Snow crash can happen here

With the reissue of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here and Harold Bloom's Democracy is Dead piece in the Guardian, you might get the feeling that some kind of authoritarian government is in the offing. I think this is the wrong model. A more appropriate literary model can be found in Snow Crash, where society has fragmented into subclasses that rarely interact and corporations have replaced or made redundant government function. While it is true that the Bush administration is to expand the state's military power and is alarmingly willing to use intelligence, it appears to be willing to let the rest of the state's responsibility wither. This takes the US not back to the authoritarian 30s, but to the 19th century when the American state limited itself to external affairs. The corporate cronyism sets the administration apart from the 19th cen and makes Snow Crash seem more prophetic.