Politics & Power Quote by John T. Flynn

A warning shot disguised as a calm weather report: Flynn isn’t claiming America has turned into Mussolini’s Italy; he’s arguing the more dangerous phase is earlier, quieter, and easier to excuse. The rhetorical move is surgical. By separating Fascism-as-regime from Fascism-as-preaching, he shifts the reader’s attention from jackboots to ideas, from spectacle to setup. That’s where democratic societies tend to relax: if the trains aren’t running on command and opponents aren’t jailed, people assume the threat is hypothetical.

Flynn’s intent is preventative, not prophetic. He’s trying to drag “fascism” out of the realm of foreign melodrama and back into domestic policy choices: economic panic, institutional distrust, the lure of a strong executive, and the hunger for national “unity” that conveniently makes dissent sound like sabotage. His subtext is that authoritarianism is less a coup than a courtship. It arrives as a promise to restore order, punish villains, and streamline a government depicted as incompetent by design.

Context matters: Flynn was a prominent mid-century critic of centralized power, writing in an era when the Great Depression and the New Deal had expanded the federal state and when European authoritarian movements were still fresh, not fossilized as history-lesson villains. That gives the quote its bite. He’s not arguing by analogy (“America is Italy”), but by precondition: the political emotions and incentives that make people receptive to Mussolini before Mussolini. The sting is the final clause: “slowly approaching.” No sirens, just a slope.