On Elites
Arendt and MacIntyre on Corruption and Power
in Amor Mundi (2025)
One of Arendt’s most unsettling insights in The Origins of Totalitarianism is her diagnosis of how power, once unmoored from truth and morality, becomes a seductive end in itself. She observes that the rise of totalitarianism depends not only on mass movements or propaganda, but also on a deeper moral collapse among the elite and bourgeoisie — a collapse marked by a cynical abandonment of the very ideals they once professed to uphold.
"Something has happened to the fabric of society"
in Amor Mundi (2025)
Fred McFeely Rogers, better known as Mister Rogers, taught my generation of Americans a fundamental empathy for friends and neighbors. Bullied and often alone as a child, Rogers created a show that spoke to a basic respect for our neighbors.
The United States is, of course, a complicated country. It is the country of chattel slavery and genocide against Native Americans. It is, as Hannah Arendt argued, a wild and violent country with a frontier mentality that celebrates vigilante justice. At the same time, there is a traditional American respect for individuals as worthy of self-government, and a history of collective action and civic engagement. There is also superficial friendliness characteristic of Americans’ relations to strangers that nevertheless contributes to a sense of neighborliness essential to a country of immigrants. And there is the idea of the country as a “city on the hill,” a bastion of freedom and a refuge for immigrants, the huddled masses, yearning to be free. Rogers’ show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, ran for 33 years, and the opening song became an American classic.
The Corruption of of the Republic
in Amor Mundi (2025)
On Friday we concluded our reading of On Revolution in the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group. Arendt’s last finished book, On Revolution is about freedom — the idea that animates her writing from beginning to end. But it is also a polemic against a long philosophical tradition that, in her view, misplaced freedom by locating it in the inner life of the will. Arendt seeks to reclaim freedom as a political experience: the capacity to act and speak in public with others, to interrupt stagnant and oppressive orders, and to begin something new. Revolution, in this sense, is not primarily an act of destruction, but a moment when freedom appears as a worldly power — the power to found a new political beginning, what she calls the constitution of freedom.
That insistence on the foundation of freedom is the heartbeat of On Revolution. Revolutions, Arendt writes, are “the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” To found a new political order is not to reform what exists but to cross an unbridgeable chasm. Every founding breaks with authority, tradition, and inherited legitimacy. That is why beginnings are so often violent. From Cain and Abel to Romulus and Remus, Arendt reminds us, political order emerges from acts that are irredeemably troubling. Whatever brotherhood human beings achieve, she writes, has grown out of fratricide; whatever political organization they create has its origin in crime.
The Revolution Against Legitimacy
in Amor Mundi (2025)
We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today think of revolutionaries as the proletariat, and a revolution is fought in the name of equality and justice. Unlike past revolutions fought in the name of equality, Trump’s revolution is against legitimacy itself — and against the very idea that legitimacy depends on equality.
Like all revolutions, the Trump revolution thrives on violence. But unlike many revolutions of the past, violence is not a means to an end — there is no fresh vision of society, no alternative and legitimate institutions. Its aim is destruction itself: the delegitimation of elections, courts, laws, knowledge, and the very procedures that make politics possible. And beyond destruction, its second aim is simply power — the replacement of one elite with another, stripped of legitimacy, bound only by force.
At its core, this is a class war, though not the economic struggle imagined by Marx. The class behind Trump is new and hard to pin down. To resist the Trumpian revolution, however, requires understanding it.
in Amor Mundi (2024)
Understanding what happened last Tuesday requires holding more than one idea in our heads. Yes, Donald Trump may be the most transformative politician in recent political history. Yes, he may upend and destroy a liberal consensus that has governed the United States since after World War II. Yes, he is angry, resentful, vengeful, unpredictable, and will likely test the limits of legal and constitutional governance. Trump is a danger to the system of government we have. And yet, that may be the reason that a majority of Americans freely voted for and elected Donald Trump as President of the United States for a second time.
Some Trump voters are angry and ill-informed. They think that Canada and other nefarious actors are fixing the elections (at least until Trump wins and then they somehow accept the election results.). But many of those voting for Trump are voting rationally. From working class voters frustrated with the economy more focused on international trade than wages to billionaires upset with woke cultural crusades, the Trump voters who brought Trump back from the political trash heap after his attempt to undo the results of the 2020 election are neither ill-informed nor fascist. In last week's election, Trump won the popular vote and he is to be credited with building an impressive coalition. It includes not just angry white men, but also many Latinos, Black persons, and young people. It runs the gamut from billionaires to working class voters of all races and genders. What all these people share to some degree is a sense that the system is fundamentally broken. They no longer have faith in the political, academic, corporate, legal, or media elite. They think that their opinions—I mean, the opinions of the majority of the people—are ignored and disdained by people like me. They are against the state and they want to break the state apart. They may realize that they are playing with fire, but they are angry enough that they are willing to take that risk. For those of us who value the system and benefit from it, this anger and risk and resentment is terrifying. And yet, it is incumbent upon us to understand where this anger comes from, and why it is rational.
in Amor Mundi (2024)
Since Roman times, political thinkers have understood that there are two basic factions in any political world: those who have and those who have less. We can define politics as the effort to balance power between the wealthy and privileged on one side and the poor and working people on the other. But if these are the primary factions that define politics through history, they are not the only ones. In the United States today, competing and overlapping factions include those around questions of gender freedom, racial equality, educational distinction, foreign policy liberalism or isolationism, and more. The imagined genius of the American constitutional system was to understand that freedom is dependent not on banning or eliminating factions (for faction is to freedom as air is to fire, in James Madison’s famous analogy), but in multiplying and empowering institutional support for so many competing factions so as to blunt the power and influence of any one faction to take power. The core insight of American constitutional republicanism is that politics must live with and even cultivate multiple polarizations and disagreements rather than simply a single polarization or disagreement.
What Lurks Below the New Class War
in Salmagundi (2022)
“America as a Broken Society” is the third in a series of Salmagundi symposia, each built around a recent essay provocative enough to prompt a conversation. In this instance the essay is “How The Bobos Broke America,” its author David Brooks. It appeared in The Atlantic online edition on August 2, 2021.
in Amor Mundi (2021)
David Brooks revisits what he got right and wrong about the rise of the creative class. Above all, he admits that he was wrong when he wrote in 2000, “The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste. Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That view that the creative elite was benign and open to all was, he writes, “one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.” What Brooks now sees is that the creative class of elites has “coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.” And this class of elites has also, “generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic.”
The Failing Technocratic Prejudice and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy
in The Emergence of Illiberalism (2020)
It is a prejudice that politics is best practiced by experts. After more than five decades of increasingly technocratic rule by elites, we are seeing a rebellion of the publics against elite governance. The prejudices of liberal-democratic politics—that democracy is liberal and individualist, and that democracy should privilege technocratic governance over populist politics—are being upended. We are reminded, as Hannah Arendt argues, that politics is not about truth, but a plurality of opinions. This chapter contends that the technocratic prejudice of elite politics is no longer meaningful or feasible. This means that we need to re-imagine a pluralist politics free from the prejudices that have, for decades, bridled democracy by liberal and individualist ideals.
Protest and Democracy: Hannah Arendt and the Foundation of Freedom
in Stasis (2018)
The great political achievement of the modern era, stable representative democracies that legitimate power, are everywhere under attack. No thinker can better help understand our present democratic disillusionment than Hannah Arendt. Arendt argues that as bureaucracies and governments grow, individual action is evermore attenuated in its ability to make a difference in the world. The result is frustration that can lead to indignation and anger of citizens on both the left and the right. And a consequence of this increasing anger and frustration is the glorification of protest as a space of freedom in modern politics. In this paper I explore the works of a number of political theorists who have been writing in the last twenty to thirty years and who are all arguing that the place to look for freedom is not in government, but in protest. And I’m going to contrast them with Arendt’s argument that freedom must be instituted and founded in political institutions. The three theorists of protest I have in mind are Simon Critchley, David Graeber, and Jacques Rancière.
in Amor Mundi (2018)
Meagan Day watched the Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testimony as so many of us did. What struck her about Kavanaugh was not his anger, not his privilege, and not his masculinity. Instead, Day saw in Kavanaugh the banality of the elite. The masters of the universe, it turns out, are losers. The Brett Kavanaugh hearing was a kaleidoscope of family and God and prestigious clerkships spliced with boofing and ralphing and brewskis. It was a thorough dressing-down. In the end, one was left with the impression of an unremarkable guy who was born on a conveyor belt to power, without much obligation to distinguish himself from his peers. On the contrary, his success was relatively guaranteed on the condition that he didn't distinguish himself from them, that he simply play nice with the fellas - and not necessarily so nice with women - from prep school to the Ivy League to the White House and beyond. What struck me most about yesterday's hearing, cutting through Kavanaugh's tone-deaf retorts and indignant whinging and his frequent professions of love for beer, is how utterly ordinary he is. This guy is juvenile, arrogant, sexist - and very familiar. It pointed to a larger truth: the people running the show are callous and dangerous, but they're also astonishingly average.
in The American Interest (2014)
The elites in Washington and Wall Street seem not to care about their decadence and even take joy in revelations about it.
in Amor Mundi (2013)
“[T]here are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to ‘think the unthinkable,’ but that they do not think.”
-Hannah Arendt, On Violence
Hannah Arendt’s warning about the power of educated elites in government is one of the most counter-intuitive claims made by an irreverently paradoxical thinker. It is also, given her writing about the thoughtlessness of Adolf Eichmann, jarring to see Arendt call ivy-league graduates with Ph.D.s both dangerous and thoughtless. And yet Arendt is clear that one of the great dangers facing our time is the prestige and power accorded to intellectuals in matters of government.
Arendt issues her warning in the introduction to her essay “On Violence.” It comes amidst her discussion of the truth of Lenin’s prediction that the 20th century would be a “century of wars” and a “century of violence.”