It didn’t feel like fascism had suddenly, calamitously arrived in America; something far stranger was taking place. Trump’s building his wall now — but along long stretches of the border there’s already a wall, crenellated with guns and surveillance tech, decorated with crosses to mark the people who died trying to make it over. I’ve crossed that border myself; I’ve seen how America looks from the outside, a blank and faceless cyborg nation; the big and beautiful wall is just another way of saying there will be more crosses on a border that already exists. Trump has started imposing his ban on Muslims entering the United States and is being met with intense and heroic resistance — but that list of seven nations whose citizens are barred was first compiled by the Obama administration. All of these countries, bar Iran, are being bombed by the American military, and in the case of Syria and Libya, it was Obama who started bombing.

On the DC metro — gloomy underlit caverns that might have been based on a doodle by Mussolini — every other poster invites you to watch The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s increasingly loose adaptation of the great Philip K. Dick novel. You see the Statue of Liberty, draped in a red, white, and black flag, one arm raised in a Nazi salute. Imagine, the posters said, if things had gone differently, and America had ended up under fascist rule. Imagine if in the United States, people were brutalized and killed simply because of the color of their skin; imagine if a cruel and indifferent military machine had seized control of the entire planet. What a strange and foreign world that would be.