Cass R. Sunstein - Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America

Contents

The Dictators Handbook, US Edition
by Eric A. Posner

Constitutional Rot
by Jack M. Balkin

Could Fascism Come to America?
by Tyler Cowen

Lessons from the American Founding
by Cass R. Sunstein

Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy
by Samantha Power

Paradoxes of the Deep State
by Jack Goldsmith

How We Lost Constitutional Democracy
by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq

On It Cant Happen Here
by Noah Feldman

Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies
by Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt

States of Emergency
by Bruce Ackerman

Another Road to Serfdom: Cascading Intolerance
by Timur Kuran

The Resistible Rise of Louis Bonaparte
by Jon Elster

Could Mass Detentions Without Process Happen Here?
by Martha Minow

The Commonsense Presidency
by Duncan J. Watts

Law and the Slow-Motion Emergency
by David A. Strauss

How Democracies Perish
by Stephen Holmes

It Cant Happen Here: The Lessons of History
by Geoffrey R. Stone

Cass R. Sunstein

The United States is living under a military dictatorship. No one dares to call it thatbut thats what it is. Heres what happened.

A year ago, a terrorist organization launched a successful attack in Chicago. Two thousand people were killed. President Donald Trump declared a national emergency and imposed martial law. With overwhelming popular support, he ramped up existing surveillance policies. The government is now monitoring all emails and telephone calls. Americans know that they are being monitored. Most of them dont mind.

In President Trumps words, Privacy just isnt smart.

Harkening back to the late 1800s, the Trump administration made sedition a crime. Sedition includes disloyalty to the United States, which includes actions that demonstrate sympathy to our nations enemies. Under the sedition laws, thousands of people have been arrested. No one knows exactly how many.

Muslim-Americans must register with the authorities, and if they engage in suspicious behavior, the authorities will pay them a visit. Preventive detention has become routine. No one knows how many people have been detained. There is a lot of private violence against people who are thought to be disloyal. As a precautionary measure, tens of millions of people are displaying American flags on their automobiles and homes.

Its not easy to leave the country. If you do, beware: its tough to get back in. If you arent an American citizen, good luck.

Since the Chicago attack, Congress has capitulated to the presidents demands and enacted the laws he favors. The federal judiciary has upheld his programs. So far, the press remains free, at least as a formal matter. But the most popular news outlets enthusiastically embrace President Trumps programs. They are careful not to criticize him.

The majority of Americans dismiss the presidents critics as sources of fake news. The Department of Justice is starting to investigate some sources of fake news for possible sedition. Whether or not the investigations result in prosecution, the dissenting news outlets are increasingly marginal. In terms of impact, theyre failing, and their economic situation is increasingly dire.

In a recent speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump declared that the war on Islamic terrorism had no beginning and has no end.

Sure, I made all that up, and its just a story; its hardly likely. (Some of the chapters here will defend that view.) But if you find anything in the narrative even close to imaginable, we could try a few others. North Korea attacked Guam, and the president claimed emergency powers. China did something frightening and horrific, and the president claimed, We are now at war. The economy took a horrific downturn, and the president contended that he must do whatever needs to be done to protect the country. Better yet: a catastrophe or a threat took a form that we cannot even imagine, producing something like the situation just described.

Fiction writers, like Sinclair Lewis, Philip K. Dick, and Philip Roth, have ventured alternative histories of the United States, in which some kind of authoritarianism ends up triumphant. Maybe Germany won World War II. Maybe the United States fell under the spell of an authoritarian ruler. If you like alternative history (and I confess that I love it), its probably for one of two reasons. First, a tale of what-might-have-been can tell us something important and even profound about ourselves. It seizes on some feature of our national charactersmall or large, hidden or overtor some inclination that some people have, and it shows what might have happened if that feature or tendency had somehow flowered. Roths book The Plot Against America is a masterpiece in that vein.

What-might-have-beens warn us: inside every human heart, theres a fascist waiting to come out. George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the best analysis of that point, and it might well be true. After the attacks of 9/11, a lot of people discovered something like that, and their political party didnt matter.

Second, what-might-have-beens make an intriguing claim about a nations history: with a little push or shovewith an illness here, a death there, a single act of cowardice or courage, a coincidence around the cornerour world could have ended up a whole lot different. If Adolf Hitler had been smarter, maybe most of Europe would have ended up under the Nazis. Without Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States might have gone in all sorts of different directions in the 1930s and 40s. In 1936, Lawrence Dennis wrote a book titled The Coming American Fascism . Its not a warning. Its hopeful and optimistic.

With some twists and turns in the future, maybe Islamic terrorists will turn significant parts of the world in their preferred directions. Submission , by Michel Houellebecq, is all about that. Its not optimistic, but its arresting narrative arc makes the tale something other than totally implausible.

Houellebecqs focus is unusual. Since the 1930s, the question whether it can happen here typically asks about the rise of fascism. But thats a failure of imagination. Things can go wrong in a thousand different ways. Actually, they have. If the United States did not have the history it has had, speculative writers would spin tales that would defy belief, including the enslavement of millions of people in the American South; lynching countless people because of their skin color; decades of racial segregation; denial of the vote to women (until 1920, no less); the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coastand also (less bad, but not good) the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s and Nixons grotesque abuses in the 1970s.

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 Trumps words and deeds have put the can-it-happen-here question on the table. Several of the essays engage his election and his presidency. Some of the authors fear that an election of a left-wing extremist could create its own form of it.

But the discussions here reach well beyond President Trump, left-wing extremists, and any other contemporary figure. They are focused on big and enduring questions. For example:

Is a powerful central government a threat to libertyor a safeguard against it?

If a president wants to be a dictator, what steps would he take?

Can populism produce authoritarianism?

Whats the Deep State, and should we worry about it?

How robust is freedom of speech?

Can we rely on our courts?

Does the American Constitution solve the problem?

What can we learn from history?