Luo Siling | Arendt’s Foresight and Lament for America Fifty Years Ago: Also On Prof. Moyn’s One-Sided Quotation and Misreading of Arendt

Editor’s Note：In May 1975, Hannah Arendt delivered the speech Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address at the Bicentennial Forum held in Boston. The full text was published in the June 26, 1975 issue of The New York Review of Books.

The speech attracted considerable attention for its unusually somber and profound tone. Unlike the blind optimism or “doctrinaire” reflections on the American system prevalent in mainstream academia at the time, Arendt offered a sharp critique of America’s “image politics” and “systematic lying,” which was highly provocative then. At the time, her prognosis for America’s future was considered overly pessimistic. Today, however, one can only marvel at how prophetic her warnings from fifty years ago have proven to be.

In fact, shortly after arriving in the United States, Arendt began writing critical essays about the country. Reading these pieces today fills one with both admiration for her foresight and a deep sense of unease.

This article was originally written in Chinese. Today is Independence Day. This article commemorates the 250th anniversary of American Independence.

Arendt’s Foresight and Lament for America Fifty Years Ago-PART 1

Arendt’s Foresight and Lament for America Fifty Years Ago—PART 2

On June 30, Yale professor Samuel Moyn published the article “How America Went Awry : Hannah Arendt was blind to the present” in Unherd. In it, Prof.Moyn argues that over the past decade, faced with political shocks such as Trump’s election, many “Resistance liberals” have elevated Hannah Arendt to the status of a prophet. They have weaponized her theory of totalitarianism to explain the current crisis, claiming that today’s world is in precisely the kind of crisis Arendt would have recognized. However, Prof.Moyn contends that this is often posterity projecting its own fears onto Arendt. In reality, Arendt lacked sufficient foresight regarding the flaws in America’s own system and its subsequent evolution. Prof.Moyn believes Arendt had a blind spot about the essence of America: she “never did glimpse the possibility that America itself had been, or could indeed become, an empire.” She mistakenly diagnosed crises such as the Vietnam War and Watergate as mere temporary “aberrations” that deviated from the founding ideals, and she prescribed a remedy rooted in a nostalgic worship of the 1776 founding myth. Prof.Moyn emphasizes that it is precisely the global hegemony and militaristic expansion pursued jointly by both American parties over the past fifty years that abandoned the domestic underclass and ultimately gave rise to Trumpism. He criticizes contemporary liberals for falling, like Arendt, into blind worship, using the false proposition of “returning to normalcy” to evade reality and refusing to acknowledge that the current democratic crisis is the inevitable price of America’s long-term maintenance of its imperial system.

I do not deny that if “Resistance liberals” use Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism as a weapon against Trump and hope to “restore” the pre-Trump American political normalcy through a Biden-style or mainstream Democratic approach, this is indeed a misreading of Arendt—and a misjudgment of America’s own problems. At the same time, however, I believe Prof.Moyn’s understanding of Arendt is equally one-sided and constitutes a serious misreading. In fact, Arendt issued early warnings about many of America’s problems and crises, and her bicentennial address Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address stands as her final lament for America.

Prof.Moyn’s One-Sided Reading of Arendt

Prof.Moyn’s article primarily relies on Arendt’s 1975 bicentennial address Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address, supplemented by limited quotations from The Origins of Totalitarianism and On Revolution, to reach the conclusion that “Arendt was blind to contemporary America.” Yet he makes no mention of the many other important essays Arendt wrote specifically about the United States. In reality, from the 1940s to the 1970s, Arendt — describing herself as a European immigrant and “outsider” — produced at least a dozen commentary pieces on American current affairs. These are mainly collected in Between Past and Future (1961/1968) and Crises of the Republic (1972). Therefore, in my view, both the “Resistance liberals” and Prof. Samuel offer one-sided interpretations of Arendt.

First, Prof.Moyn claims that Arendt failed to foresee the global hegemony and militaristic expansion pursued jointly by both American parties. The truth is exactly the opposite. As early as 1954, in the early years of the Cold War, Arendt warned of America’s “imperialist tendencies” in her essay Dream and Nightmare. In 1971, in Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers, she explicitly pointed out that America is a republic at home but an empire abroad, and that imperial expansion is structurally incompatible with republican constitutionalism. This overseas expansion and covert operations were irreversibly poisoning the foundations of the republic. She sharply warned that if America chose to become an “overseas empire,” it would have to rely on systematic lying — driven by interests and image — to rule (as exemplified by McNamara’s Pentagon Papers). This would inevitably destroy the rule of law at home. This was not an accidental “wrong turn,” but the inherent incompatibility between republic and empire. Prof.Moyn not only ignores Ar