In 2016 the sociologist Arlie Hochschild published Strangers in Their Own Land. The book appeared in the final days of that year’s presidential election and offered an account of the rise of Donald Trump. So many were shocked that a man who lied about everything could be elected. Explanations were needed, and among the many books published offering accounts of the 2016 election, and the ensuing crisis of democracy, Hochschild’s book stood out in the crowded market place of ideas (at least for me). She wasn’t telling liberals what they wanted to hear, nor was she offering an apologetic lament for the end days of democracy, a favorite American past time. (Why is it that we always think we’ll be united by some great political catastrophe in a way that will finally reveal to us the way things should be?) No, Hochschild was simply trying to understand. And, instead of just making the traditional argument for civil political discourse—talking to one’s enemies on friendly terms—she actually became friends with people, she became part of a community.
Hochschild visited and lived in Louisiana for five years. It is a conservative state in the Deep South that has been and continues to be affected by environmental pollution, from oil drilling to plastics factories. Louisiana has some of the most relaxed anti-trust laws in the United States, and so there are high incentives for high-polluting corporations, like plastics producers, to move there. In the town where she lived nearly everyone she met had cancer, was dying of cancer, or died from cancer while she was there. People in Louisiana are more likely to die earlier from cancer than most Americans in large part because of corporate pollution. Hochschild wanted to understand how it was that people could live amidst such industrial pollution and still oppose government attempts at regulation, which might prevent such human catastrophe. How could they possibly be blind to the facts when the facts were literally killing them? In other words, she was probing one of the great divisive questions in American politics: why do people seemingly vote against their own interests?
In the words of Hannah Arendt, truth and politics have never spoken the same language, or stood on the same ground. But lying in politics has always been considered a political virtue. People expect politicians to lie to them, and the more cleverly politicians lie, the more people praise them for it—for their audacity. For their ability to get away with it. When we talk about truth and lies colloquially, we often talk about “truth-tellers” and “liars” as opposites. One might say something like, He’s truthful. Or, He’s a liar. These statements carry value judgments about the person who is speaking, and it is assumed that while truth is good, lying is bad. There’s an idea that the truth-teller is in the right, and that the liar cannot be trusted. And there is the belief that the truth is backed by verifiable facts, while the liar fabricates everything they say, tailoring it to their audience’s wishes. The truth-teller is absolutely right, and the liar is absolutely wrong.
But few things in life are so clear-cut, and the truth is not a single-edged sword. At some point in our contemporary world, truth became an ideological sticking point. In politics, facts and lies are both instruments of political rhetoric that are used to try and persuade the people. And when those who believe they’re on the side of the truth fail to convince the other side of the facts, they often become incensed. And because of this, “the truth” and fact-checking become ideological goods that can blind individuals to the full messiness of reality. Sometimes one rejects the facts, because the facts ignore their reality, which is also a fact, or what we might call factual truth. Which is simply to say, the truth is that we experience the world differently.
In a letter to Mary McCarthy, in 1954, Arendt wrote: “The chief fallacy is to believe that truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought; thinking is always result-less.” For Arendt, factual truth—which is different from scientific truth or mathematical truth—is the individual truth of our experiences that we share with one another. It’s the story I share with you about my experiences in the world, and it’s the story you share with me about your experiences in the world. And together, through a process of sharing our experiences with one another we weave together the common fabric of humanity. Or, what was once more traditionally called the commons. But when this factual truth is conflated with the truth of reality, we lose the ability to share our stories with one another. Instead, it becomes about who is right and who is wrong, who has the true story and who is lying. For the truth-teller, the facts become totalizing. And this is a problem because facts can be true, but sometimes those facts don’t capture another person’s full factual truth.
In our example from Hochschild’s book about voting against one’s interests, those arguing in favor of corporate regulation are concerned with climate change and pollution. For them, it’s a question of the facts. For them, regulation is a solution to a problem. But for the people Hochschild spoke with, regulation meant less jobs and less opportunity for social growth. Regulation wasn’t a solution; it was a problem. It’s not that they didn’t know corporate pollution was bad, it’s that they have a more pressing political concern: economic survival. It’s not that one side was right and the other side was wrong; it’s that sometimes the truth is in conflict with the factual truth—with experience.
It’s easy to dismiss those one disagrees with when they are certain of the facts. But maybe it’s time to think rethink what is meant by “the facts,” and reconsider the political utility they have, because right now shouting “that’s a lie!” is only tearing America further apart.
Samantha Rose Hill
Samantha Rose Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt (2021) and the editor and translator of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (2024). She is associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, and the journals Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory and Theory & Event. Samantha is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Center for Life-Writing.
This is not true: “right now shouting “that’s a lie!” is only tearing America further apart.” Rather, the liars like Trump and the Republicans are tearing America apart. The alternative to saying “That’s a lie” is to stay silent, which implies acquiescence, or to agree, which would be wrong. Certainly there are little white lies that don’t need to be pointed out. But Trump and the Republicans tell big whopper lies, many of which have at their heart hatred, incitement to violence, anti-democracy, and nostalgia for slavery. We don’t know what Arendt would say about today’s political situation, but it’s doubtful she would find Trumpian evil banal. She fled to the US because of our freedom.
There’s so much in this piece–it’s true, truths of shared experience tend to have priority over truths we don’t get to see or experience (and these translate into votes). The truth of environmental policy will differ by state and by group as Hochschild pointed out–mostly based on values. Yet, truths differ because facts can be framed and reframed. These political truths mostly deal with meaning, and not necessarily facts.