Even poor students of history can see what’s happening to the U.S.

Open this photo in gallery:

In 1935, American author Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian novel about the rise of a populist demagogue named Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip, who becomes the U.S. president after cultivating a cult following for his nationalism, anti-elitism and quixotic promises. Windrip was fixated on restoring domestic production of material goods and hated the press.

He establishes a paramilitary force called the “Minute Men,” or “M.M.,” who are initially primarily made up of retired military personnel, but grow to include farmers, industrial workers and even former criminals, all of whom appear to revel in the opportunity to wield control and power over their fellow citizens. M.M. officers spy for the state and violently break up protests, and as Windrip’s presidency metastasizes into authoritarianism, they arrest and execute perceived dissidents with complete impunity. The regime justifies these actions by claiming the M.M. only targets malicious agitators: “The way to stop crime is to stop it!” Windrip declares to great fanfare.

Mr. Lewis’s novel was of course informed by the real-life tyranny engulfing parts of Europe at that time, but his point was that America was not impervious to those same forces. “All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette,” he wrote. “And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, [Americans] saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central Europe.”

Both sides dig in as Trump’s ICE crackdown on Minnesota shows no signs of letting up

There is a video, taken this weekend in Minneapolis – nearly a century after Mr. Lewis wrote his book – of an ICE agent clapping after his colleagues execute an American citizen on the street. That American citizen – 37-year-old Alex Pretti – was recording ICE agents conducting their work when he went to assist a woman who was shoved to the ground by one of the officers. Mr. Pretti asks her, “Are you okay?” and then is immediately pepper-sprayed in the face and tackled by a half-dozen officers. One agent removes a firearm that Mr. Pretti had in its holster – which Mr. Pretti had the right to carry under the Second Amendment – and only after Mr. Pretti is disarmed and on the ground, the agents execute him, firing a handful of bullets into his body. It’s in that moment that one of the ICE agents starts clapping. In the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, we see the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had a century ago in central Europe.

The regime then came out to justify the killing, just as it had weeks ago, when an ICE agent shot another U.S. citizen on the street – Renee Nicole Macklin Good, also 37 – whom the White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently labelled a “domestic terrorist,” though she was actually a mom in an SUV who seemed to be turning her car away from the agent in front of her. ​​Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem almost immediately declared that Mr. Pretti “attacked” law enforcement and was “brandishing” a gun, which were lies easily disproven by various videos of the interaction. But White House staff persisted with the fiction that Mr. Pretti “tried to murder federal agents” anyway, telling Americans not to believe what they could plainly see with their own eyes. The people being executed by state agents on the street were effectively criminals-in-waiting, according to the White House, and the way to stop crime, of course, is to stop it.

Opinion: How much state violence will America accept?

A witness to the killing of Mr. Pretti gave a statement hours later in which she said the story that the DHS has fed the public is wrong. But just as disturbingly, she said she fears reprisal from the government because she witnessed what actually happened. “I feel afraid,” she said. “Only hours have passed since they shot a man right in front of me and I don’t feel like I can go home because I heard agents were looking for me. I don’t know what the agents will do when they find me.”

Even poor students of history recognize what it means when governments shrug off their own citizens’ rights, as members of the Trump administration have done in insisting that Ms. Macklin Good and Mr. Pretti decided their own fates. They know what it means when an administration blocks investigations, when citizens are afraid that members of a masked, state-backed militia might show up at their homes to interrogate them or worse, when innocent people are executed on the street, and when the public is fed lies about agitators and domestic terrorists. It happens slowly, and then all at once. And as Mr. Lewis presciently noted, it could happen anywhere.