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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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Diversity Index
By Samantha HillThomas Chatterton Williams responds to the SATs new adversity index which will factor in social conditions like neighborhood and crime rates. Chatterton Williams argues that this index is a Band-Aid solution that will not address the structural inequalities that students face. He writes...
05-19-2019
A Disjunctive or Disruptive President?
By Roger BerkowitzJack Balkin of Yale Law School recently described Donald Trump as a disjunctive president. Using a model developed by Stephen Skowroneck, Balkin argues that Trump represents the “last gasp of the vanishing Reagan era that began in 1980.” He writes...
05-19-2019
Not All Populisms Are the Same
By Samantha HillWriting for the Boston Review, Jason Frank argues that we should reassess the popular use of the term populism to describe a wide range of emergent illiberal political regimes from Orban’s Hungary to Trump’s United States.
05-19-2019
Friends of Academia
By Roger BerkowitzRandall Kennedy writes that all “friends of academia” must sound the alarm in response to Harvard University’s decision to remove Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson as Faculty Dean’s of the undergraduate college’s Winthrop House.
05-19-2019
Why Arendt Matters:
David Brin
Why Arendt Matters is a series of short video interviews with prominent writers and thinkers. This week, we replay an episode with David Brin, science fiction writer and futurist. 05-16-2019
What Illiberal Democracy Means
By Roger BerkowitzIn the United States, terms like “academic freedom” and “free speech” have come to be scoffed at by many students and faculty. They have somehow been turned into conservative talking points.
05-12-2019
Student Protests
By Samantha HillStudents at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts are trying to get Camille Paglia fired “and replaced by a queer person of color.” The campaign was provoked by a talk Paglia proposed on “Ambiguous Images: Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.”
05-12-2019
Hannah Arendt’s Ethics
By Samantha HillTwo pieces on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil appeared this week. In a review essay for Contemporary Political Theory John Macready offers a probing critique of Deirdre Lauren Mahony’s Hannah Arendt’s Ethics...
05-12-2019