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• n  position or state of being dominant or in control
  that idea was in the ascendant
• n  someone from whom you are descended (but usually more remote than a grandparent)
• s  tending or directed upward
  rooted and ascendant strength like that of foliage"- John Ruskin
• s  most powerful or important or influential
  the economically ascendant class

• Since the 1990s, the ascendant mode of conservative American faith has been the megachurch.
• Just as Americans started studying Japanese in droves in the 1980s, when Japan's economy was ascendant, so today, as China rises, the world is embracing Mandarin.
• Katharine Hepburn seemed always on the ascendant, scaling the invisible ramp of her own confidence.

• ascendent
• ancestor
• antecedent
• root
• ascensive
• dominating

• descendant

News & Articles

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• Is Social Liberalism Resurgent?
  Over at Millennial , Robert Christian asks if social liberalism is on the ascendant, and notes that that the issue is more complicated than that. A great and important insight into the views of younger people.
  June 27, 2013 - National Catholic Reporter

Quotes

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• Robert Gates in ABC News
  Gates said the US approach to Iraq and Afghanistan would determine whether those countries and others pursue paths of gradual progress or the "forces of extremism and chaos will become ascendant."
• Rachel Maddow in San Francisco Chronicle
  The difference now, Maddow said, it "is sort of being done more self-consciously than it was then," Maddow said. "Then, the ascendant right wing was really looking to change America by steamrolling out of the country people who they felt like...