Politics & Power Quote by John T. Flynn

There is a quiet dare embedded in Flynn's line: stop kidding yourself. "Modified form" is the tell, a jab at the comforting American habit of treating political extremism as a design problem - sand down the rough edges, rename the parts, promise better oversight - and call it stability. Flynn's intent isn't to describe fascism as a static doctrine; it's to insist that once a politics is built on coercion, spectacle, and executive override, it doesn't politely submit to reforms. It either expands or collapses. "Cannot continue" is less prophecy than warning about momentum.

The subtext is aimed at respectable enablers: the moderates, business leaders, and technocrats who imagine they can harness the energy of authoritarianism for order, profit, or national revival, then keep it on a leash. Flynn's sentence treats that belief as childish. Fascism is not an appliance you can run on low power. It demands enemies, crises, and escalating permission to break norms. The "modified" version still needs the same fuel.

Context matters because Flynn was an American critic writing in an era when "it can't happen here" was an identity, not an argument. His suspicion of concentrated state power - amplified by the interwar rise of European fascism and debates over New Deal governance - makes the line read like a cultural immune response. It's also strategically phrased: no named villain, no melodrama, just a hard constraint. That restraint is what makes it sting. The sentence denies the audience their favorite alibi: that authoritarianism can be domesticated into something merely "illiberal-lite", safe enough to live with.