Although Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is primarily about Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but her descriptions often capture aspects of our present moment more clearly than those of us living through it can ever hope to, Ezra Klein writes for The New York Times.
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) board member Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy, joins him to discuss how Arendt’s “radical loneliness” lays the groundwork for authoritarianism, what illiberals understand about human nature that most liberals miss, whether liberalism’s own logic is making societies vulnerable to totalitarian impulses, how the ideology of “economism” blinds Western liberals to their own societies’ deepest vulnerabilities, what liberals need to do differently to counteract the rise of global autocracy and more. RTWT
