Historian David Blight delivers this installment of Yale's 2024 DeVane Lecture Series, part of a course tracing the impact of slavery and racism on American institutions from the founding to the present. Blight frames the session around a question borrowed from the 1930s fear of fascism: can it happen here? He extends that question beyond slavery's enduring inequalities to the survival of pluralistic, constitutional democracy itself, identifying the hinge points in American history when that experiment nearly failed. The lecture builds on the course's earlier sessions covering Yale's own ties to slavery and the Civil War, connecting those legacies to political, constitutional, and economic structures still shaping the country. Blight's argument treats slavery not as a closed chapter but as a live current running through American governance, and the lecture asks how close the nation has come, and may still come, to losing its democratic footing.