, pioneering female journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was married to Sinclair Lewis, became the first reporter expelled from Hitler’s Germany. Between Thompson and investigative reporter Gilbert Seldes, his Vermont neighbor, Lewis observed the rise of the Nazis closely. His fictional dictator-president, however, clearly had an American model in legendary Louisiana populist Huey Long, a former governor who had recently been elected to the U.S. Senate (and would be assassinated in 1935).

In the novel, Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the Democratic presidential nomination to Buzz Windrip, who is described as “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily discredited,” but wins the election in a landslide. After his inauguration, Windrip attacks the media: “I know the press only too well, [they plot] how they can put over their lies and advance their own positions and feed their greedy pocket books.” Windrip then threatens Mexico, accusing its government of unfair trade practices and, yes, sending criminals across the border.

“I don’t pretend to be anything but a poor working-stiff,” says one ordinary-Joe character, “but there’s 40 million workers like me and we know that Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need.”

Windrip’s Cabinet, shall we say, has a familiar character: His Treasury secretary is a bank manager, his attorney general a notorious racist. He soon declares martial law and orders 100 members of Congress arrested; days later, he dissolves Congress entirely and places the Supreme Court justices under house arrest.

His campaign featured a combination of cracker-barrel folksiness and blatant racial supremacy, and most Windrip supporters are just fine with his seizure of power: "Never in American history," Lewis writes, "had the adherents of a President been so well satisfied…with such annoyances as Congressional Investigations hushed, the official warders of contracts were on the merriest of terms with all contractors."

For other people, needless to say, things go from bad to worse. Those who protest are dispossessed of their property, even their land. Entire states are dissolved, replaced by larger and more easily controlled “provinces.” Military courts and militias dispense dark justice. Then come the concentration camps.

From Canada, the New Underground fights back. (A theme echoed decades later in Margaret Atwood's “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the ensuing TV series) Windrip is finally deposed and so is his successor, until finally a military general takes over to rules with an iron hand (or heel). As critic Gary Scharnhorst writes in an afterword to a recent edition of this classic: “The riposte to ‘it can’t happen here’ is ‘it already has.”

"The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick (1962)

This foundational work of alternative history begins with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 assassination, just after his inauguration. So there’s no New Deal, and the Depression drags on. German-American groups and the pacifist left both promote isolationism. Without U.S. firepower entering the war, Hitler prevails at Stalingrad, while Imperial Japan conquers China and then India. Eventually, the U.S. surrenders after a German nuclear attack; and America is occupied by Nazi Germany along the eastern seaboard and Japan on the West Coast, with a pseudo-independent Vichy regime in the Rockies. Slavery becomes legal again. The few Jews who survive extermination conceal themselves under assumed names.

In early 1960s America, the Reich rules by technology, building a hydrogen bomb for a genocidal attack on Africa and using Wernher von Braun’s rockets to colonize the solar system. The Nazis even drain the Mediterranean Sea to produce vast, fertile plantation land to be tilled by slaves.

Dick’s characters appear and disappear amid a nearly incomprehensible plot about a Nazi defector who tries to warn the Japanese of an impending German attack. It’s all something like Hamlet’s play within a play, meant “to catch the conscience of a king.” Indeed, there’s a novel nested within this novel, a samizdat work recounting the history of World War II and its aftermath as we know it, in which the Germans and Japanese are defeated. This provokes horror among the ruling authorities, since it may describe an alternate but equally real universe.

"Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler (1993)

Butler’s fascist dystopia — dated to 2024, let us note — features a minister and his daughter living in a walled compound outside Los Angeles, where a dozen families guard themselves from the murder and chaos outside their gates. On TV, they witness L.A. and other cities burning, thanks to a new designer drug called PYRO, which makes the experience of watching fires better than sex.

President Charles Donner is elected on Nov. 6, 2024. (Let me say again: Not kidding!) No one seriously expects much change: “Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising a return to the glory, the wealth, and the order of the 20th century ever since I can remember.”

In fact, Donner’s opponents say he’ll set the country back a hundred years: “He’s like a symbol of the past ... he’s nothing. No substance.” What does the new president promise? To “suspend overly restrictive” minimum wage, environmental and worker protection regulations. Our heroine wonders: “Will it be legal to poison, mutilate, or infect people — as long as you provide them with food, water, and a space to die?” Well, yes.

Indentured servitude returns. In privatized company towns, workers are paid in scrip and kept in permanent debt. The choice, for most, is to work for minimal wages or go to jail. Cholera spreads through Mississippi and Louisiana. Seriously ill people succumb to measles in large numbers. (Yes, really.) Illiteracy spreads like a disease.

The story is told from the adolescent girl’s perspective, her diminishing innocence and powerful empathy rendering her exceptionally vulnerable. “You’ve just noticed the abyss,” she is told. “The adults in this community have been balancing on its edge for more years than you’ve been alive.”

America crumbles and she takes to the road, collecting waifs and strays and founding a utopian community in rural Oregon. The Bay Area is overrun by looters. Scavengers, thieves and killers lurk on the roadsides; some turn to cannibalism. We’re a long way from the gentle, drug-dimmed dystopia of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

Federal, state and local governments still exist, but in name only, as Butler later explained: “I imagine the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a Third World country.”

"The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth (2004)

In this bestseller by one of America's most acclaimed novelists — our only selection from this century — fascism arrives in the U.S. through a counterfactual but highly plausible mechanism: After two terms, Roosevelt loses the 1940 election to legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh, a member of the famously pro-Nazi German-American Bund. Lindy is for peace; the war is Europe’s problem.

Until his election, Republican leaders are in despair over “their candidate’s stubborn refusal to allow anyone other than himself to determine the strategy of his campaign,” Roth writes. Yet “on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters.” (Another moment of uncanny accuracy.)

In the weeks following Lindbergh’s inauguration, he holds a friendly meeting with Hitler and sets up an “Office of American Absorption,” aimed at mainstreaming Jewish kids by sending them into the heartland as field hands and day laborers. He warns Americans against “the dilution by foreign races” and the “infiltration of inferior blood.”

In his top-rated radio news program, Walter Winchell asks, “And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?”

Winchell is fired and then shot. Lindbergh signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler, dooming Britain and Russia to defeat. It eventually turns out that the Nazis plotted every move of Lindbergh’s campaign, giving them time for a military buldup before invading Russia.

Civil rights are shredded, culminating in America’s first anti-Jewish pogrom. After a bomb explodes in a Detroit temple, Jews flee by the hundreds to Canada. In the end, however, Roosevelt is returned to power, Congress is reinstated and Lindbergh’s crimes are undone. Roth offers a degree of comfort that Sinclair Lewis could not: a sigh of relief that it truly couldn’t happen here.

* * *

We feel no such certainty today. Afflicted by the disease of authoritarianism, the body politic begins to stumble, perhaps to fall. Throughout these novels, the dominant emotion is fear — fear of one’s own government and its forces; fear of one’s own city, where one ethnic group is pitted against another. Fear like a dark hand from the sky, crushing the Capitol, the White House and the institutions of democracy they represent.

Sinclair Lewis imagined a taxonomy of dictatorship: “The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of arrest, sudden pounding on the door late at night…. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette.”

If we assemble these fictions into a playbook for the current administration, listing the (imagined) next steps, here’s what we find: First an attack on the courts and then the press, eliminating access to those who oppose his interests. The bulwark against a president-demagogue disappears when one party controls the Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court. The public is too distracted by the hateful rhetoric and showmanship to notice more insidious actions, such as laws against mass protests and attacks on federal judges. The desired end-state is clear enough: When large protests are broken up with bloodshed by militias or the National Guard, judges do little to interfere.

These writers virtually all agree on one point: Of all the tricks used to pacify a population, nothing beats war. It doesn’t much matter which enemy is selected — Mexico, Venezuela, Iran, perhaps even Canada or Greenland — war centralizes control and seizes priority over the national budget, communications and infrastructure. It’s the one sure way to make Americans rally around their flag and their president. As Ambrose Pierce wrote, “Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless and the grave, blind as a stone and irrational as a headless man.”

To presidential demagogues, Congress and the Supreme Court are inconvenient obstacles. Public education, particularly colleges and universities, must be disabled, starved and ultimately handed over to the private sector. Campus rebellions can be suppressed once the price of public protest becomes cooperation, death or internment.

President Whipple in “A Cool Million,” President Lindbergh in “The Plot Against America” and President Donner in “The Parable of the Sower” all agree on (the usual) enemies, particularly Jews, immigrants and the poor. Pretty much any religion except mainstream Protestantism is deeply suspect. While Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims do not appear in these works, these demagogues would have trashed them as well. Fascism hates competition.

Next come the militias, with West’s Storm Troopers, London’s Mercenaries and Lewis’ Minute Men all anticipating the Proud Boys and Three Percenters storming the U.S. Capitol. There’s considerable variety, to be sure, in how quickly and ferociously they take up arms, and whether they are volunteer hoodlums or highly organized military vets. These fictional American tyrants isolate and attack racial groups and mobilize mega-corporations and hard-right politicians, both inside and outside the Republican Party. For Lee Sarason, the grey eminence behind President Windrip in “It Can’t Happen Here,” we may read today’s Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller.

Finally, it’s worth considering the price of defiance in these narratives: Deportation to Japan or Germany in Dick; the step-by-step stripping of possessions and dignity in London and Lewis. Americans may fight back, but at least in these fictional universes they rarely win. The authors conclude that the populace will likely be too distracted, too unprepared and too deeply divided to act in unison. None of them would be shocked to learn that the American electorate voted in a tyrant, not once but twice.

A closing chapter in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” is titled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” He predicts that in America, authoritarianism would “degrade men without tormenting them. ... The will of man is not shattered but softly softened, bent, and guided.”

But “of all the forms democratic despotism could take,” Tocqueville continues, “the worst would be to turn over all the powers of government to the hands of an irresponsible person.” He ends with the sort of message that drives the flawed and often inadequate heroes of these books to stand up and resist or speak truth to power: “Let us, then, look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.”