It Can Happen Here: A Novel Look Backward

It Can Happen Here is set in the near future following the term of a rogue president. Its protagonist has kept a detailed journal of American politics of the period. He responds to numerous requests from family and friends for descriptive analyses of the 2020 elections and the resulting first year of the new administration. Drawing from the journal, he produces an unconventionally forthright study drawing upon fact and common sense.

Like his protagonist, author Max J. Skidmore has a background well suited for the task. Throughout a long life, he migrated far from his youthful extreme conservatism. His Ph.D. in American Studies enriched his views, as did living abroad. He has been a professor and dean at two American universities, and was the founding head of a political science department at another. He was CEO of a large library and research centre in India. He was senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Hong Kong. He has published widely, and was founding editor of a peer-reviewed academic quarterly. Never an ivory tower academician, he earned a pilot’s license, and has long practiced martial arts (holding several advanced black belts). He has produced It Can Happen Here as the final part of a trilogy of sorts, along with Unworkable Conservatism, 2017, and The Common Sense Manifesto, 2020. Each of these approached America’s politics from a different point of view. It Can Happen Here is his first application of fiction to complete the truth of the whole.