Substack Live with Princeton Professor Kim Scheppele, Saturday at 6 pm ET
Princeton Professor Kim Scheppele joins us live, for a second time, tonight. The first time, she joined us as part of our Autocracy and Democracy series in early June, and it was one of our most-watched Subtack Live editions so far. Tonight she’s back to have our final conversation about our book club book, George Orwell’s 1984, with us.
“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
Kim cites to Orwell’s line from the book in a paper she has written, titled, Democracy In Danger: The Autocrat’s Spyware. She relates it to Hannah Arendt’s seminal work on totalitarianism, and the aspiration of both Hitler and Stalin to achieve “absolute domination,” the “[t]otalitarian domination [which] aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spontaneity in general.” She argues that this century’s dictators have set similar goals.
But, she notes (and this has echoes of our earlier conversation with Andrew Weissmann about the book), there are key differences in 2025, where the notion of one cohesive society has less import. “[P]eople,” Kim argues, “have become more and more reliant on smaller and smaller circles of friends and family, finding refuge and community on the internet where, among other things, they can be anonymous or reinvent themselves as personalities they do not have to maintain “IRL,” that is, in real life.”
What does that mean for the would-be dictator today? What can we learn about 1984, Trump’s plans for our country, and how we resist?” Join us tonight at 6 ET on the Substack app (if you’re subscribed to Civil Discourse, you’ll get an email letting you know when we go live) as we discuss these questions. If you have to miss us live, there will be video available this evening.
If there’s anything you’d like us to discuss, please leave a comment.
Looking forward to seeing you tonight!
We’re in this together,
Joyce