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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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The Independent Legislator Theory
Roger BerkowitzZach Montellaro looks at a theory increasingly embraced by Republican state legislators and four Supreme Court Justices that would allow state legislatures to have near absolute authority to determine which candidate for President to award that states’ electoral votes.
03-13-2022
A Decade in a Week
Roger BerkowitzIt was Vladimir Lenin who said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” And now it is Vladimir Putin who has punctuated Lenin’s remarks. Our world has changed.
03-06-2022
Simone Weil on War and Justice
Roger BerkowitzThe Jewish born Christian philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how to respect it, is capable of love and justice.” What war teaches, Weil argues, is the experience of utter misery, the reduction of man to a mere thing, a plaything of fate.
03-06-2022
The First TikTok War
Tobias HessThe recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia marks not just a seismic change in the global geopolitical order, but a historiographical shift in how citizens take in the documentation of war.
03-06-2022
Russia Invades Ukraine
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt wrote about war, genocide, and totalitarianism. Her mantra was to look reality squarely in the face and seek to understand it and to resist it. But first to understand it. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is a human tragedy. It is also a geopolitical earthquake that threatens to transform the world in which we live.
02-27-2022
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