by Roger Berkowitz

In her final public interview with Roger Errera in 1973, Hannah Arendt issued one of her most quoted warnings. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer…. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Arendt’s remark is often cited without its context. In fact, it was about the dangers of a press that abandons its freedom and fails in its duty to inform. What Arendt saw is that when the institutions of impartiality falter, lies multiply. But the lies do not replace truth. Instead, they corrode it. Citizens stop believing not just the lies, but everything. Cynicism replaces judgment. The result, as she put it elsewhere, is that “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world is destroyed.” People who believe nothing will accept anything.

This is why mass lying is not just a moral problem but a political one. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble. Cynicism makes citizens pliable, eager to have their opinions and decisions made for them. It is a precondition of tyranny.

In that same interview, Arendt insisted on a distinction we have largely forgotten. “Tyranny,” she noted, “was discovered very early, and identified very early as an enemy.” Totalitarianism was new in the twentieth century. Tyranny was not. Under tyranny, private life and social freedom can persist even as political freedom is extinguished. People can continue to live well under tyranny — but we live without a say in our common world.

One word Arendt did not use was “authoritarianism.” In fact, she warned against using authoritarianism because she thought it an empty idea. For her, authority meant something more than command; it implied legitimacy, a recognition that power rested on right, not just force. In our age, she argued, authority has largely collapsed. Authoritarianism is nearly impossible today. To call a corrupt strongman “authoritarian” is to confuse strength with legitimacy. The point is that strongmen like Donald Trump don’t have authority. To speak of Trump as an authoritarian is to indulge in a kind of gibberish. It muddles more than it clarifies.

Today, as George Packer argued this week in The Atlantic, American democracy is decaying in ways that feel eerily familiar: institutions are hollowed out, truth has begun to wobble, cynicism reigns. In countries such as Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, India, and the United States, “democracies aren’t overthrown, nor do they collapse all at once. Instead, they erode.” We all see this on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. The President takes to social media to announce that the army, in some form, is going to come to Portland, Oregon, to achieve some unspecified end. United States Attorneys are fired and replaced by obedient minions who will charge the President’s enemies. As Packer writes, “Opposition parties, the judiciary, the press, and civil-society groups aren’t destroyed, but over time they lose their life, staggering on like zombie institutions, giving the impression that democracy is still alive.”

Packer calls this “authoritarianism.” But the word is misleading. Packer himself recognizes this. When we hear “authoritarianism,” we picture goose-stepping soldiers, secret police, and firing squads. That is not what daily life in America looks like. We still enjoy our private freedoms. We still see plays about Arendt in New York theaters. Life goes on, even as politics grows more lawless. To call this “authoritarian” is to reach for a term that does not describe the reality.

What we face is closer to an old-fashioned tyranny — a hollowing out of political freedom under the cover of normal life.

For Arendt, tyranny’s essence is not ideology but corruption. In the 1970s she warned that American elites had begun to look like “a bunch of con men, rather untalented Mafiosi” who had “succeeded in appropriating to themselves the government of the most powerful power on earth.” The crisis was not the criminals themselves but the willingness of otherwise respectable leaders to excuse and collaborate with them.

Arendt could have been describing Trump’s courtiers. That same willingness to justify criminality is on display today. Republican politicians who once warned against Trump now serve him. Business leaders and cultural elites shrug at his “lying as a way of life.” Universities that posture as defenders of truth and freedom quickly bend when power threatens their prestige or funding. The problem is not just Trump. It is the calculation — partisan, financial, reputational — that makes coordination with tyranny appear rational.

Trump is not an authoritarian. He does not command authority, not even among his own followers. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial in Arizona earlier this month, thousands gathered to honor the fallen conservative activist. When Trump took the stage, he quickly veered into partisan attacks, saying he “hates” his opponents. The tone clashed with Erika Kirk’s message of forgiveness. Videos show people filing out as he spoke. His words did not carry authority; they grated. As Packer quipped, Hitler’s followers would hardly have left one of the Führer’s speeches.

Trump is not followed because his supporters respect him, but because they are willing to excuse, collaborate, or shrug off his contempt for truth. He is not a leader to whom people grant legitimacy, but a proto-tyrant, a corrupt and vindictive Mafioso figure who thrives on cynicism. His danger lies not in ideology but in the normalization of criminality, the contempt for law and truth that corrodes our republican traditions.

Arendt warned that the deeper threat to America was not one man but the collapse of our belief in the institutions of impartiality — the possibility and integrity of self-government itself. When freedom and honor come to be valued only when they serve money, prestige, or power, tyranny has already taken root.

That leaves us with the oldest political question: What is our responsibility under tyranny?

Arendt saw two paths. The first is the path of withdrawal: the “few” who refuse to coordinate or collaborate, choosing obscurity over complicity. They preserve their integrity, even if they renounce public responsibility. The second is the path of “lesser evil”: those who stay in office, claiming to mitigate harm. Arendt’s warning was sharp: “Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.” In politics, obedience is support. Without it, the tyrant is helpless.

That logic of the lesser evil is everywhere today. Mitch McConnell, who admitted Trump bore responsibility for January 6, refused to vote for impeachment on the grounds that it would be too costly, gambling that Trump would fade away. Nikki Haley, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, who once warned against Trump’s unfitness, now praise and serve him, rationalizing that loyalty is the price of a future run for president. Universities and cultural institutions, too, justify compromise on the grounds that they can “do more good from the inside,” even as they trade away their independence for funding and prestige. The argument of the lesser evil, Arendt reminds us, is not a brake on tyranny, but its enabler.

The real danger of tyranny is not the tyrant alone but the mass of otherwise decent people who rationalize their complicity. Against them, Arendt praised those rare figures like Karl Jaspers, who were “untemptable, unswayable,” unwilling to bend even to the German resistance. Their stubborn refusal resembled Václav Havel’s greengrocer, who one day simply stopped hanging the Party slogan in his window. Such refusals do not overthrow regimes, but multiplied, they quietly erode the foundations of power.

This is the moral core of civil disobedience: not protest as performance, but the steady refusal to participate in injustice. The lesson of Arendt’s tyrants — ancient and modern — is that the inside always swallows you. The only defense is independence, the stubborn refusal to lend one’s support.

But refusal alone is not enough. In Between Past and Future, Arendt spoke of “the ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not, ‘What are we fighting against’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’”

Revolutions happen when existing systems collapse and legitimacy drains away. Power lies in the streets, waiting for those who can articulate ideals worth fighting for. Destruction alone is not enough; absent a vision of a shared world, revolutions collapse into chaos.

Trumpism is a revolution of destruction without creation. It seeks to dismantle liberal democracy but offers no vision of what could replace it. Its goal is demolition, not foundation.

For Arendt, the task of politics is always to “find that which gathers us together in a meaningful world while also respecting our plurality.” Religion once provided that bond; today, politics must bear that burden. Politics is not only administration. It is the work of building a common world — made of words, deeds, institutions, and stories — that can both unite us and honor our differences.

Such rebirth is never guaranteed. It requires courage: the courage to speak honestly, to appear before one another in our differences, and to resist the temptation of ideological certainty. Only from such courage can a new code of conduct arise.

Who, today, can speak with such honesty? On the right, politics has collapsed into fawning obeisance to Trump. On the left, too often still, politics has narrowed into pandering to illiberal censors, those who impose moral codes on what can and cannot be said. Trump rose to prominence because he told his truth. Yes, he lied incessantly. But because he spoke with authenticity at a moment when few politicians dared to, he was, and still is, seen as a truth-teller. His lies strike many as more truthful than the platitudes of conventional politicians.

The need of the moment is for voices who can oppose Trump and yet speak from the heart. We are waiting for a democratic politician who can speak with honesty. The party’s left flank speaks in the language of economic populism — a message that resonates with many. The problem is that these figures still come across as calculating, unwilling to break with progressive shibboleths, and thus inauthentic. The centrists, by contrast, speak of patriotism and putting country first. Many bring with them the authority of military service, and there is genuine appeal in that. But the real question is whether the party as a whole can accept a message of honesty that resists pandering and refuses to be censored.

Lies corrode the world, and tyranny feeds on our cynicism. The only antidote is not only to resist what corrodes us but to rediscover — together — what is worth fighting for.