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...