Alone We Fall

Shmuel Lederman (bio)

A review of Gaffney, Jennifer. Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding.Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States was met with consternation and often horror at home and around the world. To make sense of the nonsensical, many turned to books that seemed to offer relevant insights, including George Orwell’s 1984 and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. That people turned to books about the rise and dynamics of totalitarian movements and regimes says much about how they understood Trump’s election. For political scientists, the appropriate term to explain his election would rather be populism, or authoritarian populism. This places Trump in a familiar lineage of political figures who manage to come to power and threaten seemingly well-entrenched democratic institutions and liberal values through their demonization of immigrants, refugees, and certain ethnic and religious groups; their exclusive claims to speak in the name of the vague entity called “the people”; and their outbursts against corrupt elites, lying media, and disloyal opposition. But for many “ordinary” citizens and quite a few political theorists, perhaps not without reason, Trump’s rise meant something more, something to be understood through the illuminating if frightening insights of intellectuals like Orwell and Arendt.

Jennifer Gaffney’s book on political loneliness shows the insight that can be drawn from a careful and erudite reading of some of the 20^th century’s most provocative thinkers, first and foremost Arendt. Gaffney begins with a simple but far-reaching observation: “Never before have we been so interconnected, so accessible to one another. . . . And yet . . . we have never before been so lonely” (1). Gaffney attempts to understand and shed light on this peculiar loneliness and its implications. Readers of Arendt will recognize the idea that modern loneliness, due in part to the loss of public spaces where individuals could converse and participate in politics, is an important precondition for the rise of totalitarian movements. These movements appeal to the atomized, alienated masses by convincing them that the complicated world around them can be explained by a single premise, be it the perennial struggle of races or the history of class warfare. In joining the totalitarian movement, these lonely individuals see themselves not only as part of something bigger but also as facilitating the progress of history itself. The lonely individual can get lost—and thereby find himself—both in the crowd and in the sweep of history. Gaffney’s major contribution is her insistence that the regime we often identify as totalitarianism’s exact opposite—liberal democracy—prepares the ground for totalitarian thought and movements by isolating people from each other (147). She argues that the stark differences between these forms of political regimes should not obscure the fact that

the political structures that we have inherited from the liberal tradition—such as the emphasis on representation rather than deliberation, the anonymity of the vote, and the priority placed on securing and expanding the right to pursue private self-interest—have eroded the space of politics, leaving even those endowed with the full rights of liberal citizenship hidden from one another, unable to see themselves as belonging to a common world. (4)

Gaffney notes correctly that when thinking about the challenge posed by Arendt’s analysis of the elements that “crystallized” into totalitarianism, commentators tend to stress Arendt’s “right to have rights,” namely the fundamental right to belong to a political community, which is the only guarantee for human rights in the current “age of statelessness.” Gaffney points out that, while certainly an important Arendtian insight, this focus obscures Arendt’s more radical critique of the liberal tradition and its institutions (149). From a perspective critical of liberal democracy, the experience of alienation, exile, and abandonment characteristic of statelessness is but an extreme version of the basic loneliness that characterizes also citizens in the modern world (144). If we genuinely try to think with Arendt about our contemporary world, then we must consider not only the need to guarantee citizenship but also the need to guarantee a new kind of citizenship that would “return lonely individuals to themselves, the world, and others” (149) by allowing citizens to participate in a public space of appearance in which they could “see themselves and those around them in the fullness of their humanity” (150).

Gaffney clarifies that Arendt’s space of appearance is not about expressivity for the individual who is otherwise “hidden,” but about challenging the taken-for-granted conception of the individual as a “self-contained, self-interested subject that is endowed with pre-given, inalienable rights and liberties” (189). Indeed, Arendt sees this very conception in part as a result of the forgetfulness of “the political”— the unique experience of action and speech in the public sphere as equal decision-makers—and traces this forgetfulness to the beginning of political thought (108). For Arendt, Gaffney explains, the subject is always already constituted by others with whom they share the world, and their understanding of reality itself depends on the extent of their engagement with the unique perspectives of others about the common world (190). Gaffney convincingly shows that Arendt’s analysis is in many ways even truer today than it was when she wrote it. Citizens in liberal societies, Gaffney points out, struggle “not simply to converse, but even to see themselves as belonging to the same reality” (82). In today’s political discourse—about global warming or COVID, for example—even the most basic facts about the world (not to mention how to interpret them and what to do to address the challenges they pose) are contested by certain parties and movements, whether for political reasons or because they are true believers. Gaffney notes how our easy access to each other through social networks creates echo chambers rather than spaces for genuine conversation to the extent that we “barely recognize the humanity of those whose worldviews differ from our own” (82).

Gaffney reads the “hidden” Trump supporter who surprised so many in the 2016 elections through Arendt’s metaphor of the light that the public sphere sheds on those who participate in it and the darkness and “hiddenness” that characterize the private sphere:

[T]he very language of hiddenness points to a broader failure within our society to create robust political spaces for the appearance of speech and action. In the absence of such spaces, we tend to retreat into the lamplight of the private, creating echo chambers for ourselves that leave us hidden from one another. (181)

This isolation, which is accompanied by an extremely one-sided perspective on reality and an often Schmittian “friend-enemy” dichotomy between left and right, liberals and conservatives, nationals and foreigners, creates fertile ground for far-right movements. Using Arendt’s analysis in Origins, Gaffney suggests that Trump’s ability to build on these tendencies to amplify the echo chambers of the right allowed him to mobilize previously apolitical, slumbering majorities in key states (180).

Gaffney does not ignore other crucial factors that led to Trump’s election, including issues of race, gender, and class (160). As so much has been written about these issues, she is justified in focusing on loneliness. The question remains, however, whether the kind of loneliness she analyzes has the political significance she attributes to it. For cultural and political critics, there is a certain appeal to her interpretation because it points to a fundamental problem in the very politeia in which we live. But stressing loneliness as a significant factor behind phenomena like the rise of far-right movements or the inability to dialogue across political differences may run the risk of keeping the “hidden” Trump supporter hidden still, so it is worth raising some questions about it.

For example, Trump enjoyed broad support among Evangelicals. Whatever we think about these supporters, is loneliness the attribute that best describes them? Deep commitment to a cultural, religious, and political cause, and a sense of being a part a broad movement behind this cause, seems more accurate. Something similar, I think, can be said about many others in the Trump camp. If in-depth accounts such as Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land paint an accurate picture, they are motivated by a strong sense of threat to their most fundamental cultural, social, and religious beliefs, and by a sense of a broad movement of which they are a part and which Trump represented. For the most part, they are rebels with a cause, highly politicized to the extent that even the most seemingly simple and factual actions, such as wearing masks against a highly contagious, airborne disease, become political issues. Have they been lonely? It is obviously hard to tell, but it seems likely that many of them felt ignored, sidelined, or excommunicated by the liberal discourse that rules the mainstream media. They might well have felt they were being actively hidden by the “system” or the “establishment” and found in Trump (or in Fox News) an outlet that finally brought their point of view to the fore and acted on it. But were they lonely in the sense that they felt alienated from the world, atomized, and isolated? I’m not so sure. There is a strong sense of solidarity and meaning in feeling marginalized by the political and cultural establishment, evident, for example, in the way that more radical progressives morphed into an incredibly energetic movement around Bernie Sanders. To reiterate, this is just to raise questions about an argument that I find convincing overall, at least as far as many citizens in contemporary liberal democracies are concerned.     

Whatever political significance we attach to loneliness, if liberal democracy itself lays the ground for totalitarianism by de-politicizing the polity and the citizens themselves, then the way out is to turn back to “the political” and provide citizens with what Arendt called “spaces of appearance.” While Arendt scholars often interpret the concept as allowing for various kinds of public spaces, to Gaffney’s credit, she recognizes that Arendt means this space quite literally, as one in which citizens appear to each other directly, face to face (192). This recognition adds a radical bent to Gaffney’s reconstruction of Arendt’s reflections on loneliness in relation to the loss of “the political”: in order to establish spaces of appearance where citizens can “announce themselves to the world” and see themselves as members of a common world (176), there has to be some kind of participatory democracy, radically different from the kind of depoliticized democracies we have today. Such a participatory democracy would provide spaces for joint action and deliberation, and a communal existence that is not totalizing and does not erase the plurality and individuality of modern citizens. Arendt pointed to the pre-revolution American townhalls and the tradition of council democracy that came out of the socialist movements of the 20^th century as examples that could allow the experience of “the political” for all citizens if they became an institutional part of modern democracies. In advocating such a radical revolution in our democracies—so radical that commentators often ignore this aspect of Arendt’s writings or dismiss it as unimportant and unrealistic—Arendt expressed her sense of the urgent need for what Gaffney calls a “politics of appearance . . . in which we come face-to-face with one another, engaging directly in the matters that go between us” (192).

As a form of government, this will probably remain a “people’s utopia” for the foreseeable future, as Arendt called this vision of participatory democracy. But as far as political activism is concerned, Gaffney suggests that while today’s protests and assemblies are important, they do not address the need to open spaces for speech and action that would make us visible to each other as individuals and citizens (193). She thus calls on all of us to rethink our obligation as citizens, to redefine it (also) as being responsible for making each other visible in the public sphere, and to find out what such a politics of appearance would look like in our political action. It is a worthy challenge for anyone who recognizes that today’s politics put not only justice and freedom but survival itself at stake, and who is awake to the possibilities of the new political awareness so many have experienced in the face of this unprecedented predicament.

Works Cited

• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New Press, 2016.