"To Call This Fascism Doesn't Do Justice to Fascism"

"Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi's coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump."

Andrew Sullivan in New York weighs in on the 2016 campaign.

"Modern Ways of Thinking about Politics Can without Undue Exaggeration Be Said to Begin with Hobbes"

"As for how Ryan squares this with the more 'liberal' thinkers who came after Hobbes, again the answer is context. Without Hobbes, there would have been no need for John Locke to react to him, and without Locke, no Paine or Jefferson, no Hegel or Marx."

In the Los Angeles Times, David L. Ulin reviews Alan Ryan's On Politics.