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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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Propaganda and Cynicism
By Roger BerkowitzMcKay Coppins created a fake Facebook account and dived head first into the world of Donald Trump’s propaganda machine. What he found surprised him. And yet, it is exactly what Hannah Arendt argued 70 years ago about the nature of modern propaganda. The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it.
02-12-2020
On Constitutional Disobedience
Christopher SchmidtIn this essay I consider how reform activists use the United States Constitution as a tool of social movement mobilization. I focus in particular on situations in which activists advance a claim on the meaning of the Constitution that diverges from what the courts—and especially the court at the top of the American judicial hierarchy, the U.S. Supreme Court—say the Constitution means.
02-05-2020
The Need to Be Right
By Roger BerkowitzJon Baskin in The Point identifies a disturbing tone in liberal culture. He recalls Lionel Trilling’s 1947 admission of his “deep distaste for liberal culture.” While Trilling identified with liberalism, he wrote that too often...
02-05-2020
Winning Chess, Winning Politics
By Roger BerkowitzGarry Kasparov argues that those who oppose President Trump from all sides need to come together to defeat him. He warns that, “As much as opposing ideologues may hate each other, there is no one they despise more than those who try to make peace between them.” Witnessing the rise of radicalism on all sides, he writes, “Rage...
02-05-2020
Power, Arrest, Dispersal
By Patchen MarkellTo read this line from The Human Condition in the wake of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, or in the midst of the Occupations that have radiated from Zuccotti Park across the United States and beyond, might be invigorating: aren’t both of these events expressions of power in Arendt’s sense, instances of the unpredictable human capacity to break out of the daily mire of authoritarianism or of capitalism and, acting in concert, to begin something new?
01-31-2020
Reading Arendt in the Era of #MeToo
By Kate BerminghamMore often than I would like, my work on Hannah Arendt and my work as a feminist theorist and activist seem to pull in different directions. I sometimes find myself frustrated not only by Arendt’s relative silence on questions of gender and her occasional sexist remarks (among other things, she once remarked that it was unbecoming for women to occupy positions of authority), but also, like many feminist readers before me...
01-29-2020
What We're Reading: Standing On His Own
By Roger BerkowitzGeorge Packer won the 2010 Hitchens Prize given annually in honor of Christopher Hitchens. In his acceptance speech, Packer explores why it is highly unlikely that another writer like Hitchens might emerge in our time. “Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it?...
01-29-2020
Oikophilia
By Roger BerkowitzRoger Scruton died earlier this month. In obituaries, he was frequently called a conservative philosopher. The Guardian wrote that he “was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual’ who “dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.”
01-29-2020
What We're Reading: A Monumental Effort
By Roger BerkowitzUlrich Baer writes that three new sculptures by Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, and Kara Walker offer a new and important way to engage the debates about what to do with historically meaningful but offensive monuments.
01-29-2020