If there is one thing you are supposed to know about Mark Lilla, it is his status as a public intellectual. A professor of humanities at Columbia, Lilla is a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books who frequently writes about other intellectuals like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin. His writing shows the strengths and also the self-deceiving limitations of his class when he writes about subjects that intersect with politics. To briefly summarize Lilla’s most recent foray into our current national predicament, he argues emphatically that Trumpism is not conservatism, and is also not fascism....