Politics & Power Quote by Sinclair Lewis

Wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross is Lewis at his most bracing: a warning that American authoritarianism, if it arrives, won’t look like an import. It will look like home. The genius of the line is its refusal of the cartoon villain. Fascism doesn’t need foreign slogans when it can borrow the country’s most emotionally loaded props: patriotism and piety. The image is tactile and theatrical, like a parade float you’re supposed to cheer for. That’s the trap.

Lewis wrote in a period when mass persuasion was being industrialized and when the U.S. watched European strongmen convert anxiety into spectacle. His 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here skewered the national habit of treating authoritarianism as something that happens to other people, in other languages. This quote functions as a pressure test for that complacency: if you only recognize tyranny by its accents and uniforms, you’ll miss it when it speaks in hymns and campaign slogans.

The subtext is not an attack on faith or love of country; it’s an indictment of their weaponization. A flag becomes a moral blank check. A cross becomes a shield against scrutiny, laundering power through sanctimony. Lewis is pointing at a specifically American vulnerability: the ease with which civic identity and religious certainty can be fused into a politics of obedience, where dissent is recast as treason and criticism as blasphemy. The line still lands because it’s less prophecy than pattern recognition: authoritarian movements succeed when they can cosplay as tradition.