“Under all my remarks rests a very unhappy premise. Fascism may be more to the tastes of the ruling powers in America than democracy. That doesn’t mean we’ll become a fascist country tomorrow. There are any number of extensive forces in America that would resist it. There are also huge forces in America that are promoting fascism, one way or another…” So wrote Norman Mailer in The Big Empty (2006), published a year before his death in 2007. He had been pressing the point since his first novel The Naked and the Dead in 1948 when he was twenty-five years old.