Civic Thought and the Problem of Political Disaffection
This piece was presented at the Conference on Civic Thought, Education, and Leadership, at the Ohio State University
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Introduction
Years ago, I was at a movie night with friends. We watched the late 90s cult classic The Big Lebowski.
Many of you know it: the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges, wanders through life in a bathrobe, bowling, smoking, and stumbling from one misadventure to another. He is self-absorbed, careless in his habits, and completely disconnected from the wider world. What’s worse, he’s satisfied with it.
I remember asking a friend: why didn’t this movie succeed when it was first released?
His answer: “It’s kind of hard to market. People don’t like looking in the mirror.”
That struck me. The Dude is funny on screen, but he’s also uncomfortable to watch because he embodies a vice that many of us recognize in ourselves: not rage or violence, but apathy. Not the kind of explosive passions we’ve seen in recent weeks in our headlines but the opposite vice: the shrug, the checked-out attitude, the refusal to check-in to what is clear one’s business. In a way, that is a much more subtle and therefore more pernicious problem.
When I think about my students, many of them are just a step up from the Dude. They are not content to float through life. Quite the contrary, they want to care about politics and want to be involved in their community, but often they don’t know how. They describe themselves as disconnected, disillusioned, or even disaffected—not because they reject democracy, but because they feel like it doesn't include them. One is reminded here of Aristotle’s description of akrasia, or weakness of will: knowing the good but failing to pursue it. Many students today want to act, but their horizons of meaning make political action feel futile or tainted. What they need, Aristotle might say, is friendship — civic friendship — the experience of being recognized as a partner in a shared world.
And that brings me to the phenomenon that animates my paper: political disaffection.
By disaffection, I mean the growing number of citizens who still affirm democratic ideals in the abstract — who say “yes, democracy is good” — but who feel estranged from politics in practice.
They’re not anti-democratic. Many still vote. Many still care about particular issues. But when asked, they say things like: “I believe in democracy, but politics doesn’t feel like it includes me.” That feeling — of standing inside democracy, yet outside its life — is what I call political disaffection. And my claim is that we have misunderstood it. Too often we treat disaffection as a knowledge problem: if only citizens understood democracy better, if they had the right information, they would engage. I want to argue instead that disaffection is not a lack of knowledge but an interpretive distortion. It is a failure of what Gadamer, following Heidegger, called participatory understanding: the shared co-creation of meaning that allows us to recognize ourselves in political life.
Why This Matters
Why does this matter? Because liberal democracies depend on more than formal rights or procedures. They rely on a term I appropriate from environmental political theorists—oikophilia, or love of one’s home. At bottom, love of home depends on affect: that sense that politics is ours. When that sense weakens, democracy becomes vulnerable and populists and authoritarians step into the void.
So the question I want to raise today is this: How can we conceptualize disaffection in a way that takes experience seriously and that helps us imagine remedies capable of touching people’s lives?
Standard Accounts
Let’s begin with the dominant explanations.
Sociologists have long explained disaffection in terms of the institutional causes of disaffection, written with phrases including “a sense of powerlessness” or “lack of efficacy.” The classic studies framed non-participation as a failure of socialization where disengaged citizens were spectators rather than agents. Later theorists emphasized rational choice: citizens weigh costs and benefits and
often conclude participation isn’t worth it. And the “new institutionalists,” begun by Theda Scokpol in the 1990s, showed how policy design shapes habits of participation, or the lack thereof. Despite the merits of these studies, what gets lost is the inner struggle that motivates individuals to stay away from the political area. Citizens appear either as passive subjects molded by institutions or as rational calculators of incentives, when the thoughts going through the minds of students are not nearly so simple. What disappears is the ethical and interpretive drama people undergo when deciding whether to participate.
Nina Eliasoph’s ethnography of civic groups in the U.S. is instructive. She found that people often avoided political talk not because they were apathetic, but because they were trying to preserve integrity. To speak politically felt like buying into a corrupt game. Silence was their way of holding onto dignity. The lesson is that withdrawal is not always ignorance or laziness. Sometimes it is an ethical refusal, a way of saying: “I care too much to play along.”
This is where hermeneutics enters. Margit van Wessel has made a vital contribution by arguing that citizens should be seen as sense-makers. People interpret politics through everyday encounters —4 waiting at the DMV, watching the news, struggling with healthcare paperwork. Their judgments emerge from lived experience, not just abstract principles.
On this view, disaffection is not a misunderstanding of democracy but a meaningful interpretation of politics that reflects real encounters. It insists that we take citizens’ understandings seriously, even when they are don’t fit a certain preconceived mold of truthfulness—or at least that’s her argument.
But van Wessel’s account falls short in a crucial way. In her attempt to understand citizens as “sense makers,” she misapplies Gadamer’s hermeneutics. By seeking to understand how a variety of individuals understand the world, she divorces the study of interpretation with any notion of the truth or of any single account being more accurate than another—or, whether one person’s understanding is more conducive to certain social conditions than another. I.e., she tends to treat all interpretations as equally valid. And here is where a more complete Gadamer helps us go further.
Gadamer, building on Heidegger, insists that understanding always takes place within a horizon of prejudices—pre-understandings shaped by history. These prejudices are not obstacles but conditions of understanding. We all hold certainly unquestioned beliefs that can become revealed in the midst of a heated discussion. Yet not all prejudices are equal. Some open dialogue; others close it down.
Some enable recognition; others block it.
Toward a Normative Hermeneutics
So, instead of van Wessel’s take on Gadamer, which I argue is too inclusive and a misreading of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, I want to propose a normative hermeneutics of disaffection. The point is not only to describe how citizens arrive at their interpretations, but also to ask whether those interpretations sustain or corrode democratic belonging.5
Here’s where the Gadamerian lens is crucial. Gadamer more or less copies his teacher Heidegger, so I will be employing the Heideggerian term here, just because people are more familiar with it. For Gadamer, care (Sorge) names the basic structure of being-in-the-world. To be human is to be thrown into a world of concerns, projects, and relations. For Gadamer, this existential condition becomes the ground of hermeneutics. Applied to political activity, hermeneutics becomes the study of what relation to the world enables a certain output in human behavior to begin with. And this care is not individual but communal. It is what binds us to each other, what makes understanding possible.
And for Gadamer, the act of dialogue—an act that needs at least two people—resolves when those two people reach a new understanding and are transformed by it. Disaffection, then, does not follow from the absence of care. Citizens still care about democracy; in a sense, especially for those who grow up in it, they can’t extract democracy from their being-in-the-world. The problem is that their care becomes distorted. It loses direction, resonance, and coherence. They affirm democracy in principle but cannot align that aspiration with their lived encounters. While they remain legally included, they feel interpretively excluded. They are in what I call existential exile—feeling as though they are aliens in a world not made for them.
That’s a sad life.
Think again of Aristotle’s akrasia. The akratic person, in his account (not Plato’s), knows the good but cannot will it. Likewise, the disaffected citizen may believe that democracy matters but cannot see themselves in it. Their horizon of understanding renders action unintelligible or demeaning.
A Case Sketch: Pensions and Healthcare
Consider two examples: pensions and healthcare premiums. These are not just technical distributional issues. They are sites where citizens negotiate what fairness and responsiveness mean.
Imagine two citizens confronted with a rise in retirement age. For one, it looks like betrayal: ordinary contributors sacrificed while elites are spared. Trade-offs appear arbitrary, even contemptuous. For the other, it looks like a painful but necessary adjustment: the ordinary phenomenon of institutions grappling with scarcity.
The facts are the same, but the horizons make them intelligible in radically different ways. One horizon casts reform as contempt; the other as ordinary contestation.
This is what I mean by interpretive distortion. And here a normative hermeneutics matters. A purely descriptive approach treats both horizons as equally valid and as meaningful contributions to civic life and discussion. A normative hermeneutics asks which horizons sustain recognition and which corrode it? A horizon that interprets disagreement only as betrayal forecloses the possibility of democratic life.
How Horizons Might Shift
So how do we reorient our horizons? I propose three dimensions that civic theorists should take note of.
The first is to reorient citizens’ care by means of dialogue. One must create venues where citizens can encounter trade-offs firsthand — citizens’ assemblies, structured town halls, or even book club meetings at the local coffee shop. Dialogue isn’t just talking about something then going your separate ways; it’s about bringing a person into a community where they feel themselves known. Dialogues of this kind are not meant to happen just once.
Second, there are certain virtues of interpretation that both follow from and guide
dialogue. These are the virtues of openness, reciprocity, fallibility, and presumption of dignity in one’s interlocutor. These, I insist, are civic practices. Imagine officials acknowledging sacrifices honestly and listening without defensiveness. This models Aristotle’s civic friendship vis a vis recognition amid disagreement, where both parties aim towards the good of the other. And you’ll notice that it’s participatory, requiring input from multiple parties.
The third aspect is temporal. Citizens often experience reforms as arbitrary shocks: “why this, why now?” Temporal scaffolds can help orient citizens in terms of how long a potentially frightening event or circumstance will last. — sunset clauses, “why-this-now” memos, timelines linking present sacrifices to future goods. It is also helpful for integrating citizens into a world where they see themselves as continuing a legacy begun long ago. It matters the narrative that students see themselves participating in—whehter a tale of fallible but courageous and principles American statesmen or a tale of institutionalized vice.
Each of these interventions makes politics intelligible in a different register. Together, they render disagreement visible as politics rather than contempt.
Why This Matters for Civic Thought
What follows is that the remedy for disaffection cannot be limited to information campaigns or civics courses that explain how institutions work. Those treat citizens as minds to be corrected. But if disaffection is a distortion of care, the task is to reshape the encounters where citizens meet politics.
In this sense, civic education must be thought of as a formation of citizens’ interpretive capacities. Institutions must design processes that embody responsiveness. Governments must practice communicative recognition, narrating trade-offs with dignity. And policies should be situated in time, rendering them intelligible across generations.
Conclusion
Let me conclude where I began. The Dude in The Big Lebowski is meant to be funny because he’s checked out. But a democracy cannot survive if its citizens all become Dudes. Political disaffection is one of the great challenges of our age. It is not simply ignorance or rational abstention. It is a failure of participatory understanding. Citizens can still care about democracy in principle, but their horizons render that care distorted, unintelligible, and inactionable.
But, to conclude on a hopeful note, I think we can reorient citizens’ care. The way back is not simply to correct their minds, but to reshape their meetings through relationships—to build forums and ultimately narratives where they feel like they fit in and care can once again bind us to each other.
If we do this, then disaffection, far from being the end of democracy, may become the occasion for renewing it.
Thank you.
