It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US

With a New Preface

A renowned expert on genocide argues that there is a real risk of violent atrocities happening in the United States

If many people were shocked by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations―crazed extremists who did not represent the real US. This book makes the case that, rather than being exceptional, such white power extremism and the violent atrocities linked to it are a part of American history. And, alarmingly, they remain a very real threat to the US today.

Alexander Hinton is an award-winning author on the topic of genocide in Cambodia who served as an expert witness at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. In It Can Happen Here, he explains how murky politics, structural racism, the promotion of American exceptionalism, and a belief that the US has achieved a color-blind society have diverted attention from the deep roots of white supremacist violence in the US’s brutal past. Drawing on his years of research and teaching on mass violence, Hinton details the warning signs of impending genocide and atrocity crimes, the tools used by ideologues to fan the flames of hate, the origins of the far-right extremist ideas of white genocide and replacement, and the shocking ways in which "us" versus "them" violence is supported by structural racism.

Now featuring a substantive updated preface discussing new dynamics related to the second Trump Administration, It Can Happen Here offers an essential new assessment of the contemporary dangers of democratic backsliding, political violence, and white power extremism in the United States. While revealing the threat of authoritarianism and atrocity crimes that loom over the country, Hinton offers actions we can take to prevent it from happening, illuminating a hopeful path forward for a nation in crisis.