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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
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On Protests, On Violence and on Hannah Arendt
Two Arendtian scholars at Indiana University in Bloomington have turned to Hannah Arendt to make sense of an incredibly tense situation on the University of Indiana Campus. In recent weeks, police have twice cleared encampments in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. In the midst of such a standoff, Jeff Isaac, a Professor of Political science, published an Open Letter to the students in Dissent Magazine, the journal that once published Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock.”05-16-2024
Carefully Curating Our Shibboleths
A ceasefire, Zadie Smith writes for The New Yorker, is an ethical demand, not a politics. It is a cri de coeur, and it is natural and right that young people let their hearts cry out. But what would it mean to forego shibboleths and just speak from the heart? Is it possible to scream and yet not trade in overly simplified slogans?05-11-2024
Permissible But Bad Speech
Danielle Allen makes the important distinction between impossible speech and speech that is permissible and yet bad. She writes, "Permissible but bad speech is like peeing in the swimming pool — it doesn’t break the law, but it violates the norm of respect for others. On college campuses, impermissible speech is met with formal adjudication and sanctions. But how should we respond to permissible but bad speech?"05-11-2024
Con-solatio, Compassion, and Friendship
I was honored this week to have been chosen by Con-solatio to receive their annual Compassion Award at a ceremony in New York City. Con-solatio sends missionaries around the world to the poorest and most forlorn places on the planet. The goal is not to convert people or to educate them or to build them houses. It is simply to console them, to show them compassion, to be their friends.05-05-2024
Compassion and Politics
The Arendt Center will host a talk on Thursday this week by Mira Sucharov, a member of the Palestinian-Israeli non-profit A Land For All. The group seeks to imagine a future in which the 15 million inhabitants of Israel-Palestine live together between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. The form of such a togetherness would be a federation in which both Jewish and Palestinian peoples have their own sovereign states and yet live amongst each other.05-05-2024
On Campus Protests
Hannah Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a fundamental right and a distinctly American form of politics. Unlike Henry David Thoreau, who understood civil disobedience as an act of individual conscientious action, Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a form of collective political dissent. It is a group phenomenon that publicizes widely shared minority opinions via extraordinary means to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority.04-28-2024
Power and the University
George Packer reminds us of the liberal vision of the university and worries that such an ideal is being lost. Packer writes: "A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance . . . When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness."04-28-2024
René Girard and Internet Influencers
René Girard was one of the great social theorists of the 20th century. His book Violence and the Sacred is a classic account of the problem of violence in society, the way that so many of our religious and legal rituals are designed to quell the human urge for violence and reassert peace. The rituals of sacrifice and even today the ritual of legal punishment allows a community to exercise its desire for violence legally and with priestly sanction on one person or even one sacrificial animal–a scapegoat. The scapegoat can’t be innocent, we must believe our violence against the scapegoat must be justified, even sacred.04-28-2024
Symbolic Beliefs
I was recently in Mechelen, a small and lively city in Belgium, to speak to a group of mayors from the European Union about diversity and polarization. My address to the European mayors in Mechelen made three points. First, Polarization is not necessarily something to be feared and derided. Second, while polarization can be dangerous, it only becomes dangerous when our politics fails. And, finally, politics is based on talking with one another in ways that nurture a common sense.04-21-2024