Amor Mundi

The QAnon Conspiracy is Still Here

Politics is about opinion not truth. This is one of Hannah Arendt’s central insights. At the same time, however, every political community must have some truths that it shares, that it holds in common, that unites it as a collective political body. These truths are not “objective,” but they are shared stories and ideals that form, in Arendt’s words, “the ground on which we stand and teh sky that stretches above us.”

Seeing the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province

Matthew Hill, David Campanale, and Joel Gunter report on first hand accounts coming out of the horrific camps where Uighur’s are being tortured, raped, and dehumanized in China. We need to stop calling the camps run by the Chinese government in Zinjiang province internment, concentration, or re-education camps. They are rather genocidal camps for torture and rape.

Can Moral Life Survive Dictatorship?

Roger Berkowitz
Peter Baehr asks: “Can moral life survive dictatorship?” It is a question that many in politics think secondary. The rise of dictatorship—not to mention fascism—is said to justify resistance at all costs. The message of groups like Antifa is that in the fight against dictatorship and fascism, all means are acceptable and even necessary.

We All Should Have Something to Hide

Roger Berkowitz
One repeated argument against apps that allow for encryption and privacy is that those who have nothing to hide should not worry about the loss of privacy. But who is it that has nothing to hide? The human heart and mind is a factory of fantasies that remind each of us of the darkness that lurks within us.

Hannah Arendt and C.L.R. James

Roger Berkowitz
In 1958 in the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt published an Epilogue on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Two years later, the Caribbean intellectual and activist C.L.R. James  delivered a series of public lectures in Trinidad that would be published as Modern Politics.

National Solidarity

Adam Rothman and Barbara J. Fields tell the story of Hannah Fizer, a young woman shot by the police after she was pulled over for running a red light. This is a familiar story today, but for the fact that Fizer was white. This fact does not take away from the fact that there is a problem with racism in law enforcement that needs to be addressed.

The Re-Beginning of American Democracy

Roger Berkowitz
There has been a lot of worry recently about the health of American democracy. What the events of the last two weeks have confirmed, however, is that American democracy is quite robust and healthy. In spite of a President who sought to undermine an election, the system worked. The voters rejected a dangerous and narcissistic and corrupt President by over seven million votes and a large electoral college mandate.

The Fabric of Reality

Roger Berkowitz
Timothy Snyder argues that the abyss of American democracy is fed by a crisis in truth that has left us in a pre-fascist moment. But Snyder recognizes that President Trump never could bring himself to embrace fascism. He alienated the military, on which a fascist government would need to depend. He emboldened militias, but never organized them into a unit. His social media attacks were constant but scattered.

Our Political Crisis

Michael Lind writes that “Many Democrats claim that Republicans are destroying the republic. Many Republicans claim the reverse. They are both correct.” This is not at all to equate the two sides of our political dystopia, but it is to recognize that there is a feeling of disempowerment and Armageddon on across the political divide. Lind argues that this premonition of imminent destruction maps onto five crises facing the American Republic.