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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're Reading: The Firing Line
By Roger BerkowitzJohn McWhorter comments on the firing of Steven Wilson, formerly CEO of a group of charter schools in New York that serve primarily students of color. Wilson was fired after a petition circulated titled, “Hold the CEO of Ascend Public Charter Schools Accountable for White Supremacist Rhetoric.” What exactly was the “white supremacist rhetoric” that Wilson was guilty of?
11-12-2019
Political Algorithms
By Roger BerkowitzThat politicians lie is hardly news. Politics and truth, Hannah Arendt reminds us, have never been on good terms. "Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade." And yet, Arendt raises the question of "what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth."
11-09-2019
What We're Reading: Better Angels
Nellie Bowles looks at the organization Better Angels, which hosts conversations for Republicans and Democrats across the country, helping to bridge the political and cultural divide on the ground.11-08-2019
Self-Portrait
By Samantha HillConor Friedersdorf profiles Hannah Arendt Center NEH Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams for The Atlantic. Looking at Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Friedersdorf explores the ways in which the work of Chatterton Williams moves from personal experience. What ensues is a thoughtful engagement with a must read work that strikes out against the ideologically driven politics of our time.
11-06-2019
In Such Times
By Kenyon Victor AdamsLi-Young Lee describes poetry as an utterance on the ‘dying breath’ and considers the distinct physiologies of exhalation and inhalation. For Lee, the exhaling or dying breath is foundational to the poet’s work and therefore, in Baldwin’s expansive sense of poetry, the work of all artists. I see a connection between Lee’s proposal of the dying breath as the foundation for all poetic...
10-30-2019
What We're Reading: Propaganda
By Samantha HillEchoing Hannah Arendt’s definition of ideology in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Timothy Snyder looks at Hitler’s use of propaganda within the context of our contemporary political situation. How are singular ideas transformed into ideological narratives that claim to explain away the ills of the world?
10-23-2019
Political Trials
By Roger BerkowitzIn the final chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt worries that the very strength of the Israeli Court in its trial of Adolf Eichmann—its fairness and its fidelity to law—prevented the court from understanding that Eichmann’s unprecedented acts required a political rather than a legal response. Eichmann himself argued that if he were guilty, it was of “aiding and abetting” in the commission of horrific crimes, that he himself had not...
10-22-2019
Mrs. Stern Wanders The Prussian State Library
The Mrs. Stern in the play ’s title is actually a young Hannah Arendt, who at the time went by her married name, of Johanna Stern. Arendt speaks about her arrest in her famous interview with Günter Gaus. She tells Gaus that after the burning of the Reichstag she could no longer avoid politics.10-22-2019
Letter to the Editor of the Forward
By Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director and Founder of the Hannah Arendt CenterI am the person who invited Batya Ungar-Sargon, the Opinion Editor of the Forward, to participate in a recent conference hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a conference where she contends in a column published Oct. 12 that she was protested for being Jewish and, as a result, “couldn’t proceed” with her talk.
10-19-2019