Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America

Cass R. Sunstein

Mar 2018 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

. . . Or has it already? Experts in law, politics, and other fields discuss the state of American freedom—and its precarious future.

With the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump, many 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 experts on the subject. 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.

“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.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Cautionary pieces well-informed by history, legal theory, and patriotism.” —Kirkus Reviews

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
• Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago Law school professor and noted First Amendment scholar

About the author

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, where he is founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is the most cited law professor in the United States and probably the world. He has served as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and as a member of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. He is the winner of the 2018 Holberg Prize. His many books include the bestseller Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler), Simpler: The Future of Government, and Republic.com. A frequent adviser to governments all over the world and a columnist for Bloomberg View, he is married to the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power.