It Can Happen Here

By Joe Conason, Thomas Dunne Books. Posted February 23, 2007.

In light of the series of laws passed in Congress and precedents set by the Bush administration, people have good reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in America.

The following is excerpted from Joe Conason's new book, "It Can Happen Here" (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).

Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of "it" is.

To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel "It Can't Happen Here," "it" plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America's most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe's fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as "it."