Can It Happen Here?

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’s 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.

Can authoritarianism happen in the United States of America? Is freedom really secure? Acclaimed legal scholar, Harvard Professor, and New York Times bestselling author Cass R. Sunstein offers diverse perspectives on those timely questions and more in this collected volume of essays from distinguished contributors and influencers. Through thought-provoking essays, Sunstein explores how democracies crumble, how propaganda works, the lessons of history, and the role of the media, courts, elections, and “fake news."

Contributors to Can It Happen Here? 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

•Sean Wilentz, Professor of the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University

•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

•Adrian Vermeule, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School

•Duncan Watts, sociologist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research