What’s the Matter with Ohio? Liberal Democracy and the Challenge of Irrationality

Abstract

AbstractThis essay mines 100 years of fiction about the irrationalities of small-town Ohio to ask whether liberal democracy can accommodate irrationality or is required, because of its double commitment to equality and liberty, to exclude it. Reading novels from Sherwood Anderson, William Gass, and Stephen Markley, I trace a trajectory from the late nineteenth century of Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), when irrationality partially grounded liberal community, to the twenty-first century of Markley’s Ohio (2018), when the irrationalities of violence, addiction, racism, and abuse constitute what I call “piteous solidarity,” a form of solidarity grounded on our shared inhumanity. I conclude by speculating that such piteous solidarity might represent “the mobilization of common affects in defense of equality and social justice” that Chantal Mouffe has recently argued is necessary for constituting the “we” of a left populism.