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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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Resist Orthodoxy
Roger BerkowitzMy daughter graduated high school and at her ceremony, one of the speakers talked about the importance of stories and storytelling. Any event becomes meaningful when and if we tell a story about it. This does not mean that “I” am in full control of my story, that the world revolves around me and my story. Rather, it means, that the stories we tell, the communities we share, the lives we live and compose together weave us into tapestries of collective worlds, they give our lives meaning and insert us into a shared world. Stories can be told and re-told, yet stories are collective. They require both a teller and an audience, and the audience will again tell and retell the story, making it a collective experience.
05-28-2023
What Is Auditing
Elaine Godfrey writes about Rob Sand, the State Auditor of Iowa. The Iowa legislature recently passed a bill limiting the auditor’s access to information. If you want to know why, listen to Sand’s answer to an elementary school student who asked him what an auditor does. It will remind us, also, of one way to respond to the relentless attacks on truth that confound our efforts to govern ourselves.05-21-2023
The Caretakers
Roger Berkowitz
The primary need totalitarianism satisfies is the need for meaning. While fantasies of national belonging are part of the populist playbook, so too is the basic desire for a strongman to take care of us. There is a deep human need to be taken care of, and liberal democratic governments are failing in that task. Francisco Toro argues that the model populist strongman today is Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Toro looks to Bukele’s incredible popularity to help understand the underlying factors driving the populist revolution. 05-21-2023
The Great Acceleration
Roger BerkowitzAll around us are warnings about the consequences of generative AI for our jobs, our democracy, and our humanity. And all around us is excitement for the possibilities that generative AI will make us richer, more informed, safer, and better. The transformation of human society will be intense, swift, and powerful. And we all need guides to help us through. Walter Russell Mead does an excellent job of sketching out the challenges we face, contextualizing it in history, and posing questions for the present.
05-14-2023
A Small Boat Across the Mediterranean
Roger BerkowitzI came across this interview by Jeevika Verma with Marilyn Hacker, one of my favorite poets who for some reason I haven’t read in a long while. Verma asks Hacker about her use of form, how “discipline and intimacy work together in a way that might feel contradictory at first but provides a clear path toward open communication.” And then she and Hacker talk about the power of form to convey volatile movements and emotions.
05-07-2023
Can We Stop Ourselves
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of AI research, has recently quit his job at Google to spread the word of his fears that AI will be used in ways that will do fantastic harm. “It is hard to see,” he says, “how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”05-07-2023
Our Spiritual Crisis
Roger BerkowitzFrancis X. Maier interviews N.S. Lyons, and asks “What are the main factors—political, cultural, technological, spiritual—in our historical moment that cause you the greatest concern?”
04-30-2023
Our Crisis of Worldly Courage
The biggest obstacle to political action today, Arendt saw, is that we increasingly don’t have ideals for which we are willing to fight. We no longer know What We Are Fighting For. Maurits de Jongh argues that the war in Ukraine has laid bare our uncertainty about those common values that might inspire us to collective action. And he worries that as the world hurdles towards confrontations amongst nuclear powers, the courage needed to act politically may be lacking.04-30-2023
A Climate Constitutionalism
Roger BerkowitzEsmeralda Colombo turns to Hannah Arendt’s work on law, constitutionalism, and participatory democracy to argue for ways to limit state sovereignty and increase citizen participation in government through work on cli
04-23-2023