Anthropologist Alexander Laban Hinton's reflective analysis takes its title from Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here to sound the alarm against the contemporary white power movement in the United States and its potential for mass violence. Hinton, as a specialist in the Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, addresses this topic in an unconventional yet inviting style. The book interweaves accounts of key moments of Donald Trump's campaign and presidency and Hinton's testimony at the trial of Nuon Chea with discussions of teach-ins delivered to help his students understand and process events such as the 2017 Charlottesville rally or the 2018 Tree of Life attack. It is this eclectic approach that allows Hinton to advance his central thesis that elements of the contemporary political landscape of the United States resemble those that led to the Cambodian genocide, and that Americans must not ignore the fact that such horrors could happen again in the United States in their lifetime.
It Can Happen Here is one of many works published by academics and journalists since the 2016 election that so shocked many pundits and observers, which all seek to clarify how Trump has been able to gain the upper hand within the Republican Party and how the white power movement has been reenergized by this seismic shift. Like Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment (2019), Hinton looks to America's past to explain this contemporary phenomenon. Whereas McVeigh and Estep seek to compare the historical and structural conditions between the Trump campaign and the 1920s, when millions of white Americans joined the Second Ku Klux Klan, Hinton instead focusses on the United States's longer history of genocides against indigenous communities and the brutal racial oppression against Black people during enslavement and segregation, and thereafter. More importantly, as a specialist on genocides, Hinton also looks to the future. Through the discussions with his students, he outlines the warning signs for potential mass violence in the United States and the strategies needed to avert such brutality, including remembrance, reconciliation, and deradicalization. Other key works such as Alexandra Minna Stern's excellent Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (2019) provide a more meticulous analysis of the evolving strategies and ideologies employed by elements of the alt-right and their cousins in the white power movement. Nonetheless, Hinton's book stands apart in its discussions of pedagogy and how we can engage our students to think critically.
For those working in higher education, the detailed discussions of Hinton's teach-ins provide a valuable model of how to navigate the increasingly common conversations we have with our students on America's white-supremacist past and its most violent manifestations in the present. By paraphrasing their dialogues, Hinton outlines how he helps his students to move away from assumptions and superficial critiques of what drives white power activists to violence and hate. For instance, in chapter 2, Hinton asks his students to look beyond Trump and his rhetoric to understand why white power activists marched in Charlottesville. Through the simple question “What makes a man start fires?” Hinton and his students work through Doris Bergen's framework for understanding the Holocaust by examining the historical, structural, and immediate conditions that led to genocide in Europe during the Second World War and in 1970s Cambodia, and compare these to the United States. These detailed overviews of Hinton's application of critical pedagogy in the classroom present an engaging account of how to direct these complex conversations, particularly when it comes to reconciling opposing perspectives and exploring contentious topics.
The text challenges the myth of American exceptionalism when it comes to mass violence and genocide, continually highlighting that “it has happened here before and can happen again” (233). The work is also ambitious in its coverage of such a broad range of concerns and perspectives, and despite a somewhat unusual discursive style, the writing is accessible, personal, and engaging. Yet, while one of its main subject matters is the American white power movement and its resurgence in the public sphere during the rise of Donald Trump, It Can Happen Here does not fundamentally alter our understanding of either of these topics. Hinton's work often relies on media reports of the past seven years to trace the changing political landscape, and although it cites several foundational works in the study of American white supremacy, rarely are we treated to a rigorous analysis of key aspects of the developing scholarship that can shine a new light on America's past and present race relations and the violent white power movement. As such, the book revisits developments and issues in the history of American white supremacy that should be familiar to most scholars working in the field. Still, newcomers to these topics and students will find it helpful as it manages to summarize several important aspects and provides a helpful introduction to key ideas and themes. More importantly, Hinton's book is an effective and helpful example of active and critical pedagogy that will appeal to readers working in higher education that seek to expand their teaching and engage their students. Thus even those well versed in the history of American white supremacy will find insight in Hinton's work and benefit from reading this text.
