How It Could Happen Here: The Potential Rise of American Tyranny.

• Author: Stockwell, Norman
• Position: BOOKS - Can It Happen Here?; On Tyranny; Everything You Love Will Burn - Book review

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 cleareyed 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...