I don't think anyone can seriously use the word totalitarian without having read Hannah Arendt and showing some knowledge of her assessment of it. It's definiti

I don't think anyone can seriously use the word totalitarian without having read Hannah Arendt and showing some knowledge of her assessment of it. It's definitive, and a doorstop that is hard to ignore. Even just the addendum essay "ideology and terror" summarizes a lot of it. Making up a definition for it for the sake of a blog post is dumb. It's a term of art in political theory and history, and not a placeholder for whatever you think is bad. I can't quite believe I'm calling Scott Alexander (whose work I have always loved) an idiot, but on this, I think his idea would benefit from the feedback.