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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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What we are listening to: Public Choice Theory
Ezra Klein interviews the economist Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University.02-19-2022
In Memoriam, P.J. O’Rourke
Roger BerkowitzP.J. O’Rourke died this week. His satirical essays on American democracy are essential reading, including my favorite “At Home in the Parliament of Whores”—a send up of a local town hall meeting in the fictional town of Blaterboro, loosely based on O’Rourke’s home in New Hampshire.
02-19-2022
Demographics Is Not Destiny
Roger BerkowitzIt is a widespread faith amongst many on the left that the coming majority minority population will lead to increasingly left-wing politics. Mickey Kaus offers 14 reasons why this is wrong and dangerous.
02-19-2022
Virtuals, Intellectuals, and The New Ideological Divide
Roger BerkowitzN.S. Lyons considers the Trucker protests in Canada now spreading around the world and argues that the protests force us to consider the divide between what he calls the physicals and the virtuals.
02-19-2022
Tik Tok and the Online Panopticon
Tobias HessIn January the internet was set ablaze with stories of a man nicknamed "West Elm Caleb." Sasha Sloat writes for Wired about the ways that Tik Tok and algorithmic social media facilitates a state of group-play that can quickly devolve from creative collaborative exchange into events of mass social obsession with severe implications.
02-13-2022
The N-Word
Roger BerkowitzWhen a video went viral of Joe Rogan using the N-word over 20 times in the past 12 years, the effort to cancel him and have his podcast removed from Spotify hit a wall.
02-13-2022
Leviathan Wakes
Roger BerkowitzThe pseudonymous N.S. Lyons provides 20 reasons why the woke revolution, for want of a better term, has a long way to run.
02-13-2022
Consequences for Private Speech
Roger BerkowitzThe Academic Freedom Alliance has written a letter protesting the suspension and investigation of Professor Ilya Shapiro by the Georgetown University Law Center. Shapiro tweeted: “Because Biden said he’s only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached. Fitting that the Court takes up affirmative action next term."
02-06-2022
The HAC Dialogue Project:
Exercising Plurality and Good Will
Susan Oberman and Christine Gonzalez StantonWho could have predicted that in 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, the Virtual Reading Group would become a centerpiece in the lives of Arendt readers around the world? Lifelong connections and friendships have been forged through the Arendt Center's efforts to bring people together to think about the most pressing issues in our political world. A brief history of the VRG.
02-06-2022