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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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The New Aristocrats
By Roger BerkowitzMatthew Stewart in The Atlantic rehearses the truth that the top one percent of Americans are villains and the bottom 99 percent are the good guys. The reality, he argues, is more complicated. Stewart divides us instead into three classes. There is the top 0.1 percent who are masters of the universe and the bottom 90 percent who are losing out in a race to the bottom. In between is the top 9.9 percent who Stewart calls “the new aristocrats.” While it is easy to claim to be part of the 99%, many who do so are part of this new aristocracy who Stewart argues are “accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.”
05-26-2019
Leadership and Academic Freedom
Roger Berkowitz writes about the Wall Street Journal's coverage of strong leadership and engaged debate at Bard College.05-26-2019
Taking White Interests Seriously?
By Roger BerkowitzIsaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviews Eric Kauffman about his new book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Kauffman’s book looks analyzes a double insight...
05-26-2019
A Eulogy for Jacques Taminiaux
By Kazue KoishikawaJacques Taminiaux, professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Louvain and Boston College, passed away on May 7th, 2019 at the age of 90 years. As those familiar with continental philosophy know, he left a tremendous legacy in the field of phenomenology from Husserl and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Arendt, and more.
05-22-2019
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
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
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