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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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Laughing at Criminals
Donald Trump is a small-time crook whom the ruling classes have permitted to become a medium-time crook. As Bertolt Brecht once noted, “If the ruling classes permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he became a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature." The question before us is whether we will allow Trump to become a great crook with tragic consequences for the American Republic.06-01-2024
Social Media, Anxiety, and the Common World
In a review of Jonathan Haidt’s book Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Michael Toscano argues that social media is “designed to provide artificial imitations of what human animals require and fool them into believing they are receiving the real thing." For Toscano, Haidt’s analysis raises fundamental questions about the possibility of a common world, an idea most fully articulated by Hannah Arendt. 05-25-2024
A Look Into Our Spring Social
We were thrilled to have our Arendt Center members, student fellows and the broader Bard community join us at Bard College for our Spring Member Social and End of Year Gathering! Membership is an opportunity to join a rich community of thinkers, writers, activists, scholars. It comes with two free entrances to our Annual Conference in the fall, access to our Virtual Reading Group, and much more!05-18-2024
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