Includes bibliographical references and index.

The dictator's handbook, US edition / Eric A. Posner -- Constitutional rot / Jack M. Balkin -- Could fascism come to America? / Tyler Cowen -- Lessons from the American founding / Cass R. Sunstein -- Beyond elections: foreign interference with American democracy / Samantha Power -- Paradoxes of the Deep State / Jack Goldsmith -- How we lost constitutional democracy / Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq -- On "It can't happen here" / Noah Feldman -- Authoritarianism is not a momentary madness, but an eternal dynamic within liberal democracies / Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt -- States of emergency / Bruce Ackerman -- Another road to serfdom: cascading intolerance / Timur Kuran -- The resistible rise of Louis Bonaparte / Jon Elster -- Could mass detentions without process happen here? / Martha Minow -- The commonsense presidency / Duncan J. Watts -- Law and the slow-motion emergency / David A. Strauss -- How democracies perish / Stephen Holmes -- "It can't happen here": the lessons of history / Geoffrey R. Stone.

"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."-- Back cover.