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Temptations of Tyranny
Rod Dreher’s conflicted support for President Trump illustrates a broader crisis among intellectual conservatives who fear the "soft totalitarianism" of liberal institutions yet embrace the hard authoritarianism of executive overreach. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, the essay contends that true freedom is preserved not through charismatic leaders but through the multiplication and decentralization of citizen power. Revitalizing democracy, it argues, requires stubborn, local acts of collective governance rather than the dangerous temptation to concentrate authority in a single figure.04-27-2025
Articles
February 12th, 2017
Peter Baehr is one of our best Arendt scholars, and his work explicating Arendt's thinking about totalitarianism is invaluable. In his essay "The Theory of Totalitarian Leadership," Baehr argues that the totalitarian leader is only comprehensible as a mouthpiece of what Arendt calls the masses.02-12-2017
February 5th, 2017
David Kaiser writes about his experience being interviewed by Steve Bannon for Bannon's film Generation Zero, a documentary about the financial crisis.02-05-2017
Happy Holidays! December 25th, 2016
Masha Gessen suggests that facts are not the field on which politics is played, and starting from them is a mistake:12-25-2016