Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred

A highly esteemed historian reflects on the dangerous descent of democracy into populism—particularly in the United States.

The Washington Post - Owen Harries

Lukacs's latest work -- he has published more than 20 books of history, including such classics as Five Days in London, May 1940 and The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler -- is not of that kind. It is, rather, a rich and sober meditation by a mind that knows much, including the limits of what it knows, about the nature, relationships and mutations of the forces that have shaped the politics of the Western world over the past century. Its mood -- allowing for occasional waspish deviations, as when he dismisses one widely respected theorist as a muddled and dishonest thinker and another as an idiot savant -- is discursive and reflective, almost elegiac at times.