This is a terrific book. Its topic is important and indeed urgent. The rise of Donald Trump—and of “Trumpism” and authoritarian populism more generally—raises serious questions about the future of liberal democracy. U.S. political scientists are taking notice. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018), which treats Trumpism through the lens of the comparative politics of democratization and de-democratization, has received much scholarly and journalistic attention. Bright Line Watch (http://brightlinewatch.org/), founded by John M. Carey, Gretchen Helmke, Brendan Nyhan, and Susan C. Stokes, deploys multiple methods “to monitor democratic practices, their resilience, and potential threats.” William E. Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism is a work of political theory that directly engages these same concerns, employing and expanding the approach to “agonistic democracy” for which its author has long been famous.

While Connolly in the past has written favorably, and wisely, about the Nietzschean idea of “untimeliness,” this book is nothing if not timely. Beautifully weaving together genealogical, empirical, and normative modes of argument, it offers deep insight into the “fascist” dimensions of Trumpism and the forms of “multifaceted democracy” that might serve to counter it. As Connolly explains in the Preface, the book is a “brief, preliminary study” that grew out of a graduate seminar on “What Was/Is Fascism” (p. xvii) that he quickly put together and taught in the fall of 2016, as the U.S. presidential campaign was coming to a head. Drawing upon and extending the author’s postings on Facebook and on his blog, The Contemporary Condition, and published, expeditiously, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivatives license, the book’s very form exemplifies its purpose—to contribute in a critical and accessible way to the defense and deepening of democracy at a time of crisis.

The book opens, cleverly and starkly, with the Oxford English Dictionary entry on “fascism.” In the Preface that follows, “Apples and Oranges,” Connolly explains the reasons, experiential and theoretical, why he wrote the book; why, contrary to a certain kind of methodological rigor mortis, he thinks it important sometimes to “compare apples and oranges” (p. xvii), drawing loose and perhaps unconventional connections between disparate phenomena when the situation, like Trumpism, calls for it (he states of his genealogical approach, sardonically, that “we practice a minor tradition in the human sciences” [p. xxi]); and why our time is particularly “dangerous,” and requires both intellectual and political care.

Each of the three core chapters does what its title suggests. Chapter 1 brilliantly compares “the rhetorical strategies of Hitler and Trump,” and also lays out the book’s core thesis: “Trump . . . is not a Nazi. He is, rather, an aspirational fascist who pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, a law-and-order regime giving unaccountable power to the police . . . and a practitioner of a rhetorical style that regularly creates fake news and smears opponents to mobilize support for the Big Lies he advances” (p. 7). Chapter 2, “Bodily Practices and Fascist Modes of Attunement,” develops a broadly psychoanalytic account of the kinds of bodily comportment encouraged by authoritarian/fascist demagogues such as Hitler and Trump (“hardness, ruthlessness, and obedience to arbitrary authority . . . these instincts now become set in the cast of the male jaw; the rigidity of his stance . . . the visceral agitations set off by a bloodred flag and black swastika; the determined gait” [p. 51]). Connolly here draws on a wide range of theorists, including Freud and Michel Foucault, but especially Klaus Theweleit’s account of Nazi hypermasculinism in Male Fantasies (2 volumes; 1987, 1989), and Theodor Adorno et al.’s analysis of The Authoritarian Personality (1950). This is the longest chapter in the short book, and while it ranges widely, it is very sharp, and Connolly is careful in the ways he outlines the stylistic affinities between Hitlerism and Trumpism and the kinds of behavior each typically evoked in staunch supporters, particularly in crowd settings.

If the first two chapters lay out the rhetorical and affective dimensions of Trumpism as a kind of “aspirational fascism,” American-style, the third chapter, “Democracy, Plurality, and Class Inequality,” addresses the challenges that Trumpism presents to democracy, and the ways that these challenges might best be addressed. It is here that Connolly develops the idea of “multifaceted democracy,” expanding on the themes of “agonistic respect” and “agonistic democracy” for which he is well known. His discussion is compact and rich. He makes very explicit the commitment to core institutions of liberal democracy that his writing has always presumed: “Let us set periodic elections, court and popular commitment to equal voting rights, a strong legislature, and periodic practices of citizen activism and agitation as at once critical to democracy and essential consolidation of its pluralist mode” (p. 83). At the same time, he insists that such institutions and practices, currently at risk, need to be energized by a range of social movements and institutional experiments animated by an egalitarian ethos.

Central to the author’s argument throughout the book is a theme that he first developed decades ago in a discussion of Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s 1973 classic The Hidden Injuries of Class, and that he extended more recently in his 2008 Capitalism and Christianity, American Style: the link between neoliberal forms of individualism, economic inequality, and white working-class alienation and resentment. Like many commentators, Connolly understands that Trumpism centers on the mobilization of this resentment, and that the opposition to Trumpism must center on a reversal of this resentment, by social-democratic-type public policies promoting greater economic security and equality, and by the promotion of a new “ethos of pluralism” capable of both recognizing differences and supporting new commonalities.

In his recent The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017), Mark Lilla argues that liberalism can only be revived by a repudiation of “identity politics” in the name of a new reformist politics of the broad (and mainly white) political center. Connolly, defending a “multifaceted democracy,” thinks such a centrist politics neither possible nor desirable. He understands that the politicized demands for “recognition” and “redistribution” are often in tension, and that any politics of democratic renewal must manage this tension without imagining that it can be easily or finally resolved. His book is appreciative and also critical of much that goes by the name of identity politics. And it is appreciative and also critical of labor-centered conceptions of politics, including Marxism, that rightly emphasize class but too often deny the plurality of struggles. Critical pluralism is one of Connolly’s bywords, and this short book wrestles with the dilemmas that such a pluralism presents.

One of the strengths of the book is indeed the way it combines nuanced advocacy of an “agonistic democracy” with an at times deeply personal and even agonizing honesty. Connolly is worth quoting at length: “It is thus a dangerous time. My sense is that the best hope to make reasonable adjustments to American decline and the Anthropocene will emerge as pluralists come to terms more actively with the real grievances of the working and lower middle classes at the same time that we resist manifestations of racism and patriarchy emanating from sections of those classes. Is that more than a hope? I am unsure. Sometimes I think that the tensions and binds I encounter reflect unresolved knots in my thinking. At others I suspect they reflect binds in a world that does not necessarily escape tragic possibility. Because I also think that a demand for purity often backfires—the purities of morality, community, race, markets, individualism—I allow such indecisions and worries to find expression as the study proceeds” (p. xxv)

Connolly is analytically serious about the sources of both Trumpism and the possible oppositions to it. He is also intellectually and ethically serious about the uncertainties we face and the limits of even our best attempts to comprehend and confront them.

Aspirational Fascism incorporates, refines, and reworks many of the ideas that Connolly has developed over the past 50 years, since his earliest 1960s critiques of mainstream behavioralist political science (see especially his 1969 The Bias of Pluralism). What is perhaps most interesting is the range of thinkers on whom he draws, including such writers as Foucault and Judith Butler, with whom has he recently been associated, but also Hannah Arendt, Franz Neumann, Karl Polanyi, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and many others not typically associated with his mode of political theorizing. Strikingly, Connolly favorably invokes a number of “late-modern pluralists” (p. 93) whom he has strongly criticized in the past, including Isaiah Berlin, Judith Shklar, Robert Dahl, John Maynard Keynes, and Jürgen Habermas. He argues in the book that a democratic renewal capable of countering Trumpism must have a “broad bandwith” (p. 89). One way of reading this book is as a theoretical enactment of such a broad approach; and the author does go to great length to draw a wide variety of interlocutors into conversation, to wrestle with them, and to be as clear as possible about what he appreciates and those opinions with which he disagrees.

I think, however, that the breadth of Connolly’s reach is more than a rhetorical enactment of the kind of pluralism he considers appropriate to our time. It is also a mobilization of the entire range of intellectual-political resources necessary to best understand how dangerous is our current moment. Within the political theory subfield—a subfield Connolly did much to shape, especially during the period in which he edited the journal Political Theory—he is known as a kind of radical democrat (indeed, he wrote regularly in the early 1980s for Sheldon Wolin’s short-lived journal democracy) and a “postmodernist” influenced by the writings of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and others. And there is no doubt that his work has foregrounded these themes. At the same time, Connolly is also a political scientist.

In fact, Aspirational Fascism is a book of political theory that is also a book of political science. As such, it exemplifies the insights that are possible when the discipline’s arbitrary, outmoded, and foolish methodological and subfield divides are effaced in the interest of political understanding. I am indeed struck by the similarities between this book and another written by another luminary of Connolly’s generation, Ira Katznelson’s 2003 Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. Kaztnelson’s book is largely an intellectual history of what he called the “political studies enlightenment” developed in the post–World War II period by a range of writers that included Arendt, David Truman, Dahl, and Polanyi. Katznelson’s purpose was to reread these writers as contributors to a “usable past” relevant to the revitalization of both liberal democracy and American political science. Whereas these writers had been associated with different disciplinary tendencies, and had not typically been read together, Katznelson suggested that they in fact were in conversation, explicit and implicit, with one another, and that we can improve our understanding by reading them together, and then thinking, together, both with and against them.

Connolly’s is a different kind of book, written at a different moment and for a different purpose. But its purpose is not that different, and I believe that it can usefully be read alongside Katznelson’s earlier book. Both writers came of age politically in the 1960s (if Katznelson’s can in part be read as a reflection on some of his own teachers at Columbia University, Connolly’s can be read as a revisiting of some of the “radical liberal” themes articulated by Arnold Kaufman, his teacher at University of Michigan); identified with the New Left and with its critiques of mainstream political science; and went on to have distinguished careers that shaped, in different ways, the current discipline of political science. Neither fit easily into the simple-minded categories that all too many political scientists take all too seriously. Both are now alarmed by the current crisis of liberal democracy and by the ascendancy of authoritarian populists who threaten the partial and precarious achievements of the past 50 years (for Katznelson, see the September 2015 symposium in Boston Review centered on his “Anxieties of Democracy”), and are moved to write as serious and engaged scholars supporting the defense and the deepening of these achievements.

Aspirational Fascism is a short book. But it is also a very big book. In 113 pages, Connolly demonstrates that political science at its best can be both timely and deep; can incorporate a range of approaches, seamlessly blending empirical and ethical-normative concerns; and can say something of real world importance. This is an aspiration well worth emulating, and it is one that has never been more needed than now.