On the Election of Donald Trump: Reflections on Love, Language, and Listening →

“He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.”

— Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics”

The unthinkable has happened. So we must ask, among other things, why was it unthinkable? How could we not see what was happening? In asking these difficult questions my thoughts keep wandering to Hannah Arendt.

As the waves of grief begin to subside, there is an emergent and almost overwhelming feeling of moral responsibility. Time is necessary to think what has happened, but in the meantime we can call upon those voices that give us perspective in a time of collective loss and mourning. After 9/11 we reached for W.H. Auden, after this Presidential election we reach for Bertolt Brecht. We reach for those who Arendt wrote “keep the storehouse of memory” and create the words we live by. We need language so desperately right now — language, and listening, and a new collective imaginary.

In her bicentennial essay “Home to Roost” Hannah Arendt writes, “No doubt, the cataclysm of events that numbs us is due to a large extent to a strange, but in history by no means unknown, coincidence of occurrences, each of which has a different meaning and a different cause.” Arendt is writing about the Vietnam War and what she called “The crises of the Republic.” As she so eloquently reminds us, the crises could be detected for decades. The same can be said today. Except it seems as though in our will to triumph (our being those who had faith in the institutions of government and liberty) we were blinded and deafened to the signs of crises before us. In Odyssean fashion we shoved wax in our ears and sailed passed the sirens of fate. We took respite in numbers and polling data. We lifted up rationalism and relied upon cool calculations. We thought our methodologies of enlightened thinking were fool proof. We were wrong; and this is surprising because many of us, at some level, know that we cannot trust numbers and reason.

So, what is the cause of our blindness? What is the cause of our deafness? How can we accept the moral responsibility we must now live with?

One answer Hannah Arendt offers us is Amor Mundi — love of the world. In her Denktagebuch (Thinking journal) there is a short entry: “Amor mundi — warum ist es so schwer, die Welt zu lieben?” Love of the world — why is it so difficult to love the world? This is not easy. How do we love a world that can elect a man like Donald Trump? A man who spouts hatred, fear, and violence? A man who so many Americans voted for? A man who does not understand language, or beauty, or love? Arendt’s question pushes us to bear the weight of our responsibility — to engage in the difficult, painful work of loving the world.

Loving the world is intimately bound with Arendt’s timeless axiom in the preface to The Human Condition that calls us to stop and think what we are doing. Loving the world means we must see the world as it is. We must find a way to stop, listen, and think. I did not think Trump’s movement could win. An ideological movement that was fed on the rhetoric of racism, sexism, and division, in part, elected him. A disastrous war, an economic collapse, and the emergence of a nationalist, populism — this is history we’ve read, but many of us have never had to face. We read some of the signs, but could not find our way to imagine the outcome. We could not imagine a Democratic candidate beyond the traditional political boundaries. And in this failing of imagination, the rhetoric of Trump’s candidacy spoke to those we were failing, and played upon their resentment, fear, and mistrust of government, while calling upon an authoritarian sense of nationalism.

Arendt wrote The Human Condition — a text she intended to title Amor Mundi — out of the experiences of loss incurred under an authoritarian regime. Her losses were different, yes, but they have much to teach us about the historical moment we’re living in. A moment increasingly defined by elements of authoritarianism. Some of these elements that Arendt gives ear to in her work include: a turn against traditional political establishments, the emergence of mass society, the fictionalization of reality, the political emancipation of private, corporate interests, the rise of fear as a weapon of government, and the preponderance of loneliness, and mass worldly alienation. This election has been characterized by so many of these elements. The turn away from the institutional politics, the turn away from language, has bombarded us. I for one was incapable of seeing and hearing what was before me and what I did hear was a reflection of my limited imaginary. I was out of tune with what I was hearing. The language, which so many of us scowled at and scurried away from, resonated with so many of our fellow citizens. How can we hear what we do not understand? How can we hear what we so profoundly disagree with? This election was not won in silence. As Trump once told us, “I know words, I have the best words” And, “I am your voice.”

Before last Tuesday it seemed reasonable to dismiss the insane ramblings of Donald J. Trump as bad rhetoric, part of his public persona. And perhaps the individual person is different behind the public mask, but the reality remains his words moved millions of Americans to elect him to office. What once looked like the fictionalized reality of Trump and his supporters is now a shared reality we must all face. We too must put on our public masks, though, and organize to fight against the authoritarianism that has emerged in our country.

In her essay on “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” Arendt says that we must not ask “Why did you obey?” but rather “Why did you support?” She writes, “This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere ‘words’ have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals.” In this passage Arendt draws our attention to the importance of language in politics, and to the difference between obedience and support. We must ask why did you support Trump? But we must also listen to the answers with a sense of seriousness that seemed to be missing from the general election. The white, working poor, the disappearing middle class, have been marginalized by institutional politics. This does not mean that they are uneducated or stupid; this means that they are human and like the rest of us and are searching for a voice, representation, and meaning. They have called a referendum on an economy that has fundamentally changed and traditional political parties that have failed to keep abreast of their daily living conditions. Trump offered them a simplified rhetoric that offers swift and punishing reforms; affirming their own resentment toward “insider candidates.” The language he used seems so diametrically opposed to the way many of us think democracy, that it was difficult to hear and see how his language was mobilizing the populis. Trump’s words are intended to undermine political democracy. And I don’t just mean democracy in the sense of constitutional republicanism, but democracy in the sense that his speech is so perverse and so ugly that it turns us away from truth.

We cannot demand to understand Trump or his supporters within the realm of politics. And this is in part I think where I failed to listen. I was listening with the wrong set of ears. I thought despite his banter about hating politics and not being a politician he was still playing within political institutions. But this is not the case. We can only listen to Trump if we attune our ears with those who stand outside of politics. Trump understood this. This is why he won.

In teaching us to love the world Arendt teaches us that we cannot wither under the weight of immediacy, we cannot dwell on individual feelings of moral responsibility. She draws a distinction between personal responsibility and political responsibility. Personal responsibility moves us to ask how we might act in the world, to reckon with questions of judgment in contrast to political responsibility “which every government assumes for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past.” In the wake of a Trump Presidency we are confronted with both forms. Many of us feel responsible, but Arendt reminds us that our guilt is “not personal, strictly speaking, and it is only in a metaphorical sense that we can say we feel guilty for the sins of our fathers or our people or of mankind, in short for deeds we have not done.” What we can do, she says, is set time aright. We can take refuge in the words of Hamlet: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!” Arendt tells us, “To set the time aright means to renew the world, and this we can do because we all arrived at one time or another as newcomers in a world which was there before us and will still be there when we are gone, when we shall left its burden to our successors.”

Part of loving the world right now means finding a way to organize politically. And in some ways we have been offered a possibility to renew the Democratic Party and the way we think democracy in America. We can set time aright.’ Wilting beneath the weight of our grief is not an option. Let us take refreshment in the sense of community that is being forged together and find a way to act in concert.