YMMV / It Can't Happen Here

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Emma a politically apathetic woman who ignores the threat that the Windrip regime poses? Or a pragmatic survivor who stays safe by keeping her head down?
  • After the M.M.s haul Doremus off to Trianon, Emma seems more concerned about the mess they made than her husband's well-being. Is she a callous wife who is unmoved by her husband's incarceration? Or has she understandably stopped loving Doremus because he cheats on her with Lorinda and endangers their family with his activism?
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The book is often used as a cautionary tale against perceived authoritarianism in the United States. For instance, after the Pearl Harbor attacks, Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration began mass interning American citizens of Japanese descent in camps without trial.
  • The book was written during the rise of Nazi Germany, when Jews and political opponents were already being targeted and deprived of their rights. Only a few years later, Nazi Germany began waging a world war of conquest which ended up killing tens of millions, while simultaneous sending millions of Jews and "undesirables" to the deaths in systemic, large scale killings – cruelties that far exceeded that of Windrip's.
  • Many commentators noted the similarities between the politics of Windrip and Donald Trump, who was elected US President in 2016 on a right-wing populist platform championing the return of traditional values and promising to clamp down on immigration and restore the country to prosperity. Fortunately for the US democratic system, Trump's government, while controversial, never reached the authoritarian excesses of Windrip's, and a plan by his supporters to invade the US Capitol and overturn the results of the 2020 election (which Trump lost) ended in failure.
• Iron Woobie: Doremus. He lives under a totalitarian state, sees friends and loved ones die, endures torture and incarceration in a concentration camp, and spends a lonely exile in Canada upon escaping said camp. At the end of the novel, he returns to America to teach members of the resistance, but is constantly on the run to avoid Corpos. Even in a best case scenario, it will be years before he can safely see his friends and loved ones again. And yet, he perseveres without self-pity.
• Moment of Awesome/Nightmare Fuel: When Shad Ledue is imprisoned in the Trianon camp, several of his former victims conspire to kill him. Through a ruse, they set Shad's room on fire. The screaming, terrified Shad burns to death, his corpse left so badly burned as to be unrecognizable.
• Paranoia Fuel: The novel resonates to this day because tyranny could happen here.
• Spiritual Successor: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published fourteen years after It Can't Happen Here. Both depict formerly democratic nations that succumb to totalitarianism. Both novels feature protagonists who find salvation in their lovers, rebel against the government through the written word, and endure torture and incarceration.
• Squick: The torturers at the Trianon camp force-feed Doremus a large quantity of castor oil, which has a predictable (and gross) result. (The castor oil treatment was a real-life favorite of Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts.)
• Values Resonance:
  • The Windrip regime's racism toward blacks and Jews is depicted as bigoted, during an era when such bigotry was more commonplace in society.
  • Also, the novel depicts feminism favorably and has several strong, intelligent female characters. Lorinda, Sissy, and Mary are all brave, active, politically-conscious women. Lorinda in particular was a feminist activist in her younger days, and spends part of the novel secretly teaching a group of working-class women. The novel also takes misogyny and sexual violence against women seriously. When the Windrip regime robs women of jobs and rights, it is depicted as unjust. Similarly, M.M. acts of violence against women are rightfully depicted as atrocities.
  • Lewis' depiction of a revolution fought without a large, educated class of citizenry turned out to be frighteningly prescient of the fate of many post-colonial states. Many newly-independent countries, where investment in infrastructure was limited largely to what served the colonial metropole (namely resource extraction) as opposed to building a genuine native middle class (which every colonial power understood would become a key support base for an independence movement and would try to prevent), found themselves locked into cycles of poverty, dictatorship, and civil war, their people easily led by demagogues who made empty promises.

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