Hannah Arendt - Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975

The Republic of the United States of America has been in a state of decline for more than fifty years, that is, if the decline is dated from the debacle of the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. More than a century before that, John Quincy Adams already despaired of what he called the noble experiment, chiefly due to the mordant division of public opinion over the issue of human slavery.

Today, the apathy of public opinion is denounced by politicians of all parties and pundits of all political stripes, for the sake of their own power. But for the people, what does an addiction to polls, however cockeyed their results, signify other than an obsession with public opinion? It will come as no surprise to those familiar with Hannah Arendts way of thinking that she believed polls, like senseless calls for donations, signify either having lost or been swindled out of ones own opinion. Speaking with a group of students in Chicago in 1963, Arendt said that every one of us is forced to make up his mind and then exchange his opinion with others. You may remember, she said, the great mistrust the founders had in public opinion, which stands opposed to public spirit. Where public spirit is lacking, public opinion comes in its stead. To Arendt this is a perversion, and a danger to all republics, perhaps especially those that consider themselves democracies. For (now quoting Madison, Federalist, 50) when men exert their reason cooly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions.When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.

Thomas Jefferson was a party of one, though not in the sense of The Loners Manifesto, which would transmogrify loners, political and otherwise, into a group identity! In a letter to Francis Hopkinson written from Paris in March of 1789, Jefferson wrote: I am not a federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in any thing else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists.

If the American Republic has failed, who bears the responsibility? That question can be construed economically orin various formspsychologically, which, to Arendt, would bring forth social rather than political answers. To respond politically would require an observer standing at a distance from the certain but ambiguous sociability of men and women. A political response would be to a somewhat different and more precise question: How have citizens of the United States dissipated the power of their Republic? Her last public address, delivered in the last year of her life, 1975, in celebration of the approaching two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the American Republic, contains indications of what she might say today. There she emphasized the erosion of power in this country, the nadir of self-confidence when victory over one of the tiniest and most helpless countries could cheer the inhabitants of what only a few decades ago really was the mightiest power on earth (referring to the United States in the mid- to late 1940s, after the Allied victory in World War II). She next mentions something that, by 1975, seemed to her the mini-crisis triggered by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, which heralded the destruction of a reliable and devoted civil serviceprobably the most important achievement of the long Roosevelt administration. From that point on there had been a cataclysm of events, tumbling over one another, and, in words frequently quoted, cascading like a Niagara Falls of history whose sweeping force leaves everybody, spectators who try to reflect on it and actors who try to slow it down, equally numbed and paralyzed. Now, more than forty years after Arendt delivered that speech, how often do we still hear this country hailed as the worlds greatest power, or sole superpower, with even less justification than in 1975? Even more confusing, today this swagger is accompanied by the politically empty economic caveat that somehow America must return to her former wealth and greatness.