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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 Are We Fighting For?
The Philosopher asked a wide range of political thinkers to answer the question: What Question Should We Be Asking? Building upon Hannah Arendt, Roger Berkowitz answers that we need to ask: What Are We Fighting For?06-20-2020
The New Orthodoxy
Roger BerkowitzRight wing governments in Hungary, India, Turkey, Brazil, and to some degree even in the United States have increasingly embraced Viktor Orbán’s claim of “illiberal democracy.” These governments remain democratic even as they reject liberal safeguards for personal freedom such as freedom of speech and association, independent courts, a non-partisan professional civil service, respect for constitutional limitations on political power.
06-18-2020
Racial Diminishment Syndrome
Roger BerkowitzChris Lebron writes that while three medical associations now label racism to be a public health crisis, he has long spoken of “Racial Diminishment syndrome,” a disease that, if often deadly, “more commonly results in discomfort, inconvenience and the sort of pains that eventually go away but the memories of which do not.
06-18-2020
What We Are Reading: Smearmonger
Roger BerkowitzYascha Mounk asks, what should we call people “who smear good faith participants in public debate as bigots or try to cancel someone for ridiculous reasons…”
06-18-2020
A Mobbing by a Smearmonger
Roger BerkowitzJonathan Chait tells the story of David Shor, a social democrat and a data analyst who worked for President Obama. But Shor, who worked for the data analysis firm Civis Analytics, was fired for tweeting a “short summary of a paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow. The research compiled by Wasow analyzed public opinion in the 1960s, and found violent and nonviolent protest tactics had contradictory effects.
06-18-2020
The Language Remains
Roger BerkowitzOn September 16, 1964, Hannah Arendt sat for an interview on German TV with Günther Gaus. Arendt and Gaus are both chain smoking through the interview in which they talk about the Holocaust, philosophy, feminism, Jewishness, exile, and of course her book on Adolf Eichmann.
06-11-2020
To Think What We Are Doing
Roger BerkowitzThese are dark times. The hardest thing to do in dark times, writes Hannah Arendt, is to love the world. She invokes the Latin phrase Amor Mundi, For the Love of the World, to express the unspeakably difficult effort to reconcile with the world as it is while also insisting that the world must change.
06-04-2020
On Collaboration
Roger BerkowitzAnne Applebaum tells the stories of Wolfgang Leonhard and Markus Wolf. Both were sons of prominent German Communist families who were educated in the Soviet Union and were roommates in the same military camp. They had similar ideological educations and both came to understand that the communist system behind the Iron Curtain was failing to deliver on its utopian promise. But then their paths diverged.
06-04-2020
The Generals Find Their Voices
Roger BerkowitzMany have been waiting and wondering when, and if, leaders would emerge from the conservative strongholds like the military and the Republican Party to call out the childishness, narcissism, and boorishness that makes Donald Trump such a singularly disastrous President. It seems that the President’s decision to use the U.S. military to clear away protesters so he could have a photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church...
06-04-2020