“Tyranny,” Hannah Arendt told Roger Errera in the final sentences of her last interview, “has been discovered very early, and identified very early as an enemy.” The Greeks coined tyrannos for rulers who seized and wielded power outside constitutional norms. The first tyrant may have been Gyges of Lydia, who murdered the king and married his queen. From Gyges in the 7th century BCE to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the danger of unaccountable power has been well known. And yet, as Arendt warned in the interview, “knowledge of the dangers posed by tyranny has never in any way prevented any tyrant from becoming a tyrant.”
Tyranny, she stressed, is not the same as totalitarianism. Under tyranny, there is still social and private freedom, but political freedom is curtailed or eliminated. One can still live well under tyranny.
The danger of tyranny in America, she feared, was not from a single figure like Richard Nixon or Joseph McCarthy, but from a collapse of our belief in republican self-government itself — a willingness to trade freedom and integrity for money, power, and social standing. The deeper threat lay in what she called the “massive intrusion of criminality into the political process.” What worried Arendt most was the phenomenon of coordination — what she elsewhere described as “the eagerness not to miss the train of History.”
In the 1930s in Germany, Arendt was stunned that, even before terror was unleashed — before there were arrests, violence, or terror — many of her friends coordinated with the new regime. They joined the Nazi Party, accepted promotions, and enforced racist and antisemitic laws.
Writing in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, she watched something similar unfold. She was shocked again by the “overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life.” While public officials sought to draw the line at obvious illegality, they became expert at explaining away “all political transgressions short of murder.”
The driving force behind tyranny is not ideology but criminality. What united the Nazi functionary in 1933 and the cynical Washington operator in 1973 was the same reflex: the urge to be on the winning side. There was in the 1970s, a “firm resolve to do away with any law, constitutional or not, that stood in the way of shifting designs inspired by greed and vindictiveness.”
The moral crisis of the 1970s, Arendt argued, was not the existence of criminals like Nixon or McCarthy. It was that otherwise respectable political and business leaders closed ranks around them, dismissed their crimes as politics-as-usual, or shrugged and justified themselves: “everyone does it.” Public figures, she saw, came to resemble “a bunch of con men, rather untalented Mafiosi,” who had “succeeded in appropriating to the themselves the government of ‘the most powerful power on earth.’”
This willingness to condone and collaborate — whether for the sake of partisan loyalty, personal advantage, or simply the pleasure of tearing down what they saw as a decadent political order they despised — was, she believed, the moral foundation of the republic’s decay. Tyranny thrives not on the acts of the tyrant alone, but on the collaboration of the respectable.
This same willingness is visible again today. Mainstream politicians and business leaders now excuse and even celebrate Donald Trump’s “lying as a way of life.” For years, Republican politicians — many of whom, maybe most, privately acknowledge Trump’s depravity and danger — have refused to condemn or isolate him, hoping his movement could be controlled or made to serve their own ambitions. After January 6th, Mitch McConnell refused to vote for impeachment, gambling that Trump would fade and his base could be absorbed. Nikki Haley, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, after warning of Trump’s unfitness, now praise and serve him, calculating that loyalty is the price of a future run for president.
The reason tyrannies can take root, even when everyone sees what is happening, is that the tyrant knows what we are unwilling to admit: we no longer truly believe in morality, freedom, or honor unless they come wrapped in the trappings of money, power, and prestige.
This same calculation drives our most prestigious institutions today, from law firms and corporations to non-profits and universities. Universities in particular posture as defenders of free thought — until power threatens their privileges. Then the hunger for prestige makes them predictable and compliant.
Donald Trump can confidently threaten institutions like Harvard because he knows they will not call his bluff. These schools could continue offering excellent education to their students for a fraction of their current cost and still be great schools without enormous government grants. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that they want more. They want to be world-famous, economically indispensable, basking in the glow of power and prestige. That hunger for status makes them predictable — and compliant — which is why they find themselves negotiating on Trump’s terms.
This raises the oldest political question: What is our personal responsibility under tyranny? Arendt sought to answer this question in a talk broadcast on the radio and later published as “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” She distinguished between two responses to criminal dictatorships and tyrannies.
The first is taken by the “few” who refuse to coordinate or collaborate, withdrawing from public life rather than serve the regime. They avoid being implicated in its crimes, but they also renounce political responsibility.
The second path is followed by those who remain in office, claiming they can “prevent worse things from happening” and “mitigate” the harm — a position Arendt called the argument of the lesser evil. If faced with two evils, they argue, one must choose the lesser. The danger, she warned, is that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.” In politics, obedience and support are the same: without such obedience, the tyrant would be helpless.
Those who refuse are often branded “irresponsible,” yet Arendt saw them as the only ones willing to think and judge for themselves. Their refusal was rarely heroic in the usual sense; they did not necessarily risk their lives or lead resistance movements. They simply could not stomach doing what the regime required. They were unwilling to rationalize cruelty or injustice as necessary. Their consciences did not run on automatic, nor did they outsource their judgment to the prevailing opinion. They simply resigned, left public life, and went into what is called “internal migration.”
Arendt’s model for someone who withdraws from public life and acts with integrity is her friend, the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers was married to a Jew. He resigned his position and lived in obscurity throughout the war. Arendt praised Jaspers for something rarer than charisma or intellect: an inviolable independence. He was “untemptable, unswayable,” unwilling to bend even to the German resistance. His freedom began in thinking for himself, and he guarded it absolutely.
People like Jaspers, who choose freedom over participation in the world, can be dangerously independent, outside all social conventions. There is an irresponsibility in their actions. Internal migration can look like passivity, but it is not the same as surrender. Thinking for oneself, which is at most times a politically sterile gesture, can become — at moments when everyone else is thoughtlessly going along with the demands of a tyrant — a symbol of resistance, a light in dark times. When multiplied, personal refusals can quietly become the most dangerous form of resistance to a tyrant — more dangerous than one-time protests.
Much like the greengrocer Václav Havel tells about, who one day simply refused to hang a Communist Party slogan in his window, the people who “refused their support” are not powerless. The grocer’s small act — taking down the sign proclaiming, “Workers of the world, unite!” — did not overthrow the regime. But such acts, multiplied across a society, can quietly erode the foundations of power. Arendt admired such acts not for their spectacle but for their stubbornness.
This is the moral core of nonviolent civil disobedience: not protest as performance, but the steady, principled demand to witness, condemn, and not to participate in injustice. Yes, civil disobedience for Arendt is organized and collective, but it is rooted in a thinking morality. It is the conscious choice to resist the temptation to “do some good from the inside.” The lesson of Arendt’s tyrants — ancient and modern — is that the inside always swallows you. The only defense is to remain a conscious pariah, free enough to refuse.
