![]() ![]() The term “totalitarian” cannot be applied to the United States in 2020. Plainly the United States did not become a dictatorship during the Trump years it did not witness mass violence against “potential enemies of the state” it did not result in the wholesale transformation of Federal police agencies into the private secret police of the Leader. Are there any themes in Arendt’s observations that seem relevant to the current day, and the political experience of the last four years of the presidency of Donald Trump? Her observations in The Origins of Totalitarianism amount to less than a developed theory of a political system, and more of a case study of two unusual political regimes that did their ugliest work at roughly the same time in history. In a recent post I considered Hannah Arendt’s reflections on what she termed the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. ![]()
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