How do ordinary citizens become the foot soldiers, the automatons, the purveyors of evil? How does barbaric cruelty become a civic norm? In her controversial classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt gives us a way to understand this pervasive degeneration of our time. She calls it the banality of evil. And it is this banality given democratic license; this turning of neglect into a legitimate doctrine of governance; this virtuosity of brutalism without bloodshed, that Aishwary Kumar identifies as a new mutation in the structure of liberal democracy. Neodemocracy is this political mutant, born at the intersection of cruelty and the constitution.
What does it mean to be human? This is a question at once timeless, yet often posited as an abstraction: as though being human...
Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it...
No idea in our political lexicon is as deeply mired in paradox as freedom. One is wholly alive, wholly human, we are often told,...
