Where in history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship?

From Chapter 2 of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935.

"... Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!”

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen."


"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical -- yes, or more obsequious! -- than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns HIS State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the -- well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? ... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? ... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition -- shooting down people just because they MIGHT be transporting liquor -- no, that couldn’t happen in AMERICA! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade -- only of adults -- right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.  Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.  One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?  Frankly, I do not know.  I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice  - "Resist the beginnings" and "consider the end."  But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings.  One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?  Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have.  And everyone counts on that might.

http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free.html

In his new book "Fooled Again", which mainly deals with the 2004 election frauds. But, he also discusses the fact that the people behind those who committed those frauds (and if you look at the current round of indictments: Delay, Abramoff, etc., they all have to do with election fraud) want to create a theocracy, and that our democratic system is in serious jeopardy because these people do not believe in the tenets the Constitution sets forth. I saw him at a signing last night, and the fact that thinking people on both sides of the aisle keep repeating this "it can't happen here" mantra over and over was something he mentioned.