A sometimes-repetitious but well-researched and effectively argued exploration of political vocabulary in the modern age.
Loughlin, a history professor at Ohio Northern University, explores the ideology of President Donald Trump in this nonfiction work.
The author says that he wrote this book “as an attempt to place Trumpism in the context of modern political categories and terminology,” and he emphasizes the “linguistic inadequacy” that one runs into when describing Donald Trump’s politics. Although conservatives claim Trump as an icon, his eclectic policies on issues such as tariffs don’t fit into the free trade mantras of prior Republican presidents, such as Ronald Reagan. Similarly, although Steve Bannon, a former White House Chief Strategist during Trump’s first term, described his former boss as a “populist” during the 2016 presidential campaign, Loughlin argues that the president “fails to fit many of the characteristics described in various formal conceptions of populism,” given the economically self-serving nature of his actual policies. Although the author states that Trump falls within a “right-wing authoritarian/fascistic spectrum,” he asserts that the president’s lack of a fixed ideology defies one of fascism’s defining characteristics, as “almost all of his positions could shift in an instant depending on his perceived needs.” The book explores various political adjectives on a term-by-term basis, with entire chapters devoted to concepts such as “authoritarian” and “woke,” and he offers valuable commentary on how traditional political vocabulary has become less useful for describing a “rapidly evolving political reality.” The author ultimately describes Trump as a “political vampire nourished by the resentments of the public” as he voices, exploits, and intensifies the grievances of his followers.
The author draws on his expertise in world history to contextualize Trump within the post-World War II history of the Republican Party, and he effectively compares him to other ideologically amorphous figures from previous eras. The book, for instance, notes similarities and differences between Trump and French politician Gustave Hervé (1871-1944)—a leading socialist and pacifist who later became an ultranationalist and fascist sympathizer; the latter was the subject of Loughlin’s 2015 biography, From Revolutionary Theater to Reactionary Litanies. The author is keenly aware of the paradoxes inherent in extremist movements, and although he acknowledges similarities between Trump and other authoritarian leaders, he’s careful to highlight the president’s unique “lack of ideology and almost incapacitating indiscipline.” At times, the prose feels repetitive, belaboring an argument with similar examples across multiple chapters. Nevertheless, this work offers an astute, nuanced analysis of both the current president and the limitations of modern political vocabulary. The book’s learned but accessible narrative is bolstered by visual diagrams, a methodological appendix, and more than 1,000 research endnotes that demonstrate the author’s firm grasp on world history, public policy, and political theory. This analysis of Trump’s policies is likely to alienate the president’s supporters, but it offers a sophisticated examination of the ways in which both the right and left have misinterpreted a polarizing figure. Overall, it’s an important reminder that “the words we use do matter even if we cannot settle on one set of terms and usages.”
A sometimes-repetitious but well-researched and effectively argued exploration of political vocabulary in the modern age.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9798334833197
Page Count: 381
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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