It is painful to read this book. Not for any of the usual reasons. Quite the contrary. The prose is lively, the evidence more than sufficient, and the arguments persuasive. It is painful because since January 20, 2021, I have started every day with a profound sense of relief that Donald Trump is no longer president. As Honig says, the “four-year-long ambient rumble of rage, gaslighting, and resentment” (p. xv) appears to be over. Although I recognize that Honig is right that the “toxic flambé of misogyny, xenophobia, and racism” (p. xiii) is still seething within US political culture, frankly, I don’t want to think about Donald Trump any longer.

Yet, Bonnie Honig is a good teacher, and her pedagogical skills reach through the page to persuade me—and no doubt other readers as well—to keep paying attention. Among these skills is her engagement in careful feminist criticism.

“Feminist criticism,” Honig explains, “is different from feminist theory. Where feminist theory aims to be systematic, feminist criticism is more nimble and more pointed. Where the horizon of feminist theory is remote and its apparatus weighty, feminist criticism works from the particular to the general, not the other way around. Feminist criticism is oriented toward the time of now while connecting to larger patterns, contexts, and timelines. It proceeds by observation and offers readings of texts or events, not articulations of principles or deductions of norms, although its readings are compassed by feminist theory’s normativity” (p. 7).

While calling on feminist theory for her analytic lens, Honig turns to feminist criticism for its activist charge. Feminist criticism prepares us to identify feminization on the spot: the process of marshalling the distribution of strengths and weaknesses, the emotional economy of admiration and contempt, to produce structural hierarchies, “demeaning and degrading whole swaths of populations, outlooks, and behaviors” (p. 7). Anyone can be feminized: James Comey, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, the Canadians, Governor Whitmer, France. Anyone can be bullied. Just shove harder. Sneer longer. Be rougher.

Twenty years ago, Wendy Brown wrote a feminist theory essay entitled “Finding the Man in the State” (Feminist Studies, 18.1 [Spring 1992]: 7–34). It took some work, this finding. We had to look carefully at the interweavings of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and bureaucracy. Trump appears to have made it easy. In Trump’s state, “The Man” is just about all one can see. Every relationship in his world, as Honig explains, is defined through “domination and debt” (p. 132). Trump expects fealty. Others—cabinet secretaries, governors, members of Congress, scientists, heads of other states, citizens—should “vie for the king’s favor” (p. 135).

Brown warned us that finding The Man in the state requires “the mapping of an intricate grid of often conflicting strategies, technologies, and discourses of power” (p. 14). We thought masculinism had many faces, so we spent decades honing feminist thinking skills, developing arguments, recovering neglected histories, and asking fresh questions. Is all that theoretical sophistication beside the point now? After four years of being pummeled by the browbeater-in-chief, does it really all come down to who has the biggest…hands?

Yet, Bonnie Honig does not distinguish feminist theory from feminist criticism in order to dispense with the former, but to make sure the latter is always on tap when needed. In her pivot to current events, she finds new complexities that we need to address.

Honig does her work in these essays by paying close attention to detail, finding in a news report or a familiar movie scene the resources to develop critical thinking that can be shared to build more democratic life. She examines, to name a few, the films Gaslight, 12 Angry Men, and Bombshell; the tales of Harvey Weinstein, Stormy Daniels, Christine Blasey Ford, Robert Mueller, and Debbie Dingell; insights from Toni Morrison’s Home, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and the brave body politics of “Naked Athena.”

She helps us understand how Trump has left us reeling. It is his malign genius to wield shock as a blunt weapon. To be noisily, relentlessly, viciously outrageous. It disorients us. We are—to borrow some colorful slang from the Brits—gobsmacked by Trump and Trumpism. We are left stupefied.

Honig encourages us to cultivate different weapons: A discerning eye for the threads of racism, sexism, and all manner of contempt for Otherness woven into American self-understanding and American claims on the world. A capacity to give clear voice to our experience, to reorient ourselves with others as equals. The ability to remember different histories, better histories, necessary histories. To develop those weapons, Honig suggests, we have to detect struggles toward them: the yearning for mutuality, respect, the ability to act together for the good of everyone.

What is at stake, Honig suggests, is the very idea of a public at all. Publics require some negotiation with difference. Not members only. Not whites only. Not no girls allowed. In Trumpism, there is no commons. Trump’s contempt for people he casts as weak is one of his strategies for destroying the very notion of the commons: If people who get COVID-19 are unworthy of proper care, then not only is their suffering unimportant, but the very notion of public health lacks meaning. If soldiers who get captured or injured are “losers,” then our government is both neglecting those who served their country and undermining the very possibility of common defense.

Most of these short essays were initially published between 2017 and 2020 in Boston Review, The Contemporary Condition , Politics/Letters Quarterly, or The Los Angeles Review of Books. These essays exemplify public teaching. They are both an example and an encouragement of it. Feminist criticism, as Honig employs it, is preparation for democracy: it can “sensitize the senses and hone the empathy needed for living with others in the world as equals” (p. 7).

Armed with this strategy, perhaps Bonnie Honig can help us with another painful turn. Although I do not, now, wake up to Donald Trump being president, I do wake up each day to a country in which an awful lot of other residents wish that he was. A substantial number of our fellows evidently crave daily exposure to a bullying, bragging ignoramus who ran a disastrous presidency—one they cannot wait to reinstall in power.

So recognizing that we live with that big block of voters who embraced Trump— who will still be dangerous at the next election, and the one after that—what do we do? We might turn the skills of feminist criticism more toward them. Look at their neglected histories: large swathes of the white working class, on whom Trump counts as his base of support, not too long ago belonged to unions. Or perhaps their parents and their grandparents did. Belonging to a union means that one has a decent chance of learning to think in terms of “we.” To strengthen our tenuous hold on a commons, among the many avenues of activism that rightly clamor for our attention, feminist criticism suggests that we work for stronger, more democratic unions.