Temptations of Tyranny

Roger Berkowitz

"If this isn’t tyranny, what is?" So asks Rod Dreher, one of President Trump's most steadfast intellectual supporters, now increasingly alarmed by the President’s abuses of power. Dreher laments Trump's destructive tariffs, his disdain for due process, and his willingness to flout constitutional norms. And yet — despite recognizing the dangers of the President’s tyrannical executive overreach — Dreher remains loyal to the President he once embraced to defend freedom.

In a recent essay, Dreher expresses concerns about the current state of the Trump presidency, writing, “These are difficult days for people like me: Americans who back the Trump administration for its determination to fight back against establishment tyrannies, but who are now troubled by its excesses.” Dreher is concerned both by the President’s destructive tariffs and by his rejection of due process and the rule of law. Dreher understands the danger that the President is undermining the very freedoms that people like Dreher elected Trump to preserve. He knows that “The temptation to embrace tyranny for the sake of setting things right is universal and ever-present.” And yet, Dreher is standing by his President.

Immediately after raising his concerns about President Trump turning into a tyrant, Dreher pivots in his essay to what he still loves about the President: “One of the best things this administration is doing is going after universities, especially elite ones—bastions of illiberal leftism that have acted with contempt for liberal norms.” The core of Dreher’s support for President Trump is his faith that Vice President J.D. Vance understands that “universities are the enemy” and that they have “institutionalized ideological radicalism and spread it throughout society.” 

In Dreher’s telling, elite universities became ideological bubbles. College-educated elites rigged the system for their children under the guise of "merit." Globalization enriched the wealthy and devastated the working class. Immigration suppressed wages; welfare fostered dependency. Meanwhile, the liberal elite enforced speech codes that branded dissent as racism, sexism, or bigotry.

Liberals such as myself concede many of the critiques Dreher launches at core liberal institutions, but we argue that these institutions can and should be reformed. Dreher dissents, insisting that the institutions are so broken and so captured by an illiberal cadre of woke leaders that they need to be destroyed. The argument is that the institutions are beyond salvation. The mistake is to overestimate the power and control of what might be called “soft totalitarianism.”

The core of the incoherent impulse underlying Trump, Vance, and Dreher’s willingness to embrace tyranny in the name of freedom is their contention that they are fighting what Dreher calls the “soft totalitarianism” of the left. Soft totalitarianism, as it is used today by those on the intellectual right, means domination by social norms, bureaucracy, and elite institutions rather than overt political violence. As the tech billionaire Marc Andreesen, who did much to normalize and legitimize Trump during the last election, put it in an interview with Joe Rogan: Trump is fighting against a soft totalitarianism that exercises “complete control” of society and whose leaders “can do whatever they want to you that doesn’t involve physical violence.” For Andreesen and Dreher, “that system had to be dynamited.” Dreher understands the risk of a new tyranny that undermines law, destroys the global economy, and puts fundamental rights into question. And he is willing to take those risks because he finds the liberal order so fundamentally repressive. That is why he will “continue to back Trump, despite it all.”

The use of the term “soft totalitarianism” is, of course, an allusion to Hannah Arendt. Arendt herself never speaks of soft totalitarianism. She does, however, write of the potential totalitarianism of the social realm. Arendt begins the Epilogue to The Origins with her famous warning that “the true predicaments of our times will assume their authentic form—though not necessarily the cruelest—only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” Her later work of the 1960s is consumed with a worry that the combination of bureaucracy, the loss of privacy, expert rule, and the loss of spaces of freedom where everyday citizens could experience self-government would corrode the foundations of a free republic. “Social domination” might, she cautions, prove to be an equally dangerous and potentially more worrisome attack on human freedom. 

In other words, Arendt too recognized the danger Dreher names — but she drew a very different conclusion about how to respond. While Arendt recognized the dangers of bureaucratic "social domination," she never believed the answer was a charismatic strongman and a concentration of power. On the contrary, she insisted that freedom depends on multiplying and dispersing power through federated self-government. As I recently wrote, what made America unique as a constitutional republic, Hannah Arendt thought, was its “particular aversion to centralized power.” Arendt found, in the American experience of local power epitomized by New England Town Hall meetings and mirrored in local government and citizen engagement, a deep well of belief that individual citizens were responsible for governing themselves. This tendency of Americans to write letters to their representatives, to join together to form civic associations, to attend town hall meetings, and to act in concert with others meant, Arendt wrote, that any effort to centralize power would come up against resistance from real power. 

Arendt never tires of reminding us that power is not found in laws or regulations, all of which can be swept away by violence and power. Power emerges wherever people act together. In joining together, individuals act collectively with power. In the United States, not only the separation of powers amongst the Congress, Presidency, and the Courts, but also the dispersion of powers across the States, Counties, Cities, and Towns, and even the historical experience of power in civic bodies and volunteer associations, all contributed to what Arendt called the “constitution of freedom.” It meant, she argued, that the United States was one of the few countries in history in which there is no sovereign power, where power comes from the combination of many powers, not the rule of one. Since all power is susceptible to corruption, the best way to prevent tyranny is to guarantee, as much as possible, the multiplication and dispersion of powers. 

Donald Trump is trying to fight bureaucracy and destroy a system that he finds oppressive by concentrating power in the executive branch led by a charismatic leader. As Ivan Kratev sums up the Trump approach: “Less state, more emperor.”

In the face of social domination, Arendt called for a renewal of citizen power — not its abdication. Freedom, she argued, emerges wherever people act together to build a common world. The multiplication of local, shared powers is the only antidote to tyranny, whether hard or soft. Those who, like Dreher, are willing to risk everything to restore freedom by concentrating it in a single charismatic leader have forgotten the deepest lesson of republican self-government: that the price of freedom is the responsibility to rule ourselves.

The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon warned that "Every successful revolution puts on the robes of the tyrant it has deposed." President Trump’s revolution now threatens to make good on that warning: to replace the "soft tyranny" of liberal opinion with the hard tyranny of centralized executive power. If the President succeeds in weakening the rule of law, eroding due process, and concentrating power in the hands of one charismatic leader, we will not be freeing ourselves — we will be forging new chains. This is not the freedom Dreher and others claim to seek. Like so many intellectuals before them, they believe they can control the force they unleash. History suggests otherwise. The mob, once awakened, seldom heeds its would-be masters. And political institutions, once destroyed, are not easily resurrected. 

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The cure for social domination is not surrender, but renewed, stubborn, and local acts of citizen power. With that in mind, the Arendt Center’s Democracy Innovation Hub is working to revitalize democracy through citizen participation by means of citizen assemblies. This week, we are participating in a convening by the New York City Civic Engagement Commission designed to explore new ways to increase citizen participation and citizen power. 

One of the leaders of the Citizen Assembly movement is Claudia Chwalisz, who was a leader in the Arendt Center’s first Citizen Assembly training program in 2022. Chwalisz has a new essay, “Lessons from the Permanent Paris Citizens’ Assembly’s Collaborative Drafting Process,” in which she argues that citizen assemblies should incorporate parliamentary leaders and civil servants into the deliberative process. Chwalisz writes, 

Historically, one of the main criticisms of citizens’ assemblies has been the gap between their recommendations and actual policy implementation. The typical process involves assembly members developing recommendations in isolation, presenting them to officials, and then stepping back from the process entirely. This approach often leads to recommendations being diluted, misinterpreted, or simply gathering dust on bureaucratic shelves.

The Paris Citizens’ Assembly developed a distinctive four-phase process, with particular emphasis on the final part where recommendations were transformed into legislation. Elian Belon, secretary general of the assembly, noted that they reinforced this phase during the last assembly cycle in 2023- 24, explaining that there were three meetings held between the citizens, politicians, and administration. Together, they co-constructed and wrote, “to the comma,” the Citizen Bill, transforming the citizens’ initial 43 ideas into the 20 recommendations that ultimately made it into the bill.

While the term “co-creation” has become somewhat of a buzzword, it rarely captures a truly equal process that results in both a joint output and joint decision between citizens and policy makers—whether elected officials or civil servants. The Parisian case, however, truly merits the description of “co-creation. Below, I outline the five key elements:

Structured dialogue between all stakeholders: The transformation of 43 initial recommendations into 20 actionable measures involved intensive, facilitated workshops where citizens, politicians, and civil servants worked together to assess each proposal’s feasibility, timeline, and potential impact. This was not simply about cutting recommendations—it was about understanding what was already being done, what could be combined for greater effect, and what needed to be modified to work within existing systems.