"Still Pack a Bold Punch"

"Both volumes urge recognition of illiberalism for what it is: a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy—not a loyal opposition with which one breaks bread and compromises. Both take a realistic view of American conservatism's peculiar susceptibility to conspiracy theories and toxic identity politics. Both implicitly reject the idea that the fever will break if only the forces of liberal democracy extend their hand in a show of good will. People are sometimes rational. Often, they are not."

At Politico, Joshua Zeitz returns to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Vital Center and Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

But Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins at Dissent call for "a break with the anxieties that drove Cold War liberalism."