The Brooklyn Rail

The last work that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime was the text of a speech she gave at Faneuil Hall in Boston to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the founding of the American Republic. The text was published on June 26, 1975 in the New York Review of Books, only six months before Arendt died of a heart attack at age 69 in her apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan and was buried on the Bard College campus.

“Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address” was less celebratory of the past and future of the American Republic than Arendt usually was. Arendt was often quite optimistic about the future of her adopted country, but in the wake of the end of the disastrous Vietnam War (“an outright humiliating defeat”) and the scandal of Watergate (“the intrusion of criminality into the political processes of this country”), she was rather less sanguine about the likelihood of an imminent American resurgence. She begins with the crisis triggered by Joe McCarthy, leading to the destruction of the civil service built up by the Roosevelt administration, but moves quickly to the recent defeat in Vietnam and the unraveling of Nixon’s Watergate White House.

“Home to Roost” is rooted in the specifics of that time, 50 years ago, but it also includes some surprising insights about our time, now. She talks a lot about the rise of “public relations” and the prominence of images, but also about post-truth and “the doctrine of progress” in technological terms.

If abundance and superabundance were the original goals of Marx’s dream of a classless society, then we live the reality of the socialist and communist dream, except that this dream has been realized beyond our wildest fantasies through the advancement of technology, whose provisionally last stage is automation: the noble dream has changed into something closely resembling a nightmare.¹

Lying has always been a part of politics, but the level of mendacity and its shamelessness has reached a new peak with Trump.

Image making as global policy is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history, but lying as such is neither new nor necessarily foolish in politics. . . . Lying as a way of life is also no novelty in politics, at least not in our century. It was quite successful in countries under totalitarian rule, where the lying was guided not by an image but by an ideology.

In Arendt’s terms, the Trump phenomenon is not totalitarian because it is not ideological, but rather tyrannical in the exercise of power for power’s sake. When Arendt was writing about Nixon and the people around him, she maintained that the trouble was “less that power corrupts than that the aura of power, its glamorous trappings, more than power itself, attracts,” and she concludes that Nixon’s men “were corrupt long before they attained power.”² And then comes this insight into Nixon, and by extension, into Trump:

As far as the criminals themselves are concerned, the chief common weakness in their characters seems to be the rather naïve assumption that all people are actually like them, that their flawed characters are part of the human condition stripped of hypocrisy and conventional clichés.

I have heard a version of this “cynical realism” from many Trump supporters over the years: he just says and does what all politicians would if they had the chance and were no longer subject to the rule of law. He’s no worse than any other politician; he just says it all out loud. Trump believes that everyone around him is just like him, or a lesser version of himself. Megalomania becomes him.

One of Trump’s favorite sayings is “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you.” The most attractive and enduring thing about Trump for his supporters has always been his ability to drive liberals crazy. All those holier-than-thou snobs are routinely driven mad by Trump’s routines in front of the press or in tweets on his own social media platform, and that pleasurable spectacle has been enough for a lot of people. But the routines make it difficult to see what Trump is actually doing to the world. After Trump, the US will be significantly diminished on the world stage, and it will take a long time to recover from that. The world will not forget that we made it possible for Trump to do what he has done.

Over 3,600 people have been killed, including at least 383 children, in Iran in the war with the US and Israel since February 28, and 26,500 more have been injured. Civilians, especially children, old people, and the poor, are the ones suffering the most from the war. It’s as if Trump couldn’t resist joining Benjamin Netanyahu in his cruelty and bloodlust.

Arendt ended her speech on the 200^th anniversary of the American Republic with this plea:

While we now slowly emerge from under the rubble of the events of the last few years, let us not forget these years of aberration lest we become wholly unworthy of the glorious beginnings two hundred years ago. When the facts come home to us, let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into utopias—images, theories, or sheer follies. For it was the greatness of this Republic to give due account, for the sake of freedom, to the best in men and to the worst.