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heathermillehrer.bsky.social
Heather
@heathermillehrer.bsky.social
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Reposted by Heather
rebeccasolnit.bsky.social
Wrote about that here:
These would-be dictators are rushing about severing alliances, sabotaging support, undermining cooperation within the nation and across the world. It seems to be in their nature to segregate, isolate, and disconnect. They cut the United States off from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Treaty. They cut off the countless beneficiaries of USAID programs as they left USAID workers stranded across the world. They cut off crucial parts of the federal government with reckless disregard for how those parts contribute to the functioning of the whole--or maybe with enthusiasm for its malfunction, perhaps because they're bought into the rightwing idea that all this stuff is unnecessary, obstructive. It's certainly in the way of some of their ambitions. Hannah Arendt described men like them well long before this era. A few days ago, the Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge called my attention to this passage from Arendt's On the Origins of Totalitarianism: “What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible.…Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous conviction that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy.”
February 28, 2025 at 9:56 PM