"Hey, if I found out somebody had been sneaking into my fitness club for years without paying, I'd want him arrested!"

 

The complaint encapsulated by the above title corresponds to the Republican Party's attitude toward "illegals" at present, and is now being tied to the current dispute over whether the U.S. Census should include the counting of non-citizens. Even when the critic of the current process concedes that "illegals" won't be allowed to vote--a concession which, of course, is  quite unlikely given who these particular critics are--based on the (unassailable) point that counting such individuals in the Census has effects on the distribution of Congressional and Electoral College seats, they are likely continue to maintain their objection to counting "illegals" in the Census.

Are such effects inappropriate, akin to letting a poacher dominate use of the gym eliptical (every freaking day!?) The short response is that countries are not clubs.  If a fitness establishment has rules requiring the payment of fees, then it is quite reasonable to insist that nobody should be getting club benefits without paying up. But territories are importantly different: if they are to be considered authentically democratic, they must have  authentically democratic rules and rule-making in place. The "benefits of citizenship" should not be thought to extend to voting rights in any real democracy, because the latter are required to ground citizenship there. That is, while votes should be taken to be the appropriate way to make almost every public policy--those that constitute and constrain democracy itself are exceptions to that rule. 

Without that crucial deviation, there could be no good objection to calling what Putin is attempting in Ukraine or Netanyahu would like to achieve in Gaza examples of forceful democritization of deviant territories. In other words, when a sufficiently powerful alien country takes over a territory, they can set forth a list of whose preferences are to be counted there, and so long as they hold events that look something like elections occasionally, they can describe what they have done as being consistent with "democratic nation building." 

Naturally, some individual or country might have the power to take this or that land (even planet!) by force; the point is that the immediate result of such conquest can never be correctly called the creation of a democratic polity unless every competent inhabitant there gets to vote on  all matters of national policy (again excluding axiomatic democratic principles).

The appropriate way to prevent an entire world of might makes right among those nations calling themselves "democracies" is to insist that once people have been living in a territory for a reasonable period of time--say a year--they must have an absolutely inviolable right to equal involvement in the determination of (nearly all) nearly all the public rules there. 

The equal effective electoral power of all competent residents# should extend even to policies involving immigration, emigration, and citizenship. The crucial exception, however, is that such policies (even those regarding citizenship or "wall-building") cannot extend to voting rights.

In other words, a group of people can make a club and put whatever rules in place for it that they want. But a group of conquerors can't just declare ownership of a populated area and imagine that it will be a democracy whoever they announce has the right to vote there. 

Getting back to our original question, this means that the fight regarding which individuals should be included in U.S. Census tallies must be determined in accordance with at least something like the Democratic Party's preferences, because if all competent residents--regardless of their "legal status"--aren't counted for the purpose of determining, e.g., the appropriate number of Congresspersons for each state, the U.S. cannot reasonably assert the right to be included among the democratic republics of the world.##

Other purposes of the Census, like those involving the distribution of Federal funds, aren't in the same category. The question of whether only citizens should be counted for the purpose of welfare determinations is something that, arguably SHOULD be subject to majority vote. The point is that all the non-temporary residents must be allowed to vote on them if any question of that sort is put to "the people." 

Authentic democracy absolutely requires that every long-term resident (even incarcerated felons) be treated equally with respect to the weights given their preferences, and it doesn't matter in the slightest how the majority of those who are currently eligible to vote in America would prefer this dispute to be resolved. No territory can remain a democratic polity if it allows for the undermining of basic democratic principles--even by its voters. Not only would a majority be insufficient to legitimately exclude non-citizens from being counted in any Census used to determine numbers of representatives, unanimous consent wouldn't do the trick either. 

This isn't actually that complicated if one thinks about what is necessary to make something a democracy and remembers that the democratic axioms landed upon cannot be abandoned without forsaking democracy itself.

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#For a brief discussion of "competence," see my blog entry for 9/14/23 and the one for 7/18/25. For discussions of "residence" and "inhabitancy, see my book, especially Chapters 5 and 6.

##Admittedly, whether the US should now be (or should have ever been) included either way is a good question...but never mind that vexing matter for the present.

Arendt's Strange Take on Truths, Opinions and Facts

 

Hannah Arendt has certainly been having her day. That she led a fascinating--even romantic--life, is clear from several recent movies and documentaries about her. She wrote both knowedgeably and passionately on subjects that are of the utmost importance in the world today: totalitarianism, refugee problems, political reform movements, racism. She was both prolific and deep. Some of her work, particularly that which focused on what she called "the banality of evil"  touched a nerve and was extremely controversial. It is unsurprising, in view of the clearly authoritarian turn in U.S. governance these days that Arendt, who was something of an expert on both Nazism and Stalinism, has gotten extremely popular of late. (But maybe it's a little unexpected to find something he calls "Arendt's Law" in Paul Krugman's most recent Substack essay.#)

I am not an Arendt scholar myself. But, as I have been reading some of her work lately, partly as the result of a recent review of a book by Margaret Canovan (who was an Arendt scholar) and partly in anticipation of writing something on a new book on truth and politics by Michael Patrick Lynch, I thought I would try to give those unfamiliar with Arendt's work a sense of just how exotic her views on truth and opinion are. 

As far as I can tell, Arendt first discussed this matter publicly in a lecture on Truth and Politics that she delivered at Notre Dame University in 1954. Rather than take complete credit for her unconventional theory, she attributes its main outlines to an anti-Socratic strain in Plato's thought.## The idea is that Plato was as disgusted by the treatment of Socrates by city folk as a liberal reader of the New York Post or X today might be at MAGA-oriented comments found there. On Arendt's view, Plato felt that Socrates should have been understood to be above the common fray, to be engaged in the hunt for eternal truths, in spite of the polis attitude that, "If he's so much smarter than we are and has nothing to offer about how to make our lives better, why doesn't he at least write brilliant plays or poetry or make beautiful statues? In reality, the guy is good for nothing at all!"  

Now, according to Arendt, Socrates didn't agree with Plato that philosophy could not provide better lives for the people. For Plato took TRUTHs to be absolutely separate from the sort of facts that would ever be of interest to the people, while Socrates thought he could help make things better for the polis. According to Arendt's Plato, all the common folk can have are OPINIONs: they are as far from TRUTHs as cave dwellers are from the sun. Keep in mind that this failing isn't just a matter of how much evidence has been complied on behalf of some proposition or other, as if something could cease to be a mere opinion when justification for it reaches some level of sufficiency. Rather, an ontological separation is being made here between propositions of essentially different types. 

The idea here is that what is a mere OPINION can never reach the level of a TRUTH, no matter how much evidence for it is amassed. That's because, on this view, TRUTHs all resemble "2 +2 = 4" while OPINIONS are more along the lines of "Aristophanes tells a better story than Sophocles." So, it's claimed that there is a sort of objectivity to propositions of one group that can never be exemplified by propositions in the other category. And persuasion, while relevant to the world of OPINION, is simply out of place when we are talking about TRUTHs. So, on Plato's view (according to Arendt), Socrates was mostly wasting his time chatting up the people of Athens.

The oddness of this way of sorting propositions is that it is customary to attribute the property of being true or being false to beliefs, statements, propositions, etc., whatever the nature of their content. In ordinary language, we take the predicate "true" to mean exactly the same thing, whatever the content of the proposition to which it is being ascribed. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about an axiom of geometry or a description of a meal: we either get things right or we don't. What we say, write, or believe is either true or it isn't. (Though maybe, in the case of value judgments, like how good the meal tasted or how funny the comedian was, it might be neither, or at least the proposition might be said to be insufficiently specified.) 

But Arendt understood this matter quite differently. For her, OPINIONs can never be TRUE. On the other hand, she claims that one's OPINIONs are not exactly "subjective." They "comprehend the world as it opens itself" to one. Thus, although they don't reflect "subjective fantasy and arbitrariness," neither can they ever be understood as "something absolute and valid for all," and on this view, it is only that sort of universality which can make something TRUE. This is because, although "the world upens up differently to every man according to his position in it...the sameness of the world, its commonness or objectivity resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and that despite all differences between men and their positions in the world...both you and I are human."

This appeal to intersubjectivity is a bit confusing (perhaps especially so to those like me who are not steeped in the "continental" side of modern philosophy). But, leaving complicated niceties aside, it is fairly easy to see a problem. Like many of us in today's AI-infested world, Arendt was  extremely concerned in her own time about the near omnipresence of lying. (She was particularly exercised by the Pentagon Papers.) She recognized that both those in power and those in search of it have, since the birth of politics, used untruths almost any time it was believed that deceptions would increase the liar's power or popularity. 

Now, there is no obvious tension between Arendt's conception of OPINION and the possibility of lying: one simply expresses something that does not jibe with how the "world has opened up." The problem emerges when one considers that (i) the things politicians lie about are usually neither "rational" TRUTHs nor doxa (OPINIONs), but contingent, often verifiable facts; and (ii) Arendt has no doubt whatever about the truth of a vast number of such propositions. In her 1967 New Yorker article "Truth and Politics," Arendt writes that "considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium." And she adds that "Once perceived as true," statements like 'In August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium' "are beyond agreement, dispute, opinion, or consent." This is so, she says, because "for those who accept them, they are not changed by the numbers or lack of numbers who entertain the same proposition; persuasion or dissuasion is useless, for the content of the statement is not of a persuasive nature but of a coercive one....Facts are beyond agreement and consent, and all talk about them – all exchanges of opinion based on correct information – will contribute nothing to their establishment. Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies." When it comes to "brutally elementary data of this kind," Arendt tells us, "their indestructibility has been taken for granted even by the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in historicism."

Arendt's astonishment at the audacity of some liars brings her to absolute outrage: "Even if we admit that every generation has the right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has the right to rearrange the facts in accordance with its own perspective; we don’t admit the right to touch the factual matter itself."

That may all be eminentally reasonable, but, unfortunately, it is inconsistent with Arendt's ontological categorization of TRUTHs vs. OPINIONs. The claim that Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 is a simple contingent fact on her view: i.e., neither a (rational/philosophical) TRUTH nor an OPINION (i.e., an example of doxa).### 

The moral here, I think, is that the concept of truth is, as thinkers as diverse as Aristotle and Tarski have pointed out, singular and absolutely fundamental. There isn't one kind for philosophers and another kind for Fox News viewers...or one kind for algebra and another for The New Yorker. But it confuses things to suggest that contingent matters of fact are "beyond agreement, dispute, opinion or consent." It actually makes no difference whether something is completely obvious, highly controversial, or completely unknown, and it is contrary to coherence to bring in epistemological matters here: propositions are either true or they aren't--whatever our relation to them may happen to be.

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#His piece. In case you're wondering, Krugman defines "Arendt's Law" as Totalitarian and wannabe totalitarian regimes only hire incompetent hacks.

##I want to stress the fact that in addition to not being an expert on Arendt, I am also very far from being a Plato scholar. In fact, IIRC, I did not take a single course in Ancient Greek Philosophy either as an undergraduate or while in grad school. And I've never taught anything related to Platonic thought except a couple of well-known Dialogues in a class on Introduction to Ethics. I hope this will excuse my unwillingness to comment on the accuracy of Arendt's interpretations of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle.

###For a more detailed discussion of this aspect of Arendt's work, I recommend John Nelson's "Politics and Truth," published in American Journal of Political Science (1978).