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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 Courage to Distinguish Facts from Judgments
Courage, Hannah Arendt believed, is the first virtue of politics. Martin Gurri makes a similar argument, arguing that the post-truth malaise we find ourselves in requires the courage to distinguish facts from judgments. Gurri writes, "We are supposed to live in a post-truth world What does that mean? Basically, that trust in our interpreters of truth—the elites, the mediating class, whatever one chooses to call them—has evaporated. We haven’t believed our presidents for at least a generation." 06-22-2024
The Second Founding
We celebrated Juneteenth National Independence Day this week on June 19, a Federal Holiday since 2021. As the newest Federal Holiday and the first new Federal Holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day established in 1983, the country is still figuring out the meaning of Juneteenth. One imagines that sometime soon there will be Juneteenth sales and Juneteenth greeting cards. But as the Holiday lurches toward consumerism, it is also important that we build a narrative around the meaning of Juneteenth as a National Independence Day. Towards that end, Condoleezza Rice argues that Juneteenth celebrates the second founding of the United States.06-22-2024
An Autonomies Student Fellow Reflection: Declan Carney
This was my first semester at the Hannah Arendt Center, and I am very glad to have had the privilege of working with the other student fellows in the Autonomies program. They programmed some very fascinating events throughout the semester with thought provoking speakers, from Nora Krug to Maya van Rossum, and I learned a great deal at each talk. By assisting at the Autonomies lectures, as well as at the Bill Mullen Poetry Recitation contest, I was able to connect with my peers and gain an appreciation for their thoughtfulness, ambition, and humility.06-21-2024
Perspective is the Most Important Word in Life
Jerry Seinfeld talks to Bari Weiss about how comedy is so important because it demands honesty and, above all, the effort to see the world from the perspective of others. Hannah Arendt defines thinking as an enlarged way of thinking, of being able to imagine the world as others see it. Thinking is a conversation one has with oneself, a two-in-one, in which the thinker tests their own opinions against all the possible counter thoughts imaginable by others. Seinfeld’s approach to comedy is, surprisingly, deeply Arendtian.06-16-2024
An Oasis of Peace
Masha Gessen writes about Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom, “an intentional community of Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Israeli families.” Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom “means Oasis of Peace, in Arabic and Hebrew—was founded by Bruno Hussar, an Egyptian-born Jew who fled the Nazi invasion of France.” Gessen writes about how the village has changed since the October 7th attacks by Hamas and the Israeli military response.06-16-2024
Courage to Be Fellow Reflection: Adriana Želmira Ondrejka
My name is Adriana Želmira Ondrejka and I am a rising junior at Bard. I also have always had a passion for history, and during last summer I got an internship at the National Museum of the American Indian helping out with their special events sector. I really wanted to continue to work on the skills I learned there, so when I saw the posting for the Courage to Be fellowship at the Arendt Center I immediately jumped on it. I decided to ask Hudson Mayor Kamal Johnson to speak as part of the Courage To Be Porgram because I thought having a local politician would be very impactful for the students. Here at Bard, we have a high visibility on voting and politics, with our school body having some of the highest numbers of registered voters in the country and our very active Center for Civic Engagement. Thus, I thought people would really appreciate being able to hear from and talk to a professional who was deeply involved in that world06-14-2024
Socialized Risk
To Arendt, the great danger to political freedom was bigness of all sorts, big government, big business, and big bureaucracy, all of which marginalized the importance of individual action and made self-government meaningless. As Ruchir Scharma writes in his essay “What Went Wrong with Capitalism?”, we are witnessing a quasi-capitalist system of socialized risk in the United States that is ballooning the size of both government and business at the expense of individual freedom and innovation.06-08-2024
Laughing at Criminals
Donald Trump is a small-time crook whom the ruling classes have permitted to become a medium-time crook. As Bertolt Brecht once noted, “If the ruling classes permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he became a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature." The question before us is whether we will allow Trump to become a great crook with tragic consequences for the American Republic.06-01-2024
Social Media, Anxiety, and the Common World
In a review of Jonathan Haidt’s book Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Michael Toscano argues that social media is “designed to provide artificial imitations of what human animals require and fool them into believing they are receiving the real thing." For Toscano, Haidt’s analysis raises fundamental questions about the possibility of a common world, an idea most fully articulated by Hannah Arendt. 05-25-2024