Featured Article
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
All Categories
Revitalizing American Democracy
Roger BerkowitzOn Hannah Arendt’s 115th birthday on October 14th, the Hannah Arendt Center convened its Annual Fall Conference, Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom. The effort was to explore the movement for citizen assemblies from a wide plurality of perspectives from activists, artists, public intellectuals, business persons, and students. Watch a recording of the webcast here.
10-22-2021
The Meaning in Supporting Trump
Roger BerkowitzThomas B. Edsall looks at three in-depth voter surveys to ask why some people continue to support Donald Trump and still believe he won the last election.
10-07-2021
The Civil Courage Prize
Roger BerkowitzEric Ward has been awarded the 2021 Civil Courage Prize, given by the Train Foundation. Ward is the first U.S. Recipient of the Civil Courage Prize. You can watch Ward’s talk at the 2019 Arendt Center Conference here.
10-07-2021
MIT Disinvites a Geophysicist
Roger BerkowitzAs Amor Mundi Readers know, I am a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. This week the Alliance sent a letter to MIT protesting the disinvitation of University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot. Professor Abbot had been invited to give a prestigious lecture in his specialty field of climate and planetary science.
10-07-2021
Experts and Citizen Governance
Roger BerkowitzRecent years have not been kind to experts, technocrats, and specialists in government. Amidst our hyper-partisan politics, there is a desire for policy to be made by experts who are thought to be neutral, objective, and informed. But experts have continually proven mistaken in their response to Covid-19, leading to the politicization of expert-driven policies. The experts in the U.S. military bungled the pullout from Afghanistan.
09-30-2021
The Insurrectionists
Roger BerkowitzA new study by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) has some startling conclusions. Twenty One Million Americans or 8.1% of the population—more than one quarter of all adults—are “insurrectionists” who believe that the last election was stolen. Sixty three percent of Americans believe that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”
09-30-2021
Final Account
Jody Bolton-Fasman reviews Luke Holland’s new documentary “Final Account.”09-30-2021
Dangerous Neighbors
Roger BerkowitzOne feature of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is their use of informants and every-day citizens to enforce ideological conformity. Unlike the police that must follow rules and regulations, neighbors can simply let their fantasies run wild and report on those they dislike, find suspicious, or want to discipline.
09-09-2021
The End of Liberalism
Roger BerkowitzLaura Ford writes that we may be witnessing a major epochal shift in which after nearly 300 years of supremacy, liberalism and the “gestalt of liberal compromise” is being supplanted as the dominant philosophy of the age. The shattering of the liberal consensus is above all visible on college campuses in the United States where it is being challenged by social identity movements that Ford argues are analogous to pre-Christian forms of religiosity.
09-09-2021