Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America

Written by Cass R. Sunstein

Narrated by Kaleo Griffith

“What makes Trump immune is that he is not a president within the context of a healthy Republican government. He is a cult leader of a movement that has taken over a political party – and he specifically campaigned on a platform of one-man rule. This fact permeates “Can It Happen Here? . . . which concludes, if you read between the lines, that “it” already has.” – New York Times Book Review

""Several of the contributors...agree that American politics is susceptible to creeping authoritarianism and provide the intellectual underpinning."" – Washington Post

With the election of Donald J. Trump, many people on both the left and right feared that America’s 240-year-old grand experiment in democracy was coming to an end, and that Sinclair Lewis’ satirical novel, It Can’t Happen Here, written during the dark days of the 1930s, could finally be coming true. Is the democratic freedom that the United States symbolizes really secure? Can authoritarianism happen in America?

Acclaimed legal scholar, Harvard Professor, and New York Times bestselling author Cass R. Sunstein queried a number of the nation’s leading thinkers. In this thought-provoking collection of essays, these distinguished thinkers and theorists explore the lessons of history, how democracies crumble, how propaganda works, and the role of the media, courts, elections, and ""fake news"" in the modern political landscape—and what the future of the United States may hold.

Contributors include:

• Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School
• Eric Posner, law professor at the University of Chicago Law School
• Tyler Cowen, economics professor at George Mason University
• Timur Kuran, economics and political science professor at Duke University
• Noah Feldman, professor of law at Harvard Law School
• Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business
• Jack Goldsmith, Professor at Harvard Law School, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founder of Lawfare
• Stephen Holmes, Professor of Law at New York University
• Jon Elster, Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University
• Thomas Ginsburg, Professor of International Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University
• Duncan Watts, sociologist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780062797780

Cass R. Sunstein

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He received the 2018 Holberg Prize from the Government of Norway, often described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities.

Reviews for Can It Happen Here?

[mirekluza · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book should be read/listened by anyone who cares about where this world goes. It is thought provoking, enabling to realize that things we take for granted may be more fragile than it seems. It is not perfect, but its problems are small in comparison to what it brings. The main problem seems to be the fact that most of the authors have not yet fully realized the truly gigantic scope of the antidemocratic revolution which is coming. So the book is probably a bit too optimistic.

Minus one star is for the occasional unreasonable fascination by the American Constitution - I mean the kind of persuasion that it can almost magically stop any evil by its perfect system of checks... I have also met a several times the opinion that the Constitution is a kind of the root of all good - but only towards Americans and there was an unspoken implication that any kind of behaviour to foreigners is fine, because it does not cover them. As if there were no deeper principles concerning all people... One chapter also argues something dangerous taken from the playbook of the opponents - the "abusing/stretching of laws" in order to defend democracy. I could not help thinking about the saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Defending liberal democracy by non-democratic means would just hasten its destruction.

[Jados Moreno · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

An amazingly myopic mediation by some wildly privileged intellectuals. Only Sunstein and his friends could consider it fantasy to imagine America an authoritarian state. All the rest of us are living it.

[mrdickie · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A series of 17 articles, by different authors, about authoritarianism in America. Discusses whether our system of democracy is in danger and covers the question of why Donald J. Trump was elected.

[deusvitae · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A collection of essays written in the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency.

Much of the collection rotates around the question of whether America could become as authoritarian a state as would be seen in the 1930s or as manifest in other parts of the world. Most of the authors, for various reasons, do not believe so, but displayed various concerns.

I was looking specifically for the essay on authoritarianism by Stenner and Haidt, which represents a good introduction to Stenner's work on authoritarianism. I found its conclusion a bit much: sure, authoritarianism is a thing among a decent percentage of the population, but its existence need not demand a full capitulation to the authoritarian impulse.

"Constitutional Rot," "Paradoxes of the Deep State," and "The Resistable Rise of Louis Bonaparte" are the best essays in the work.

Overall the biggest criticism of the book, 2 years out, is that it was too much, too rushed, and too fast. One entire essay focusing on how Korematsu has never been repudiated by the Supreme Court is now almost entirely irrelevant, since in the last term Chief Justice Roberts did explicitly repudiate it. A lot of the viewpoints expressed represent the alarmism at the beginning; a similar collection written right now would be a bit more sanguine and rather different in tone and focus of concern...and whatever happens in the 2020 election, such a work would seem just as dated by 2022.

Such are the dangers of works such as these.