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.
“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some...
Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it...
Few words in our democratic language invoke visions as paradoxical and as powerful as sacrifice. On the one hand, sacrifice recalls an archaic, ritualistic,...
