Fifty-one years ago, Hannah Arendt gave what would be her final public speech at Faneuil Hall. The occasion was America’s 200th birthday, but Arendt refused the framing: she had come, she said, to celebrate “the Republic of the United States.”
The Republic, she said, is not a nation-state. There are no American people as there are Germans or Iranians. For Arendt, the United States was a constitutional republic, a place where all peoples from all lands could join together to form a free government and live together in freedom. She worried, in the wake of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, the subsequent attacks on the “devoted civil service body” of the Republic, and President Nixon’s crimes, whether the Republic had run its course. Still, she said, “these two hundred years of Liberty with all its ups and downs have earned Herodotus’ ‘due meed of glory.’”
As the Republic of the United States slouches toward a celebration of its 250th birthday, the Republic may be once again standing before “one of those decisive turning points of history.” It is natural, at such moments, to turn our attention away from the brutal and naked facts. The facts are clear: The United States is politically paralyzed. The presidency has claimed executive powers it has no constitutional authority to wield. The country has lost its manufacturing base. It is highly in debt. It is challenged by China economically, technologically, and politically. Even militarily, the United States — with the strongest military in the world — has not won a war decisively since 1945. The one arguable exception, the First Gulf War, stands out for precisely what is missing today: narrow objectives, popular support, and an international coalition of the willing, including 35 countries.
The overwhelming fact of recent history is the unprecedented and startling decline in U.S. political power. The current war in Iran is sad confirmation of the diminished power of the United States. We attacked an Iranian regime weakened by two years of war with Israel. In spite of startling tactical dominance, the United States is losing the war strategically. Not only does Iran retain its future nuclear capacity, but now it has asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz. What is more, our alliances and presumed leadership of the Free World are in danger of disintegrating. The war is not over, and things may change, but at least at this point, instead of demonstrating our power and diminishing Iran’s regional dominance, we may have undermined U.S. power and augmented Iranian power.
It is natural to turn away from the unpleasant facts and occupy ourselves with the search for “deeper causes” of the crises of the republic. There are many to be found. One in particular stands out: the rise of what Arendt called “lying as a way of life” at the center of our political life.
There were, it is true, many strategic reasons to aim to defeat Iran in a war. These included its determination to gain nuclear weapons, its hatred of both the United States and Israel, its dominance in the Middle East, and its support of proxy terror groups in Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon. But while all of these grounds have been mentioned, any cursory glance at the stream-of-consciousness justifications that come from the President’s social media feed shows that the real goal of the war was to convince himself and the world that the United States is and still is the mightiest power on earth. He sought to bolster the image of American greatness. To justify his boasts that America is the greatest country on Earth, by which he means the strongest. He wanted to secure his place in history as the President who solved problems in the Middle East that had bedeviled seven prior Presidents.
In short, the war was fought for an image, not for interests. The interests were secondary; the primary goal was to demonstrate his own power as the leader of the strongest country in the world. And because that image is his true goal, he cannot accept an off-ramp from the war that would saddle him with a defeat. He keeps proclaiming victory, but he can’t find a way to actually convince himself, let alone the Iranians or the rest of the world.
The centrality of an image — the image of the President and the country as the strongest in the world — confirms Arendt’s insight that lying has been elevated to a way of life at the very core of American politics. The lying in our politics differs from lies told by totalitarian leaders such as Hitler and Stalin, and even from contemporary leaders in Iran, Russia, and China. In totalitarian countries, lies are told in the interest of ideology and they are protected and proven true through terror. Anyone who contests the lie is killed, imprisoned, or disappeared. Total domination enforces the lie, the coherent ideological fiction.
Lying as a way of life is different in non-totalitarian countries. We have learned from history to refuse totalitarian lies that would justify genocide, mass killings, and ideological repression. But while we refuse to condone mass killings, we do condone nearly all other political transgressions short of murder.
The last year has witnessed an unprecedented and shocking proliferation of criminality. The President pardoned the rioters who sought to undermine an election, and many others who donated to his businesses. He has turned the Justice Department against his critics, fired prosecutors who resisted, ignored court orders in the Alien Enemies Act deportation cases and the Abrego García case, impounded funds Congress appropriated, and dismantled independent agencies without congressional approval. He has transformed ICE into a masked, quasi-legal paramilitary force. Any single item in this list might be contested, but together these acts amount to a systematic attempt to dismantle the rule of law.
In addition, there is the financial corruption at the heart of the current White House. The $TRUMP memecoin, launched days before the inauguration, was a vehicle for foreign and anonymous payments to the President. Pay-to-play access has been routinized, public office has been monetized, and ethics oversight has been hollowed out. The impunity and promise of future pardons are themselves a license: every official learns that limits exist only to be tested.
When Arendt considered the culture of lying and criminality that infused the Nixon administration, she wrote that the lies were not in the service of an ideology, but rather the result of a firm resolve to get away with criminal acts for their own sake. She compared Nixon and his henchmen to “a bunch of con men, rather untalented Mafiosi” who succeeded in appropriating to themselves the power of the strongest country on Earth.
It is clear that President Trump and his loyalist functionaries, as well as the businessmen who circle around him, are con men and talentless mafiosi, but on a scale that Nixon and Arendt could hardly have imagined. What results from the fundamental mendacity that is now at the very heart of the Republic is a credibility gap of unprecedented magnitude. No one believes what the President says. Our allies no longer trust us. Increasingly, Americans know he is a con man. The best that can be said is that his crimes are a far cry from the kinds of totalitarian and ideological criminality with which we are inclined to compare them.
What brought Nixon down — and at least for a time restored the Republic of the United States — is that the President and his followers proceeded on the “naive assumption that all people are actually like them, that their flawed character is part and parcel of the human condition stripped of hypocrisy and conventional clichés.” As a result, Nixon and his men “misjudged the incorruptibility of the courts and the press.” They thought that everyone would abandon principle in the pursuit of money and power. They were wrong.
President Trump also believes that, in the end, everyone is just like himself. He believes that Iran will fold and make a deal, just as Europe folded on tariffs and Venezuela folded when faced with the threat of invasion. He has a fundamental belief that strength and threats can be used to win, that if you are crazier and more dangerous than your adversary, you can convince your adversary to give in to your ever-increasing demands. And often the world shows that the President is right. Most people are after money and power. Most will give in to absurd threats. And yet some do not.
As much as Trump wants to believe that all are like him, there remain some today who refuse to accept his lying as a way of life. The people in Minnesota who protected their neighbors and stood witness to the illegality of ICE; the judges who are refusing to roll over and are freeing those held in detention; the journalists who are documenting the lies; the prosecutors who quit rather than bring bad cases; and above all, the citizens who keep showing up. What they share is a refusal to live inside the image — an insistence on the facts.
Nixon fell because he misjudged the limits of the Republic. He believed that everyone was corruptible, and he was wrong. What is different today is not simply the scale of the corruption, but the response to it. Corruption is no longer hidden; it is accepted, even admired. The danger is not simply that the laws are broken, but that they no longer command respect. The truly unsettling possibility is that Nixon may have been right after all.
Arendt ended her final speech at Faneuil Hall by saying that our long education in imagery — no less habit-forming than drugs — has left us, when the chickens come home to roost, the only thing to do: refuse the impulse to look away.
When the facts come home to roost, let us at least try to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into some utopias–images, theories, or sheer follies. 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.
Arendt’s warning is that the task is no longer simply to expose lies, but to resist the temptation to live within them. A republic does not collapse when crimes are committed; it collapses when crimes cease to appear as crimes. If we are at a decisive turning point, it will not be decided by the strength of our military or of our enemies abroad, but by whether we still possess the capacity to see and to judge what is happening before us — and to resist it. That is what Arendt meant by welcoming the facts when they come home.
