Grüezi Amerika Episode 16: It Happened Here – or Did It?

“But – it can’t happen here!” many Americans asserted in light of the Nazi takeover in Germany. Novelist and muckraker Sinclair Lewis ran with this line and sentiment, outlining a scenario in It Can’t Happen Here (1935) in which it did happen: an authoritarian turn in the United States. Similarly, Philip Roth imagined The Plot against America (2004) in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt would lose the election to “America First Committee” candidate Charles Lindbergh. Scholars and journalists now claim that it has indeed happened here and the plot against America was successful. The “coup from within” succeeded in ringing in “technofascist” age. Is all hope lost?

We discuss these different diagnoses of the present political moment with the first “repeat offender” on the podcast, political theorist Lee Trepanier. Professor Trepanier joined Assumption University in July 2024 as the Dean of the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Previously, he was Chair and Professor of Political Science at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, which he joined after serving in the same roles at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan. With a PhD from Louisiana State University, he established himself as a specialist of Eric Voegelin and has published extensively on conservative thought in the USA and beyond, with books on Canadian Conservative Political Thought (co-edited with Richard Avramenko) and on political conversion in Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right (co-edited with Grant Havers).

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