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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 Reading
The Self-Interest of White Fragility
Roger BerkowitzRoss Douthat offers one of the best and most original explanations of the attraction of the new ideology of white fragility.
07-25-2020
Power Politics
Roger BerkowitzIn an essay “Power Politics Triumphs” from 1945, Hannah Arendt argues that the “obsoleteness of this book” is a “consequences of the author’s pathetic faith in the validity of economic arguments.” Over and again, in modern politics, it has been shown that “nobody cares” about economic arguments and that politics is not driven by economics.
07-25-2020
Special Contribution: Our Space
Dariel VasquezDariel Vasquez is a first generation college graduate from Harlem, NY. Dariel graduated from Bard College (Class of 2017) with a joint degree in History and Sociology, and a concentration in Africana-Studies. He is the founder and director of Brothers@. Youth development and mentorship is Dariel’s passion, and he’s been working with young men of color since he was 16 years old.
07-17-2020
A Letter from Roger Berkowitz
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt cannot solve the problems of our world. But her bold, provocative, and fearless thinking is a model for how we can think about the problems we confront today. At the Hannah Arendt Center we don't worship Hannah Arendt. But we seek to nurture the kind of worldly, humanities-based thinking about ethics and politics that Arendt so fully embodied.
07-17-2020
“I’m With the Young On This”
Roger BerkowitzIn a passionate, honest, and brilliant interview with Bill Moyers, Bill T. Jones is asked if he is more politically inclined now than previously in his life. Jones invokes Hannah Arendt to affirm the necessary confluence of politics, intellectual honesty, and spiritualism.
07-16-2020
The Canceler in Chief
Roger BerkowitzThere is an apparent myth going around that cancel culture is a phenomenon of the political left. One sees this in the reaction to the Open Letter in Harpers that I signed last week. There was in that letter no mention of “the left.” The letter explicitly mentioned the danger from illiberalism from both the political right and Donald Trump as well as from cultural intolerance for curiosity and experimental thinking.
07-16-2020
What We Are Reading:
The Universal Editor
Samantha HillBari Weiss resigned from The New York Times this week in an open letter, citing the effect social media has had on traditional publishing platforms.
07-16-2020
Saving America Once Again: Comparing the Anti-Trump Resistance to the Tea Party
By Theda SkocpolWhat I’m going to do today is to talk about two remarkable upsurges of self-organized citizen activity that have spread across the United States in just the last decade. I’m going to be talking about the Tea Party from 2009 to 2011—although there are still some Tea Parties meeting—and the anti-Trump grassroots resistance that has self-organized across many communities in the country since the November 2016 election.
07-11-2020
A Jewish Home
Roger BerkowitzPeter Beinart acknowledges what he calls “the painful truth” that there is not going to be a two-state solution in the Middle East. Given that reality, Beinart asks, what is the path forward? Growing numbers of Palestinians embrace a one-state solution. But in Israel and amongst Jews, the one-state solution crosses a red line, since it would likely mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
07-09-2020