4 ideas
Through his travels and duties we see a state built on racial mysticism, cult ritual and pseudoscience, locked in an atomic standoff with its former ally Japan. His credulous perspective lets the regime's absurdity and cruelty show themselves without an outside critic having to point them out.
Loyal subjects protect their faith in a supreme leader by blaming abuses on subordinates who supposedly hide the truth from him. This keeps the leader's legitimacy intact however bad the regime's conduct gets, because every atrocity counts as a deviation from his will rather than an expression of it. The novel's title mocks this reflex by imagining a world where the leader's will has fully triumphed.
A regime that has won no longer faces a competitor that punishes false beliefs, so fringe doctrines can become official science and state ritual. By imagining occult racial theory and cosmological myth as institutionalized orthodoxy, the novel shows that ideology left unchecked grows more irrational, not more moderate.
Winning does not settle a totalitarian order, because its logic of enemies and struggle has to find new targets. In the imagined Reich, the victors turn to rivalry among their own leaders and to a nuclear confrontation with their wartime ally. The machinery of war simply moves on to the next opponent.