The ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidential candidacy of the Republican Party has been both remarkable and, to most commentators, unlikely. In The Rise of Trump: America's Authoritarian Spring, Matthew MacWilliams argues that Trump's rapid rise through a bewildered Republican Party hierarchy is no anomaly; rather, it is the most recent expression of a long-standing theme in American political life, the tendency and temptation to an ascriptive politics--a political view that ascribes to any relatively disempowered group (whether defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual...

Religion's place in American public life has never been fixed. As new communities have arrived, as old traditions have fractured and reformed, as cultural norms have been shaped by shifting economic structures and the advance of science, and as new faith traditions have expanded the range of religious confessions within America's religious landscape, the claims posited by religious claims--and the respect such claims may demand--have been subjects of near-constant change. In The Limits of Religious Tolerance, Alan Jay Levinovitz pushes against the widely held (and often...