All credit goes to John B. Judis, formerly of In These Times and the New Republic, for his ecumenical spirit. A lifelong democratic socialist, Judis has authored a scrupulously fair biography of William F. Buckley Jr., and has lately pondered the world-historical significance of Donald John Trump through the philosophical lens of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Watching Napoleon ride into the German university town of Jena in 1806 shortly before his great victory over the Prussian army, Hegel had an epiphany: He was seeing the mysterious forces of history embodied in one man. He later elaborated on this theme in his “Lectures on the Philosophy of World History,” a posthumous compilation of his lecture notes and transcripts from his time teaching at the University of Berlin between 1821 and 1831.
