I was honored to learn that Thom Hartmann, the thoughtful progressive author, columnist and syndicated radio and Web television host selected It Could Happen Here as his “Independent thinker of the Month” book review. An excerpt from his extensive review follows:

The United States “is not immune from history,” Judson says, and lays out the factors that he believes could well lead us to a collapse/revolution that would permanently alter the landscape of this nation. The most important of these factors, he suggests, is that revolutions are likely to happen not when people experience the most privation (which is what conventional wisdom suggests) but, instead, when people’s expectations for the quality of their lives are dashed quickly, unfairly, and without recourse.

The American Dream is, for most Americans, no longer viable, as Judson documents in frightening detail in this book. It’s been replaced by underwater home values, massive credit card debt, the most rigid economic/social order in the industrialized world (for the first time in two centuries, in America today the most reliable predictor of a child’s economic future is his parents’ economic status), and a growing certainty that the political game has been rigged by big wealthy interests at the expense of average working people.

It may seem odd, but the latest terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit is not what’s got me worried. What’s got to me is a very short book by a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management titled It Could Happen Here (HarperCollins Publishers, 2009). The author, Bruce Judson, argues that American democracy is at risk not because of outside attack but because a 30-year rise in income inequality is leading the nation toward political instability and/or revolution. The strongest part of his argument is that income inequality has reached unheard of levels, with the top 10 percent of American families receiving nearly 50 percent of all U.S. household income, the largest level of income inequality ever officially recorded!

So why lose sleep over this kind of thing? Because now when the Community Service Society does polls about low-income working families in New York City (over three million people), signs of what the author is talking about are emerging across virtually every demographic. Our latest survey, The Unheard Third 2009, reveals job losses at unprecedented levels, and hunger and lack of health care escalating fast. Savings for a majority are almost nonexistent. And after welfare reform, our safety net programs are woefully underfunded to handle the fallout of the “Great Recession.”

What’s also evident in Congress and on the street is a generalized anger among the bedrock of the Democratic Party, particularly the Congressional Black Caucus, that the bailout of big banks and large financial institutions in the first stimulus may have saved the financial system, but seems to have only a small effect on bringing the unemployment rate down, particularly for low-wage workers. Black voters won’t turn against the Obama administration but, having led nonpartisan voter registrations a number of times in my career, I’m deeply concerned that it will be difficult if not impossible to motivate first time voters — particularly young people in urban America — to get registered and vote in the numbers that helped the president win his first term. And I would be hard pressed to make the case for why they should.

Unemployment rates for black men without a high school diploma have now enter territory never seen in my lifetime, over 24 percent, and that doesn’t count those who have given up trying to find work. So with Wall Street coming back strong, with only a slight moderation in bonuses, a lot of hard-working people of all races and regions are going to see high rates of unemployment and lower wages for years to come and, as Judson posits, they’re going to want to blame someone – some party or some group.

So we may sneer at “tea baggers,” anti-immigrant zealots, and “birthers,” but we better take what they represent very seriously. The country and its political parties have to be very careful not to play with the explosive mixture of unheard of levels of income inequality and significant racial and demographic shifts because these have the potential of doing what the Northwest underwear bomber never could — seriously undermine a democracy that we thought was bullet-proof.

The Republican Party’s partisan closing of ranks on health care, and its efforts to tear down any bipartisan effort, even if it threatens the county’s well being, seems to be matched by Democrats’ seemingly tone deaf response to the general suffering going on among the working poor of all races. Perhaps we should add rapid job creation and WPA programs to our list of what we should be looking for, along with long waits for body scans at the airport.

Last week’s headlines about Wall Street’s latest bonus windfalls once again raise a question most basic: How much greed at the top before America says enough? How much more before some Americans, incensed by the contrast between that greed and their daily struggle to get by, take matters — rashly — into their own hands?

Might we see, someday soon, unemployed nuclear engineers threatening America with radioactive dirty bombs? Might we experience a home-grown “terrorist act” that ends up collapsing the United States we we know it?

Bruce Judson thinks we might — and we would be wise to listen to his warning.

“History teaches that there are limits to the extent of acceptable economic inequality in any society,” this senior faculty fellow at Yale University’s business school writes in his chilling new book, It Could Happen Here. “We have moved beyond these limits.”

Judson’s slim new volume imagines what might happen if a small group of Americans – infuriated by the demise of the American dream — decided “to use extreme and abhorrent methods to voice its rage.” This gripping and plausible foray into futuristic fiction then segues into a well-argued, totally nonfiction brief against present-day America’s extreme — and growing — inequality.

The brief reads well. A lawyer by training and an entrepreneur by career, Judson knows first-hand how big money gets made in America today. The super rich do not awe him. But their impact does scare him.

America’s intense concentration of wealth and income over the last three decades, Judson explains, has undermined our middle class economic security. Some eight to ten million families, he notes, now face foreclosure. And nearly 80 percent of America’s middle class households lack enough in savings “to survive more than three months at three-quarters of their current spending.”

“If millions of people — who believe their anger is justified — lose their homes, jobs, retirements, and dreams, can we realistically expect continued loyalty to our system?” Judson asks. “In particular, how will angry people react if they feel their lives have been unfairly ruined for the benefit of a small number of people at the top?”

Judson, a self-described “ardent capitalist” and “patriot,” considers It Could Happen Here “a wake-up call” for a “dysfunctional democracy.” The Great Recession, he believes, constitutes just “the first of the dangerous perils that face the nation as a result of unsustainable economic inequality.”

We obviously need to recover from recession, Judson readily acknowledges, as soon as we can. But economic recovery by itself, he stresses, won’t reverse the dynamics — and dangers — that our current inequality creates: “We have been placing untenable stress on the middle class for too long, through boom times and recessions, for economic recovery to be the only answer to our ills.”

The reversal we need, Judson goes on to note, “will require a far more radical realignment of the way wealth is distributed within the society.”

What might that realignment entail? It Could Happen Here outlines, in broad strokes, an answer. But Judson offers no step-by-step gameplan for change. He aims instead to jolt, to help a confused and frustrated America understand what we endanger when we let wealth cascade year after year into precious few pockets. At that task he succeeds.

Read this book and see for yourself. Even better, give this book to friends and family who need to see what you already do.

Sam Pizzigati is the Editor of Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Last year, he played an active role on the team that generated The Nation magazine’s special issue on extreme inequality, which issue recently won the 2009 Sidney Hillman Prize for magazine journalism.

“All readers will not agree with Judson, but his book will excite argument and discussion, serving as an excellent springboard for considering these important, timely issues.”

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This review appeared in Booklist, Oct 15, 2009.