It Can Happen Here

Product Description “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.” ---Sinclair Lewis, author of It Can’t Happen Here, 1935 For the first time since the Nixon era, Americans have reason to doubt the future---or even the presence---of democracy. We live in a society where government conspires with big business and big evangelism; where ideologues and religious zealots attack logic and the scientific method; and where the ruling party  encourages xenophobic nationalism based on irrational, manufactured fear. The party in power seems to seek a perpetual state of war to hold on to power, and they are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their ends. The question must be asked: Are we headed toward the end of American democracy? Nobel Prize--winning author Sinclair Lewis depicted authoritarianism American-style in his sardonically titled dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here, published in 1935. Now, bestselling political journalist Joe Conason argues that it can happen here—and a select group of extremely powerful right-wing ideologues are driving us ever closer to the precipice. In this compelling, impassioned, yet rational and fact-based look at the state of the nation, Conason shows how and why America has been wrenched away from its founding principles and is being dragged toward authoritarianism. Praise for the books of Joe Conason: “A comprehensive, well-researched indictment of a bunch of nasty people who really deserve it.” ---Molly Ivins on Big Lies “When Joe casts his eye on the cadres of the right, they invariably emerge battered, with their arguments filleted, their sources of money exposed, and their real motives laid bare.” —Michael Tomasky, former editor, The American Prospect, on The Raw Deal “A hundred years from now the primary source on the so-called Clinton scandals will still be The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.” ---James Carville on The Hunting of the President About the Author Joe Conason writes for Salon.com and has written a popular political column for The New York Observer since 1992. He is the author of Big Lies, The Raw Deal, and, with Gene Lyons, The Hunting of the President. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, and many other publications. He is a regular commentator on Air America Radio. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Madison’s warning, delivered during the early years of the American Republic in a congressional debate over presidential powers, has been vindicated many times since then. For reasons that the fourth president could not possibly have foreseen, his observation may be even more urgent now. And when he further observed that war empowers the nation’s chief executive with “all the means of seducing the minds . . . of the people,” he seemed to anticipate how a modern president might be tempted to exploit a state of “continual warfare”—such as an indefinitely extended “war on terror,” also known as “the long war”—to secure political domination. In American history, authoritarian excess has often accompanied war (or the fear of war), from the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Madison’s political opponents to Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of habeas corpus; from the Red Scare of World War I to the internment of Japanese in World War II; from Joseph McCarthy’s depredations at the beginning of the cold war to Richard Nixon’s abuses during the war in Vietnam. Those wartime encroachments eventually receded, owing to the end of hostilities or the vitality of democratic resistance. But what would happen in a nation beset by continual warfare? How will liberty and democracy survive what the Pentagon and the president predict will be decades of a long war against terror? In literature, too, war has been depicted as the precondition for dictatorship. Two