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.
When we began Mutant, we set ourselves the task of entering ordinary language. Not the magisterial or prophetic, but words, ideas and concepts so...
It is today impossible to understand the fragility and violence of democracy’s global life without grappling with the appearance of an unprecedented political form...
Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it...
