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Book Reviews in this Issue $13.00 Fall 2017 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY Christopher H. Achen and Sumit Ganguly, Deadly Impasse: Darren Kew, Civil Society, Larry M. Bartels, Democracy Indo-Pakistani Relations at the Confl ict Resolution, and for Realists: Why Elections Dawn of a New Century Democracy in Nigeria POLITICAL Do Not Produce Responsive PAUL KAPUR A. CARL LEVAN Government p. 561 p. 575 ROBERT ERIKSON SCIENCE p. 549 Donald F. Kettl, Escaping Omar G. Encarnación, Out in the Jurassic Government: How Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Charles S. Bullock III, to Recover America’s Lost Rights Revolution QUARTERLY Ronald Keith Gaddie, and Commitment to Competence JORDI DÍEZ Justin J. Wert, The Rise and Fall BRYAN D. JONES p. 577 of the Voting Rights Act p. 562 MARGARET M. GROARKE Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, p. 550 Michael F. Oppenheimer, Pivotal Continental Drift: Britain and Countries, Alternate Futures: Europe from the End of Empire The Journal of Public and International Affairs Daniel Béland, Philip Rocco, Using Scenarios to Manage to the Rise of Euroscepticism and Alex Waddan, Obamacare American Strategy GEORGE ROSS Wars: Federalism, State MARCUS HOLMES p. 578 Politics, and the Affordable p. 564 Care Act Doris Marie Provine, Barak Mendelsohn, The al-Qaeda Monica W. Varsanyi, Paul G. Lewis, MICHAEL K. GUSMANO Franchise: The Expansion of p. 551 and Soctt H. Decker, Policing al-Qaeda and Its Consequences Immigrants: Local Law Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar AUSTIN LONG Enforcement on the Front Lines The Varieties of Collective Financial Statecraft: The BRICS Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy p. 565 KRISTEN HILL MAHER and China and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Kjell Engelbrekt, High-Table p. 580 Order SAORI N. KATADA, CYNTHIA ROBERTS, AND LESLIE ELLIOTT ARMIJO Diplomacy: The Reshaping of Sangay K. Mishra, Desis Divided: TOM LONG International Security Institutions p. 553 The Political Lives of South Asian DAVID A. DEESE Americans Chinese Thinking on the South China Sea and the Future Kate Baldwin, The Paradox of p. 567 NATALIE MASUOKA Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Marwan M. Kraidy, The Naked p. 581 of Regional Security Africa Blogger of Cairo: Creative Timothy P.R. Weaver, Blazing the FENG ZHANG MICHAEL G. SCHATZBERG Insurgency in the Arab World p. 555 Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political WILLIAM LAFI YOUMANS Development in the United States p. 569 John P. Burke, Presidential and the United Kingdom “Whither We Are Tending”: Interrogating the Retrenchment Power: Theories and Dilemmas Simon Reid-Henry, The Political RACHEL MELTZER Narrative in U.S. Environmental Policy DIANE J. HEITH Origins of Inequality: Why a More p. 583 p. 556 Equal World Is Better for Us All Johannes Kadura, The War DAVID J. SOUSA AND CHRISTOPHER MCGRORY KLYZA DANIEL P. HAWES Melanye T. Price, The Race after the War: The Struggle for p. 570 Vol. 132 Number 3 Fall 2017 Whisperer: Barack Obama and Credibility During America’s Exit the Political Uses of Race James W. Endersby and from Vietnam Making America Grate Again: The “Italianization” of MICHAEL JAVEN FORTNER William T. Horner, Lloyd Gaines SIMON TONER American Politics and the Future of Transatlantic Relations p. 558 and the Fight to End Segregation p. 584 JEFFREY L. LITTLEJOHN in the Era of Donald J. Trump Susan Turner Haynes, Chinese p. 572 Melissa Deckman, Tea Party Nuclear Proliferation: How Women: Mama Grizzlies, MARCO CLEMENTI, DAVID G. HAGLUND, AND ANDREA LOCATELLI Global Politics Is Transforming Vincent Pouliot, International Grassroots Leaders, and the China’s Weapons Buildup and Pecking Orders: The Politics and Changing Face of the American Modernization Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy Right The Racial Gap in Wait Times: Why Minority Precincts Are DAVID BACHMAN PATRICK THADDEUS JACKSON CHRISTOPHER C. TOWLER p. 559 p. 573 p. 586 Underserved by Local Election Offi cials STEPHEN PETTIGREW Book Reviews www.psqonline.org Published since 1886 by the ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE Making America Grate Again: The “Italianization” of American Politics and the Future of Transatlantic Relations in the Era of Donald J. Trump MARCO CLEMENTI DAVID G. HAGLUND ANDREA LOCATELLI For decades the Republican Party has embraced America’s open, future-oriented nationalism. But when you nominate a Silvio Berlusconi you give up a piece of that.1 LATE ON THE NIGHT of Tuesday, 8 November 2016, when pundits on America’s many television networks were suddenly beginning to grasp that the all-but-guaranteed election of Hillary Clinton as the 45th president of the United States was not going to occur, a member of the team covering the day’s events for PBS offered what, in our view, was 1David Brooks, commenting on the nomination of Donald J. Trump as Republican candidate for president, in “Democrats Win the Summer,” New York Times, 29 July 2016. MARCO CLEMENTI is an associate professor of International Relations at the University of Pavia (Italy) and visiting lecturer in International Relations and Tourism at the University of Italian Switzerland, in Lugano (Switzerland). DAVID G. HAGLUND is professor of political studies at Queen’s University in Kingston (Ontario). ANDREA LOCATELLI is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Catholic University in Milan (Italy). POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 132 Number 3 2017 | www.psqonline.org # 2017 Academy of Political Science DOI: 10.1002/polq.12655 495 496 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY a most intriguing clue for comprehending what had happened: the American voters, remarked Jeff Greenfield, had just elected Silvio Berlusconi.2 Now, this was hardly the first time that the Republican candidate had been compared with an Italian political figure, nor would it be the last. Our purpose in this article is to reflect systematically upon this “Italianization” of American domestic politics, so curiously on display during the most recent campaign—for it is not every day, to put it mildly, that one finds such frequent appeal being made to Italian “objective correlatives” in a bid to explicate American ones. Asinteresting,onthefaceofthings,asthismightbetoItalian scholars and their readers, we posit our Italianization thesis because it speaks to two important questions surrounding the future of American domestic and foreign policies. The first question is this: which of the two leading Italian analogies so often bruited about during the election campaign, Benito Mussolini or Silvio Berlusconi, makes the most sense (to the extent that either makes any sense), and with what implications for American domestic politics? The second question is a derivative one and concerns the potential “lesson” that our Italian tutorial might have for the quality of America’s future relations with its transatlantic allies. Of course, it was not just with Italian political figures that Donald J. Trump was being compared throughout the long and, at times, some- what surreal campaign of 2016.3 At various moments, one could hear or read accounts that Trump resembled no one so much as he did any of a gamut of former and current personages, usually assembled from a rogues’ gallery, given that few, if any, of the analogy wielders could be deemed to be partisans of the Republican nominee and, therefore, likely to want to suggest admirable analogues. Comparisons extended all the way from the ridiculous (Adolf Hitler) to the absurd (Nigel Farage),4 with a few observers even invoking midrange nonentities such as Hugo Chavez. Sometimes, however, purely homegrown com- parisonsseemedtobetheonlyonesthatcounted,forinstance,Trump 2Accessed at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/pressrelease/pbs-newshour-announces-election-night-2016- special-coverage-plans/, 19 May 2017. 3For the flavor of that electoral season, see Maureen Dowd, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (New York: Twelve, 2016). 4In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote in June 2016, the lead editorial published in Canada’s national newspaper somewhat bizarrely interpreted the British tally as a victory for Donald Trump. “Who ever imagined,” harrumphed the editorialist(s), in drawing a parallel with Nigel Farage, “that Britain— rational, modern, sophisticated Britain—would turn out to be the wind beneath Mr. Trump’s wings?” See “Bloody Old England,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 25 June 2016. MAKING AMERICA GRATE AGAIN | 497 as Huey Long, or as Father Charles Coughlin, or as Joseph McCarthy— and even, to some rare analogists not spooked by the prospect of a Trump presidency, as Andrew Jackson.5 One commentator, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, insisted that when all was said and done, Trump had to be considered sui generis, beyond the range of commensurability with political figures from other places or other times,becausehewas“only and absolutely of America” in the early twenty-first century. Yet in so declaring, even Cohen could not resist the Italian tutorial, detecting as he did very disturbing similarities between Trump and Mussolini.6 Nor was Cohen alone in highlighting Il Duce as a potentially useful trope for understanding the stakes of the American election. Many observers will tell you that there is a likelihood of fascism coming to America, for some of the very same reasons that it arrived in Italy following the First World War.7 This fear (or hope, if you are a follower of America’s “alt-right”) seems rather far-fetched to us, for a variety of reasons upon which we elaborate in the following section. Nevertheless, we do consider there to be merit—possibly even a bit of perverse psychic comfort—to be had from that other Italian symbol, Berlusconi. Michael Walzer once so elegantly wrote, of symbols, that they “tell us more than we can easily repeat.”8 Indeed, they do; our purpose in these pages is to reflect upon the claim made by quite a few commentators that Trump is Berlusconi and to ask what the implications of such a pairing might be.9 Again, the implications are of two sorts—those that will find their great- est salience in the domestic political arena in the United States and those whose importance will bear most heavily upon the quality of America’s transatlantic relationships.