SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
hannah arendt
Are We on the Road to a Totalitarian US?
In important ways the Trump brand of authoritarianism contains hallmarks of totalitarianism in seeking to ensure that there is only one permissible way to think.
Oct 07, 2025
Americans of a certain age are well acquainted with the idea of totalitarianism—a regime or form of government that exercises total control over all aspects of life in society. We were bombarded with warnings about the totalitarian Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. George Orwell’s 1984 showed us a world where people could never escape the all-seeing eye of “Big Brother.” If they acted in any way the Party considered suspicious or subversive, they would be brainwashed or vaporized.
The United States was widely assumed to be the counterweight to these totalitarian systems, given the principles of liberalism—government limited by the individual rights of people with protections against the arbitrary exercise of power—that legitimized our constitutional system of government. Yet, Orwell himself was critical of Western groupthink during the Cold War, and the US had launched the long era of post-WWII imperialism and consumer-driven capitalism.
We are currently living under an authoritarian regime. At the national level, we live in a one-party state. Each of the three branches of government are controlled by the Republican party–checks and balances are meaningless or ignored. The president rules by his self-serving personal whim. He has assembled an administration of misfits and incompetents who will never challenge his views in public. Donald Trump's rule is by definition arbitrary rule. Rather than giving sound reasoning and evidence to support his claims, he just makes stuff up. He got where he is by ridiculing and attacking others, particularly those who are vulnerable.
Back in 1951, as the Cold War cast a huge shadow over American life and the Red Scare was taking off, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, focusing on Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Here are three brief quotations from Arendt:
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
I ask you, do these words remind you of anything going on under the Trump administration?
Authoritarianism relies on keeping the people isolated, divided, and fearful—which underscores the importance of communities coming together, protecting valued institutions, and raising our voices effectively. Yet in important ways the Trump brand of authoritarianism contains hallmarks of totalitarianism in seeking to ensure that there is only one permissible way to think.
Thus the intimidating attacks on universities, seeking to rewrite their curricula and admissions policies to conform to the administration’s “values.” Thus, too, the intimidation of corporations, especially the mass media, including efforts by Trump henchmen to take ownership of CBS and CNN. Also efforts to ostracize, if not imprison, critics of Israel—to say nothing of critics of Trump himself. Thus, too, the Department of Government Efficiency's effort to access individuals’ social security data and the Republicans’ quest for voting data. And of course, corporations have for years been gathering data on gullible consumers. Even our phones can be used to spy on our thoughts and conversations.
After spewing outrageous claim after outrageous claim before the United Nations General Assembly (not to mention the military brass), Trump declared, “You [the other nations of the world] are going to hell.”
The reality is the United States under Trump totalitarianism is going to hell. Policies his administration has imposed will inevitably lead to a rapid decline of the quality of life in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. The short-sighted stupidity of boosting fossil fuels and eliminating renewable energy as much as possible, and of slashing funding for scientific and medical research—these will result in untold numbers of people needlessly dying from illnesses, epidemics, or increasingly horrific environmental disasters.
And of course, there are the special targets of the Trump agenda. Not only does his administration make clear their intention of making life miserable for anyone who is economically or socially vulnerable in this country, the Republicans are actively cutting them off from voting. Arendt refers to these targets of totalitarianism as “superfluous people.”
In the end it’s up to us, the American people, to come together around a vision of a humane, fully democratic society, and rise up in determined opposition to these forces who so perilously threaten our world.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Real-Time Demise of American Democracy Under Trump
Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few oligarchs at the expense of working people and ordinary families.
Oct 06, 2025
For generations, Americans have been taught that the United States is the world’s beacon of democracy. Politicians across the spectrum speak of the nation as a “shining city on a hill,” a place where freedom and the rule of law set the standard for the rest of the world. But the truth is harder to swallow: the U.S. is drifting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.
A survey of more than 700 political scientists conducted by Bright Line Watch in 2020 found that the vast majority believe the U.S. is rapidly moving toward some form of authoritarian rule. Scholars rated American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, they gave it a 67. Several weeks into his second term, the score had plunged to 55. Elections, rights, and freedoms are under attack—and America is running out of time to save its democracy. The experts’ warnings are not abstract; they reflect a country where voter suppression, gerrymandering, corporate influence, a compliant Supreme Court, and executive overreach are eroding the foundations of democratic governance. When citizens are uninformed—or choose not to vote—the systems of power tilt toward elites, making it easier for authoritarian forces to consolidate control. Authoritarian forces also thrive on fear—fear of immigrants, political opponents, or anyone deemed an outsider—turning Americans against one another and eroding the inclusive ideals that once defined the nation as a melting pot.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarian systems is the concentration of power in a single office. In the US, the presidency has been steadily amassing authority for decades. Presidents of both parties have expanded executive power—from Woodrow Wilson, who during and after World War I oversaw a massive expansion of federal authority, centralized control over the economy, and signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent, to more recent administrations. After September 11, 2001, Congress handed the executive branch sweeping powers through the Authorization for Use of Military Force, essentially giving presidents a blank check for war. Since then, presidents have increasingly governed through executive orders and “emergency” declarations, bypassing Congress altogether. Barack Obama further expanded executive authority through extrajudicial drone strikes, targeting individuals abroad without judicial review or due process, demonstrating that executive power can be exercised unilaterally and with limited accountability. Meanwhile, Congress has been paralyzed by polarization and gridlock, leaving lobbyists and corporate donors to fill the vacuum. The Senate’s structure, which gives Wyoming and California the same representation despite a 70-fold population difference, allows minority rule to dominate national policy. Gerrymandering and voter suppression further hollow out electoral accountability. A government that concentrates power in the executive while undermining the voice of ordinary citizens is not functioning as a democracy.
Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action.
Authoritarian governments also justify extraordinary powers in the name of “security.” The U.S. is no exception. The National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed a government that watches its citizens on a scale once unthinkable. At home, local police departments increasingly resemble military units, rolling out armored vehicles and tear gas against peaceful protesters. We saw this during Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter uprisings. The deployment of force against citizens exercising their constitutional rights should alarm anyone who values democracy. Yet the normalization of militarized policing has created what philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote as a “state of exception”—where emergency measures become everyday tools of governance.
Yes, Americans still enjoy constitutional rights—but too often these rights exist more on paper than in practice. Free speech? Tell that to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Snowden, or Reality Winner, who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act for revealing government misconduct. Voting rights? They’ve been under relentless attack, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted protections for minority voters. States have since imposed strict voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, and closed polling places in Black and Latino communities. Even fundamental rights like reproductive freedom are being stripped away. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans. Millions of women and people who can become pregnant no longer have control over their own bodies. That’s not democracy; that’s state control of private life.
Another clear sign of authoritarian drift is the domination of politics by wealthy elites. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, corporations and billionaires have been able to pour unlimited money into elections. Political campaigns are dominated by super PACs and billionaire donors. Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in 2014 that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” leaving ordinary voters almost powerless to shape the laws that govern them.
The authoritarian character of the United States cannot be understood solely within its borders. With more than 750 military bases worldwide and a defense budget larger than the next ten nations combined, the United States functions as a global empire. Military interventions—from Iraq to Afghanistan to drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa—have often been launched without meaningful Congressional approval. Empire abroad normalizes authoritarianism at home. Militarized policing, mass surveillance, and a bloated national security state are justified by the logic of “permanent war,” which also benefits defense contractors, private security firms, and other corporate interests that profit from endless conflict. As Hannah Arendt wrote, imperialism abroad often requires repression at home. That warning has become reality.
The United States still holds elections and maintains a written constitution, but appearances are misleading. The US still calls itself a democracy, but in practice, authoritarian forces are calling the shots. What makes American authoritarianism distinctive is its velvet glove: it is not a dictatorship in the classical sense but a regime where democratic symbols cloak undemocratic realities. Its most effective disguise is the illusion of freedom itself—an ideology of free market capitalism that promises choice while consolidating power in the hands of a few. Americans are told they live in the land of opportunity, yet the choices available to them—whether in the marketplace or at the ballot box—are increasingly constrained by corporate monopolies and two political parties beholden to the same economic elites. Recognizing this drift is the first step toward reversing it. Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
It is a bitter irony that 66,000 living World War II veterans—who risked everything to fight authoritarianism abroad—now witness the creeping authoritarianism at home and the steady erosion of the freedoms they fought to secure. Their sacrifices are a reminder that democracy is fragile and must be actively defended.
Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
Democracy is not self-sustaining. If Americans care about preserving freedom, they must act: vote in every election—from school boards to city councils to state legislatures—and recognize that their power extends beyond the ballot box. As consumers and shareholders, they can choose carefully which corporations they support, amplifying businesses that align with democratic values while withdrawing support from those that undermine them. Citizens can also engage directly with elected officials, starting meaningful discussions to make their voices heard, and volunteer with nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy organizations and watchdog groups that protect the democratic process, civil rights, and corporate and government accountability and transparency. Pushing for structural reforms that rein in executive power and corporate influence, challenging fear-mongering narratives, and defending the rights of marginalized communities are all essential steps to reclaiming and preserving democracy.
We each have a role to play. Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action. Be no bystander; democracy depends on participation. We ignore its demise at our peril.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Elon Musk Is Wrong About Empathy
History has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives.
Mar 21, 2025
“The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Elon Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”
As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules, and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.
And as (let us acknowledge it) the Trump revolution is currently popular with at least large parts of the U.S. electorate, and some overseas too, what Musk said summarizes also the worldview of a social-cultural moment and movement on the march.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.”
Core to the argument against empathy is the claim that ethical and practical considerations run counter to each other. The guardrails of rules and norms about caring for others, it argues, don’t only hold us back, they tie our hands behind our back.
Morality is for losers, it suggests, and who wants to lose? Only when we cut ourselves free of the burden of looking after and looking out for others, it posits, can we soar. The practical applications of this worldview are all encompassing.
They include the ripping up of international cooperation; the gutting of life-saving programs for people in poverty abroad and at home; and the violating of due process for protestors, prisoners, migrants, minorities, and anyone (who can be made to be) unpopular. That’s not how it ends, that’s how it starts.
A collapse of empathy would be an existential threat to the world. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her witness to, and escape from, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, concluded, “The death of empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” The stakes are too high for us to fail.
So how can we respond to the argument against empathy?
One way would be to stick only to ethics, arguing, simply, “it is our duty to sacrifice for others, and failing to do so is just wrong!” This has driven what has come to be known as the charity narrative.
This approach seems like a flawed strategy because by refusing to engage in the practicality conversation, it concedes it to the cynics and nihilists, accepting the framing of morality as a kind of self-immolation that brings only noble suffering and that cares only about stances, not consequences.
Another way would be to give up on ethics, and make only the most selfish arguments for doing good, like “we should not show ourselves to be unreliable because that would get us knocked off the top perch by our rivals when we must be Number One!” This too seems like a flawed strategy because it reinforces variations of dog-eat-dog as the only frames for success.
What both of those approaches get wrong is that they accept the frame that ethics and practicality are separate. Older wisdoms have long understood them as inseparable. What can in current debates seem like a rivalrous relationship between “what is good?” and “what is smart?”, or “what is moral?” and “what is wise?”, we often find when we look more deeply is not.
That often, the way in which societies developed moral principles was that they are ways to abstract what people have learnt from experience works. When, for example, people say in the African principle of Ubuntu “I am because you are,” that is not just a moral or theological point, it is literally true.
It is what public health teaches us: that I am healthy because my neighbour is healthy. (Even Musk was forced to concede to public pressure on this with his partial admission that “with USAID, one of the things we cancelled, accidentally, was Ebola prevention, and I think we all want Ebola prevention.”
Fearful of the reaction to his initial cancellation of Ebola prevention, he even claimed, falsely, to have fixed that “mistake” straight away, but what matters here is that the case against Ebola prevention collapsed so fast because interdependence was so quickly understood.)
So too, history has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives. Perhaps, for oligarchs, a ruthless, rule-less, world can work. (Perhaps not, however, when the fall-out comes between the “two bros.”)
But for the 99.9% of us, as John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” We are interdependent and inseparable. Alone we are weak, but together we are strong. Or, as the brilliant bleak joke of old ascribed to Benjamin Franklin put it, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”
The mutual interest argument, which highlights to people “we each have a stake in the well-being of all, looking out for others is not losing,” does not take us away from values, it reinforces them.
“There is an interrelated structure of reality. We are all tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” That was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and yet he was making an argument that you could say is the argument of mutual interest.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.” Interdependence, as a practical frame, reflects on the situation of that person, and comes through that reflection to understand that “I need to connect, as that could next time be me.”
Morality and wisdom guide us in the same direction; and as the fastest way there is empathy, that makes empathy not humanity’s weakness but our superpower.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular