Postmodern Culture

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...