In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, scholars and activists have been scrambling to make sense of what happened, and assess the potential impacts. For many, a question that arises is whether we are on the road to some form of authoritarian rule. Books like Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and George Orwell’s 1984 have become modern-day bestsellers.
Another newly popular book is Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here. The satirical tale tells of a populist leader rising to power and dismantling democratic structures. That played into fears that demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin might steer the United States into an extremist form of populism with a distinctly American feel—fears familiar among Americans today. The book concludes in uncertainty; the reader is left only with the notion that to protect our democracy, we must be ever-vigilant.
Cass R. Sunstein, law professor and former administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Barack Obama, has assembled a collection of essays by a number of academics and scholars under the title, Can It Happen Here?, seeking to investigate the questions raised by Lewis in the modern context. The general tone of the forthcoming book (with a March 6 release date) is expressed in Sunstein’s introduction: “This is not a book about Donald Trump, not by any means, but there is no question that many people, including some of the authors here, think that Trump’s words and deeds have put the can-it-happen-here question on the table.”
Sunstein, for his part, takes a clear-eyed view of the threats to democratic structures that could be occasioned by a “terrorist attack.” “If the American project is to be seriously jeopardized,” he writes, “it will almost certainly be because of a very serious security threat.”
This concern is echoed in several other essays in the book. Suspension of democratic rights in the event of an external threat has happened repeatedly in our not-so-distant past. Martha Minow, former dean of the Harvard Law School, reminds readers of the 1942 internment camps for Japanese Americans.
“Despite executive, judicial, and legislative repudiation, the precedent stands,” she writes. “Indeed, despite intense contemporaneous dissents and ongoing scholarly criticism, the Supreme Court has never overturned its decision, leaving the executive order [that created the detention centers] unscathed by constitutional challenge.”
The case, Korematsu v. United States, was decided in 1944 on a 6-3 vote. Four decades later, lead plaintiff Fred Korematsu wrote, “As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without trial or hearing. I would like to see the government admit they were wrong and do something about it, so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color.”
In fact, the decision was cited in 2016 by some supporters of Trump’s call for a “Muslim registry.”
Some of the book’s contributors also ponder whether outside actors may influence our institutions. One interesting and tremendously well-footnoted essay by Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations (who is married to Sunstein), discusses the history of foreign interference in U.S. democracy—most notably, the 1984 attempts by the Soviet Union to change the outcome of President Ronald Reagan’s bid for re-election.
Power notes that today’s media landscape is vastly different from that of thirty-four years ago, and warns that “because sowing divisions is seen by our adversaries to be in their interest regardless of whether there is an election occurring, we must be on our guard at all times.”
Many of the authors in Sunstein’s collection take an optimistic view of the strength of our constitution and democratic institutions. But, as University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner asks, “Could steady pressure against all of these institutions, all at once, cause them to crumble because they cannot rely on each other for support?”
In another essay, University of Chicago law professors Thomas Ginsburg and Aziz Huq look at the hidden declines in constitutional democracy, noting, “the quality of democracy can decline precipitously even as formal elections continue to be held.” They advise the public to “reject feel-good talk about American exceptionalism and embrace some of the founders’ bracing and necessary trepidation about the future.”
Many of the book’s seventeen essays echo these concerns over a slow erosion of democracy. “In fact each step might conform to the letter of the law,” writes David A. Strauss of the University of Chicago Law School. “But each step, legal in itself, might undermine liberal democracy a little bit more . . . . They can do this because the legal system of a functioning democracy is not set up to deal with a systematic effort to undermine democratic institutions.”
In one of the book’s final essays, New York University law professor Stephen Holmes writes, “The unthinkable is not yet probable, but neither can it casually be ruled out. Wherever we are headed, we need to look seriously again at the conditions under which democratic government, hollowed out from within, might gradually sicken and suddenly die.”
And Geoffrey R. Stone, also a professor at the University of Chicago and a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, concludes: “Those of us who would defend democracy against its drunkenly reckless enemies must keep firmly in mind democracy’s singular virtues even as we contemplate realistically all the reasons . . . faith in democracy has been declining around the world . . . . That, after all, is why we have ended up where we are.”
A second book addressing these themes is On Tyranny, a small volume released last year by Yale professor Timothy Snyder. The book rapidly became a bestseller in the first months of Trump’s presidency. It is a quick read, based around twenty “lessons,” each illustrated by a historical example, from responses to the rise of Hitler to events in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and today’s Russia.
The pocket-sized volume, with red stripes on the cover, is meant to be easily carried and referred to in times of need. “It’s like a ‘little red book’ for modern times,” a local Democratic Party activist told me, referring to the frequently carried Chinese “Little Red Book” of quotations from Mao Zedong. Snyder, who also quotes from Orwell, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Rowling’s Harry Potter, wants readers to study this history of resistance, or forget it at their peril. “And to make history,” he writes, “young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”
Finally, from a darker realm comes Vegas Tenold’s frightening volume, Everything You Love Will Burn. The title of this forthcoming book (release date: February 20) comes from a text message he received on the night of Donald Trump’s electoral victory from one of the interview subjects for this book.
Tenold, a journalist from Norway, embedded himself with a variety of groups on the radical right for a period of six years, beginning in 2011. It was a time, he recalls, when neo-Nazis, skinheads, and the Ku Klux Klan “weren’t even a blip on the media’s radar.” He remained embedded through the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which drew hundreds of white nationalists to the University of Virginia campus and resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer.
Tenold had a front-row seat to the unification of a variety of disparate white nationalist groups, in part through the planning and efforts of Matthew Heimbach, a radical right activist in his midtwenties who founded the Traditionalist Workers Party.
“His was not just an economical argument about bringing wealth and dignity back to parts of America that sorely needed it; it was also an appeal to people’s tribal nature,” Tenold writes of Heimbach, one of a small group of white nationalists he follows throughout the book. “Matthew realized that perhaps this was the key to bringing the far right together to celebrate what bound them as well as to fight those who would keep them down.” The enemies keeping “whites” down were “globalism and liberalism.”
Tenold’s book is on-the-ground reporting about a new American reality. It is full of violence and hatred, and ultimately quite frightening to read since, as Tenold notes, it is about “the resurgence of radical rightwing groups that, as of this moment, seem only to be growing more confident and exuberant by the day.” But Tenold, at least, remains optimistic: “I became convinced that the path to defeating extremism was through understanding it.”
Can it happen here? These books serve to remind us that it already has, and now it is our imperative to respond.
Norman Stockwell is Publisher of The Progressive.