LIVE from the NYPL | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Bartos Forum, on March 5, 2018.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here imagined a dystopian future in which American democracy is bent to the will of a demagogic strongman whose tyranny propels the country into undreamed-of chaos. In 2018, Harvard Professor Cass R. Sunstein polls some of the great thinkers of our generation to ask how democracy in the United States could actually crumble and whether authoritarianism can actually happen here. He will discuss the resulting volume, Can It Happen Here, which he edited, with Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, who is also his wife. Sunstein and Power will speak with David Cole, National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
