How it Happens Here: Dystopian Literature and the Rise of Fascism

Summary

The video argues that popular dystopian stories more often show how to overthrow a fascist regime than how one gradually takes hold. The narrator uses Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here as a starting point, suggesting that the slow, ordinary political and social changes that enable authoritarianism are harder to dramatize—and easier for audiences to ignore—than a clear conflict between heroic rebels and an obviously evil government.

The video contrasts familiar dystopian storytelling with stories that emphasize complicity and incremental change:

• The Hunger Games provides a recognizable rebellion-against-tyranny structure, but its ending adds nuance: Katniss rejects Coin after recognizing that the rebellion’s leaders may repeat the violence of the regime they replace.
• Lord of the Flies portrays Jack as a demagogue who uses fear, force, and short-term rewards to gain power. Golding’s story challenges readers to see how ordinary people can enable a harmful leader, even without committing the worst acts themselves.
• “The Lottery” explores complacency and tradition. Tessie objects to the ritual only once she becomes its victim, illustrating how people may tolerate injustice when they believe it affects someone else.
• The Harry Potter series offers both starkly villainous imagery and more complicated ideas about personal choice. The video highlights the notion that people contain the capacity for both good and evil, and that fear and hatred can take root when people allow them to.
• Ron Jones’s classroom experiment, “The Wave,” demonstrates how symbols, rules, status, exclusion, and promises of belonging can draw ordinary students into an authoritarian group.

The video also draws on Star Wars, The Handmaid’s Tale, and other dystopian works to argue that stories can help audiences recognize authoritarianism—but can also make it easy to distance themselves from it. If fascists are always depicted as visibly monstrous or unlike ordinary people, viewers may assume they could never participate in similar systems.

The narrator concludes that preventing fascism requires attention to incremental changes, critical engagement with media and history, and empathy for people targeted before the harm reaches oneself.

Concepts and Techniques Discussed

• Intertextual comparison: Reading works such as It Can’t Happen Here, Lord of the Flies, “The Lottery,” and Harry Potter alongside one another to identify shared political themes.
• Dystopian conventions: A familiar structure in which an ordinary protagonist is drawn into rebellion against a clearly evil government, followed by the restoration of democracy.
• Subversion and nuance: The Hunger Games ending complicates the simple “government bad, rebellion good” formula by questioning whether the victors will reproduce the old regime’s violence.
• Allegory and symbolism: Jack’s rule and the Beast in Lord of the Flies, and the lottery ritual in Shirley Jackson’s story, represent broader patterns of fear, conformity, and social cruelty.
• Demagogue characterization: A leader maintains power by exploiting fear, promising immediate benefits, and dismissing ideas—such as rescue or democratic protections—that may feel distant or abstract.
• Incremental escalation: The video emphasizes that authoritarianism develops through a series of seemingly limited decisions, rather than appearing all at once.
• Audience self-examination: These stories are most challenging when they prevent audiences from seeing evil as something committed only by people wholly unlike themselves.

Advice Emphasized

• Look beyond stories about defeating an established dictatorship; pay attention to how authoritarian systems develop.
• Question traditions and political decisions, especially when their consequences are framed as affecting only other people.
• Distinguish academic study of fascism from support for fascism.
• Approach media critically: a story’s political message may be more complicated than its obvious heroes and villains.
• Consider how exclusion, fear, and indifference can make people complicit in harm.

Creators and Contributors Mentioned

• Sinclair Lewis — It Can’t Happen Here and Main Street
• Suzanne Collins — The Hunger Games series, including Mockingjay and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
• William Golding — Lord of the Flies
• Shirley Jackson — “The Lottery”
• Umberto Eco — the essay “Ur-Fascism” and its characteristics of fascism
• William L. Shirer — The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
• Colson Whitehead — The Underground Railroad
• Martin Niemöller — the poem commonly known as “First They Came”
• J. K. Rowling — the Harry Potter series
• Ron Jones — the “Wave” classroom experiment
• George Lucas — Star Wars
• Veronica Roth — the Divergent series
• J. R. R. Tolkien — The Lord of the Rings
• C. S. Lewis — The Chronicles of Narnia
• Margaret Atwood — The Handmaid’s Tale
• Robert Penn Warren — All the King’s Men