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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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Arendt, Camus, and Comte
David Langwallner writes about Hannah Arendt as a public intellectual and highlights her connections with Albert Camus and their joint worry about the rising power of scientists in public life.04-01-2021
Without Vision, the People Perish
Elisa Gonzalez writes about Marilynne Robinson’s novels with a particular attention to her account of race, the Church, and the vision of what America might be.04-01-2021
The New Left and Ideological Politics
Roger BerkowitzLouis Menand writes a long and important account of the “New Left” as it emerged in the cultural politics of the 1960s. Pace Menand, the core tenets of the “New Left” are a fight against “the system” and an understanding of politics as an existential struggle in self-actualization.
03-25-2021
Anti-Black Antiracists
John McWhorter is publishing excerpts from his new book, The Elect: The Threat to A Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists. In the fifth excerpt, he argues that antiracism is a religion that harms black Americans.03-25-2021
HAC Student Fellow Isis Pinheiro Awarded Watson Fellowship
Selected from a nationwide finalist pool of over 150, Pinheiro was one of 42 college seniors to receive a Watson Fellowship for the 2021–22 academic year. She will spend the year traveling to England, Japan, China, Italy, and Guyana, where she will examine “the intersection of fashion and Black American culture through streetwear [and] explore how streetwear, and Black culture more broadly, have been globalized.”03-18-2021
Power is Everywhere and Nowhere
Roger BerkowitzNadav Eyal writes that our time will be remembered for what it lacks and for what it destroys. It is a period of negation and nihilism consumed by a rage against the machine and a distrust of the system. Writing in the 1960s, Hannah Arendt saw that the glorification of violence witnessed in both theory and practice was in large part driven by a global sense of powerlesseness...
03-18-2021
Is a Civil War Coming?
Elliot Ackerman asks if the polarization in the United States presages a new Civil War. "A recent poll conducted by Ipsos showed that only 12 percent of Americans consider the country “unified” and concluded that “political party identification has become the chief dividing line in this new American ethos.”03-18-2021
Both-Sides-Ism
Roger BerkowitzIt is well known that we are suffering a crisis in truth alongside hyper-partisanship and a massive loss of trust in public institutions. As part of that hyper partisan atmosphere, however, it is usually the case that everyone thinks it is only the “other” side that spreads lies and misinformation.
03-18-2021
Masha Gessen on Language, Loneliness, and the American Story
The central object of (Arendt’s) study is what happens to society when there’s too much distance, or not enough distance. . . . It is so important in her thinking that people think with one another. In order to think with one another, they have to feel their separateness from one another. You have to be an individual capable of forming an opinion, and expressing it, and exchanging it, and seeing the reflection of your ideas in the eyes of others.03-13-2021