Introduction
This book has been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of its time. Another commentator has said: "Highly detailed, [it's] a roadmap to the craziness of a powerful and fanatical segment of the population that is unlikely to fold any time soon."
"The 15% Solution" in the title refers to an electoral strategy to ensure victory for the Republican Party that was first developed by the Republican Christian Right in the 1980s. (The current [2024] GOP voter suppression campaign is one of many successors to it that they have developed over time.) The book was written as "fictional non-fiction." The first version was published in 1996. In it, the book was purported to have been published in 2048, on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy, that occurred in 2023.
The Restoration followed the end of the conflict between the forces of the fascist government of the "New American Republics" (NAR), a racially partitioned "Christian nation," that under the successor to the old Republican Party, the American Christian Nation Party, had demolished the old United States, creating the NAR in its place, and the "Movement for the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy." It was aided by the Intervention of the Greater East Asian Federation (the primary motivation of which was to eventually recover the enormous debt which the NAR owed to it, which the GEAF knew the NAR would never repay).
From the perspective of the mid-1990s when the book was written, it was primarily focused on the threat of developing fascism "American style," which even then was posed by the Christian fundamentalist/nationalist movement, operating in close alliance with the Republican Party. (Of course, in real time that association has become ever more pronounced, and clear, e.g., Trump himself is being associated with "Christ," and the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, a self-proclaimed Christian, believes that he communicates directly with God.) Again, written from the perspective of the mid-1990s (with no updating or editing), the book's primary purpose was to show how a theocratic authoritarianism could gradually be introduced into any country, even the "world's greatest democracy," behind a facade of Constitutional legality no less.
That is, of course, if there is no awareness in some significant sectors of the population, and among opposition elected and party officials nationally, of what might happen, and when the time comes, that it is happening. In that sense the book follows in the tradition established by its two major forebears: Jack London's The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. When originally published in 1996, the book, to repeat, presented a warning about what might happen in the U.S. as a result of the alliance that was developing then in real time, between the Christian Right and the Republican Party.
Presented in this serialization is the book as it was re-published by Punto Press in 2013, with virtually no editing or updating from the 1996 original. It does have a new "Afterword," but again, the text is virtually the same as that which was published in the original version, in 1996. And so, at the present time the book presents a warning about what really IS happening in the United States. Projected in the book in 1996 was that the Republican Party would trans-mogrify into a then-fictional "Republican-Christian Alliance."
By 2012, Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post and MSNBC had determined that the Republican Party had already become what he termed the "American Faith Party" (1). And now in 2024, what is termed "Christian Nationalism," both in policy and in persons, is playing an ever-more central role in the Republican Party and its policies. As I said in a previously published columns, Die Warnung (The Warning, the title of a paper published in the mid-1930s about Nazi Germany which predicted its further development (click here) is clear.
This 3rd version of the book is available on Amazon in the published paperback and on Kindle: click here.
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1. Fineman, H. , "Rise of Faith within the GOP has created America's First Religious Party," The Huffington Post, lclick here.
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