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After reviewing a half-dozen American novels imagining a demagogue as president, I’ve discovered what the next step for Trump is: he needs a war, and the martial law and militia that often accompany it. What else could we learn from these authors’ predictions?

In Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” which predicts the early Trump presidency, it’s a war with Mexico. That’s because the same forces at work in the 1930s persist: a growing plutocracy. The year changes, but the actors and roles remain the same. These three alternative histories imagine fascism’s arrival on the Potomac:

Iron Heel (1908)

Jack London moves from Alaskan adventure stories to politics. His hero is young socialist Ernest Everhard. In the name of the people of the abyss, he claims “all the mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks and stores. That is the revolution. It is truly perilous.”

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And so it proves. Revolts are brutally suppressed by an unrepentant oligarchy: “We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel.” A bomb is thrown at Everhard during his speech in Congress. The Socialist representatives there – 50! – are later arrested and sent to camps and 300 years of tyranny follow, finally yielding a Brotherhood of Man.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935 )

In August 1934 Dorothy Thompson, wife of Sinclair Lewis, became the first reporter ejected from Germany. Lewis blended her experience under the Reich with Louisiana’s gangster-governor Huey Long. The result was a president “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily discredited” who immediately 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.” President Windrip threatens Mexico: They’re not fair traders! They’re sending criminals and subversives North.

From there, everything goes downhill. When people protest, they’re dispossessed of property and land. Military courts and militias dispense dark justice. Then come the concentration camps and the dissolution of Congress.

Based in Canada, the New Underground fights back, but there’s no Hollywood ending. Windrip’s deposed and so is his successor, until a general rules with iron hand – or heel. Resistance takes generations.

Do such actions lie dormant in Americans’ current ideology? As critic Gary Scharnhorst quotes in an afterword: “The riposte to ‘it can’t happen here’ is ‘it already has.'”

The Plot Against America (2004)

Roosevelt loses the 1940 election to Charles Lindbergh, “Lindy,” famous aviator and member of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. Anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic, he warns Americans against ‘dilution by foreign races’ and the ‘infiltration of inferior blood.’

Until his election, “Republican Party leaders were in despair over their candidate’s stubborn refusal to allow anyone other than himself to determine the strategy of his campaign. … On the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters.” The new president meets Hitler, signs a non-aggression pact and sets up an “Office of American Absorption” to send Jewish kids out as field hands and day-laborers.

“And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president?” Walter Winchell asks in the country’s highest-rated radio news show. The next week, Winchell’s fired.

The shredding of civil rights culminates in the first American Pogrom in September 1942. Temples are attacked, and anti-Jewish looting spreads across the country. Finally, Roosevelt is re-elected.

In this passionate book, the dominant emotion is fear. Fear of your own government, fear of your own city, where one ethnic group is pitted against another. Fear like a long dark hand from the sky grabbing the Capitol and the White House and squeezing them to dust.

In these works American tyrants share a playbook: restrictions on the press, militias, anti-Semitic speeches, isolating and attacking groups like Muslims or Jews, the elimination of Congress and arrest of the Supreme Court, and an unholy alliance to quash dissent by mega-corporations and hard-right conservatives in and outside the Republican Party. Such scenarios today may seem extreme, but anyone reading these novels must be forgiven for thinking, yes, it really could happen here. And it all starts with a war.

These authors predict America’s rebellions against authoritarianism will fail. Why? Either because that oligarchy is too powerful; or because Americans are too distracted, unprepared and divided to act. Forewarned is forearmed.

David King Dunaway teaches writing at the University of New Mexico.