"With the election of Donald J. Trump, many people on both the left and right feared that America's 240-year-old grand experiment in democracy was coming to an end, and that Sinclair Lewis' satirical novel, It can't happen here, written during the dark days of the 1930s, could finally be coming true. Is the democratic freedom that the United States symbolizes really secure? Can authoritarianism happen in America? [The editor] queried a number of the nation's leading thinkers. In this ... collection of essays, these ... thinkers and theorists explore the lessons of history, how democracies crumble, how propaganda works, and the role of the media, courts, elections, and 'fake news' in the modern political landscape--and what the future of the United States may hold."--

Gradually, in fits and starts, American Government is becoming a cost-benefit state: government regulation is increasingly assessed by asking whether the benefits of regulation justify the costs of regulation. The rise of the cost-benefit state is creating a number of intriguing and novel challenges for policy analysts, for all branches of government, and for the law in general. If a statute allows agencies to balance lives against costs, how will the balancing occur? What are the legal limitations on the agencies' choice of how to balance costs and benefits? How can lives and health be turned into monetary equivalents? What is the value of life? How should an agency handle a small risk of catastrophe, from terrorism, nuclear power, natural causes or some other source? How, if at all, should future generations be counted? What does it mean to say that agencies can exempt trivial risks from regulation? How do we know that a risk counts as 'trivial'? How can it be legitimate for courts to allow agencies to make such exemptions? This book hopes to make some progress on such questions.