My last quotes from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (from chapter 36):

“More and more, as I think about history,” [Doremus] pondered, “I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.  But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”

Eventually, there is a revolt against Windrip’s dictatorship, but it does not get very far:

“…there the revolt halted, because in the American which had so warmly praised itself for its ‘widespread popular free education,’ there had been so very little education; widespread, popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted–indeed knew about so few things to want at all.”