A friend alerted me to this A.O. Scott review about a new Hannah Arendt documentary:

'Two insights stand out in painful relief. The first is Arendt’s contention that the lethally dehumanizing logic of totalitarianism originated partly in the massive displacement of populations after World War I. The refugees created by that conflict were not only stateless but “rightsless,” regarded by the nations of Europe not as citizens in need of protection but as a problem to be solved. A century after that war, Europe is again in the midst of a refugee crisis, the political consequences of which are not yet fully known.

Arendt was also concerned with the ways certain totalitarian tendencies and attitudes could persist in democratic societies, and “Vita Activa” includes some especially chilling implications for the current state of American politics. Totalitarianism rested, in Arendt’s view, above all on the systematic refusal to engage reality, on the substitution of ideological fantasy and outright fiction for reason and empiricism.'

Read the review here.

The systematic refusal to engage reality is a nice way to describe contemporary democracy.

A politician then is somebody who offers refuge from reality. Not all of them but too many of them.