Last week I described a new class of revolutionaries taking power in the United States. The aim of revolution, I argued, is not so much the creation of a new order but the perpetual seizure of power — the endless unseating of enemies, the compulsive display of strength, and the faith that one day victory itself will deliver…something. What that something is remains undefined. One of the defining features of the revolution is its lack of ideological coherence. There is no vision or ideal outside of power itself.
This new revolutionary class is not interested in justifying its power through legitimacy. Unlike the class of judges, professors, regulators, and journalists it seeks to displace, the new revolutionaries are driven by a mixture of resentment and entitlement. They are convinced they are the rightful elite and resent anyone who would regulate or limit them. They see their exclusion from cultural power by the credentialed elite as illegitimate. Oversight and regulation — by auditors, regulators, professors, journalists, or judges — is experienced not as fairness but as humiliation, recast as conspiracy.
One window into this class is the reshaping of federal law enforcement. This week we learned that both ICE and the FBI are lowering their recruiting standards, no longer requiring college degrees. ICE has dropped its age requirements and no longer requires agents to learn basic Spanish. The FBI has cut its training for new agents from eighteen to eight weeks. The aim, according to an article in The New York Times, is to shift the focus away from public corruption and national security to street crime. But the deeper effect is that positions of state authority are being opened to those whose claim to power does not rest on the credentials that have long undergirded legitimacy in society run by educated elites. What matters, increasingly, is not abstract qualifications but loyalty, not expertise but force.
In Washington, DC, national guard troops mix with FBI and other federal agents to manifest a show of force. ICE agents arrest and detain pepole — disappearing citizens as well as non-citizens. This marks an attack on the very idea of professional law enforcement and military service. At West Point, Jen Easterly — a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, an Afghanistan war veteran, and a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council — was blackballed. In her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”
Hannah Arendt, in her deeply relevant book On Revolution — which we will begin to read in the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group in September — drew a sharp distinction between revolutions that found freedom and those that merely revolt against tyranny. The American Revolution, she argued, succeeded because it culminated in the creation of enduring institutions that could channel freedom into a lasting and stable government. The French Revolution, by contrast, collapsed into an endless process of suspicion, devouring itself through purges and terror. Driven by the desire to unmask authority, the revolutionaries forgot that freedom cannot last without authority. Without a founding of authority, revolution degenerates into perpetual upheaval.
For Arendt, the danger of such non-founding revolutions is that they destroy the space of politics itself that could give birth to a new common ground. Once legitimacy is replaced by resentment, and oversight is denounced as conspiracy, there can be no common world to sustain political life. The result is not the renewal of freedom but its opposite: domination by those who mistake the exercise of force for the practice of politics. In this sense, the new revolutionary class is not simply attacking elites — it is hollowing out the very possibility of the foundation of freedom, leaving behind a desert where politics withers and only power remains.
A second front in the rise of this new class is the return to religion, especially Catholicism. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, wrote this week that “more young people are attending Mass,” and cited a Harvard University study showing that Generation Z has seen “a 6% increase from 2022 to 2023 in those identifying as Catholic.” His explanation: In a corrupt, senseless, and harrowing world, young people long for clarity and guidance that failing institutions no longer provide. “People aren’t looking for a question mark,” Dolan quotes Archbishop Fulton Sheen, “but an exclamation point!”
The religious turn is also gendered. For the first time in American history, young men are more religious than young women. Among Orthodox churches, converts surged by 78 percent from 2019 to 2022, with men outnumbering women. The opioid crisis, declining college enrollment, and shrinking job prospects have left young men especially broken. Faith — like masculinist political movements — offers them authority, transcendence, and belonging.
Hannah Arendt knew that human beings seek transcendence. In a secular age, she found transcendence in a politics of plurality: the coming together of a diverse people to build a common world and pursue goals beyond private interest. Today, amidst the failure of pluralist political institutions, people turn to political movements mixed with religion. The question is whether such a return to faith can be a constructive renewal — or merely a desperate refuge for a society in collapse.
The political face of this new class is J.D. Vance. Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s 2022 profile of Vance shows that his evolution is not a reversal but the maturation of a deeply alienated worldview. Vance has become one of the leading avatars of a new populist-intellectual persuasion that blends cultural conservatism with economic nationalism. Known as national conservatism or post-liberalism, it is heavily Catholic, defiantly anti-woke, skeptical of big business, nationalist on trade and borders, and admiring of strongman models like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
This movement is still institutionally weak, but it wields growing cultural power. It speaks to a multiracial working class alienated from both parties. Its wager is simple: as progressives weaken the Democratic Party with unpopular cultural stances, the right can capture disaffected voters by offering identity, clarity, and belonging — an exclamation point instead of a question mark.
Arendt reminds us that the miracle of revolution lies both in beginning — in founding a new political order that can outlast the passions of the moment — and in durability and stability, the creation of meaningful institutions that establish legitimacy. What makes the present upheaval so perilous is precisely its refusal of that double task. It seeks power without institutions, transcendence without plurality, and authority without law. Such a revolution cannot found freedom; it can only liberate us from real and perceived tyrannies, offering terror in its wake. Its triumph would not be the renewal of American democracy but the creation of a political desert, where the space for freedom and common life is scorched away by the fire of resentment and the will to dominate.
On Revolution is Arendt’s most relevant book in contemporary politics. We will begin reading it in the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group starting September 12. You can also read a transcript of my recent speech on Arendt and the “Constitution of Freedom,” delivered at the São Paulo Law School in Brazil, here.
