Author’s note: We condemn Eritreans in sweeping categories yet often treat the very individuals behind those labels with patience and respect. Why does political judgment become harsher when its target is an imaginary public? This essay examines how collective blame allows responsibility to disappear, and why democratic change may require learning to speak with citizens rather than endlessly speaking about them.
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We have become remarkably good at speaking to the Eritrean people without ever quite speaking to an Eritrean.

Open a political discussion, listen to a commentator, or read through our social media exchanges, and someone will almost certainly be addressing the people: the people must wake up; the people have failed; the people are divided; the people are afraid, ignorant, manipulated, emotional, tribal, or incapable of thinking independently.

The accusations change depending on who is speaking, but the audience remains the same: an enormous, undefined collective called the Eritrean public.

There is, however, a question that increasingly troubles me: Who, exactly, are we talking to?

I do not mean this rhetorically. I want us to take the question seriously.

When someone declares that Eritreans are politically ignorant, who is supposed to receive that message? Which person holds the opinion being criticized, and what does that person actually believe? Have we spoken to them, or even tried to understand their reasoning? Are we interested in changing their mind, or merely in announcing that their mind needs changing?

We rarely ask these questions.

Instead, we address a collective noun and somehow imagine that we have communicated with the people it supposedly represents. I suspect that this habit reveals something troubling about our political thinking, because we have developed a language of public criticism that often allows us to avoid the actual work of political communication.

The problem, in other words, may run much deeper than our choice of words.

The strange disappearance of the individual

Consider something ordinary.

I have met people who, upon discovering that I am Eritrean, immediately ask why Isaias Afwerki remains in power.

“Why don’t Eritreans do something?”

It sounds like a reasonable question until one considers what it demands of the person receiving it. Suddenly, I am expected to account for the political behavior of millions of people I have never met, whose circumstances, fears, convictions, and available choices I do not know.

My nationality has somehow made me their representative.

I try to explain that political power is not distributed equally, that individuals living under repression face risks outsiders often underestimate, and that dissatisfaction does not automatically produce collective action. Even people who desire change may have no safe or effective means of pursuing it.

Still, the question returns.

“But why don’t they do something?”

Notice what has happened. Millions of individuals, living under different circumstances and possessing different degrees of power, have been compressed into a single political actor, after which we demand an explanation for why this imaginary actor has failed to act.

We do something similar in our own political conversations. We speak of government supporters as though every supporter thinks alike, of opposition groups as though everyone associated with them shares the same motives, and of the diaspora, the youth, the intellectuals, or the silent majority as though these categories possess a common mind.

Our language makes the collective appear capable of deciding, understanding, refusing, and acting. Yet when responsibility must be assigned, the collective becomes difficult to locate.

We have created a political actor that can be endlessly blamed but cannot answer a single question.

The people we insult are not the people we meet

Here is the contradiction I find most revealing.

Listen to how people describe their political opponents when those opponents are absent. Government supporters are brainwashed, morally bankrupt, or incapable of independent thought, while opposition activists are opportunists, traitors, foreign agents, or enemies of the nation.

The language is often merciless.

Now place two people from opposing political camps in an actual conversation, and something interesting frequently happens: they become more careful. They explain themselves, listen, interrupt, reconsider, disagree, and occasionally concede a point. They may remain completely opposed politically, but they often recognize something that disappeared in their public descriptions: the other person is capable of reasoning.

The person who was an idiot as a category becomes an interlocutor as an individual.

Of course, this does not always happen. Some personal encounters are hostile, and politeness can conceal contempt. Nevertheless, the contrast is common enough to deserve serious examination.

Why are we sometimes more reasonable with the individual than with the category to which we assign that individual?

I think the answer has something to do with responsibility.

When I speak about “government supporters,” I do not have to establish what any particular supporter believes. I can attribute motives to an entire group without allowing anyone to correct me. When I speak to an actual supporter, however, my claims can be challenged, my assumptions can be questioned, and I must listen to answers I did not anticipate.

The other person is no longer a convenient object of my judgment; they have become a participant in the conversation.

The category cannot talk back. The individual can.

Perhaps that is why collective condemnation has become so comfortable.

The grammar of political evasion

There is another dimension to this problem, one that reaches the highest levels of political power.

In a 2017 interview published by Eritrean state media, President Isaias Afwerki discussed Asmara’s infrastructure problems, describing overloaded sewer systems and water pipes that were old, rusted, blocked, and no longer functioning properly.

What interests me is not whether these descriptions were accurate. Nor is it unreasonable for a president to describe national problems or the challenges involved in addressing them. What interests me is the political relationship between the person speaking and the condition being described.

A president is not simply another observer of public affairs.

When someone holding extraordinary political authority describes the deterioration of public infrastructure, the relevant questions extend beyond the existence of the problem. Who exercised authority over the institutions responsible? What decisions contributed to the situation? Which commitments were not fulfilled? Who must account for the results?

A description of national failure is not yet an account of political responsibility.

The distinction matters because language can create distance between authority and its consequences. A problem is presented as something that exists, something that has happened, something that must be addressed, while the people empowered to prevent, correct, or account for it disappear from the sentence.

We should resist the temptation to explain this merely as the eccentricity of one leader. That explanation may satisfy our frustration, but it teaches us very little about political power. What should concern us is how easily such language can normalize the separation of authority from responsibility.

Here comes the uncomfortable part.

Those of us who criticize authoritarian power should examine whether our own political language sometimes reproduces a related habit. We condemn the failure of the public without explaining what we expect particular people to do; we announce that the opposition has failed without identifying which institutions, decisions, or strategies should be examined; and we insist that someone must act without identifying who possesses the means to act.

The consequences are certainly not equivalent. A ruler exercises coercive power that an ordinary commentator does not possess. Nevertheless, the underlying habit of assigning problems to an abstraction while leaving responsibility unspecified deserves scrutiny wherever it appears.

Political accountability begins when we stop allowing collective nouns to conceal the people, institutions, and decisions behind them.

We have confused broadcasting with communication

I suspect social media has made this problem worse.

The platforms on which much of our political conversation occurs reward statements that produce immediate reactions. A sweeping accusation is easier to circulate than a careful examination, a category is easier to attack than an argument, and condemnation gathers applause faster than a difficult exchange between people who genuinely disagree.

We begin to mistake the number of people who encounter our words for the number of people with whom we have communicated.

But visibility is not understanding, and agreement from an existing audience is not persuasion. Repeatedly announcing what is wrong with other people is not necessarily political engagement.

An accusation directed at an undefined public can reach thousands of people without requiring a meaningful response from any of them. The speaker has expressed an opinion, the audience has reacted, and everyone has performed a recognizable political role.

Yet what has changed?

What belief was examined, what disagreement was clarified, what relationship was established, and what possibility for cooperation emerged?

Perhaps nothing.

We have built an impressive machinery for circulating political judgments, but a much weaker practice of engaging the people those judgments concern. That is a serious limitation for a political community seeking transformation.

What if the problem is how we speak, not only what we say?

I am not suggesting that we abandon collective political criticism. Governments, movements, institutions, and political tendencies must be examined collectively, nor am I asking anyone to be gentle with injustice.

An unjust policy does not become less unjust because we describe it politely.

My argument is different: we need to become more demanding about the structure of our political communication.

When we say that Eritreans are afraid, we should ask what conditions produce fear, how fear operates, and what forms of action are realistically available to individuals. When we accuse government supporters of ignorance, we should identify the claims we consider mistaken and explain why. Better still, where circumstances allow, we should be willing to discuss those claims with people who actually hold them.

When we condemn the opposition for its failures, we should identify the decisions, organizations, and practices we believe require correction. When we say that something must be done, we should be prepared to ask who can do it, with whom, through what means, and at what cost.

This is not an appeal for nicer language. It is an appeal for more accountable language.

The distinction is important. Political disagreement does not require affection, and it does not even require mutual admiration. People can fundamentally oppose one another and still participate in an intelligible political relationship, provided that the disagreement has identifiable participants, contestable claims, and some possibility of response.

Otherwise, we are not really arguing with one another.

We are delivering speeches about one another.

A public cannot be awakened from above

There is a deeper political assumption hiding inside our familiar appeals to public consciousness.

When someone says that the Eritrean people must wake up, the speaker often imagines themselves already awake. The problem belongs to the audience, while the responsibility of the enlightened speaker is to correct it.

But who authorized this division?

What makes the critic immune to the very failures of judgment being attributed to everyone else? Why should political consciousness be understood as something that one group possesses and another must receive?

This is where our conception of power becomes especially important.

Authoritarian government treats citizens as subjects to be administered, mobilized, disciplined, and instructed. A democratic political relationship must begin from a different premise: people are capable of exercising judgment, questioning authority, disagreeing with one another, and participating in decisions that affect their lives.

Our political communication should reflect that distinction. Yet we cannot meaningfully affirm the political equality of citizens while speaking about them as a permanently defective population awaiting correction.

A public is not a classroom in which a few enlightened teachers endlessly instruct everyone else, nor is it a giant creature with a single mind that can be awakened by the right speech. A political public is formed through relationships among individuals who recognize one another as participants in a common political world.

That recognition does not eliminate disagreement; it makes disagreement politically meaningful. It also requires more than the freedom to speak. It requires the willingness to address someone who may answer differently.

The citizen missing from our politics

Much of our political discussion begins with an abstract population and ends with an abstract demand for transformation. Between the two, the citizen disappears.

The person who must decide whether to trust a political organization; the person who disagrees about history; the person who supports the government for reasons we may find mistaken; the person who fears political involvement; and the person who wants change but distrusts those promising to deliver it: these are not minor complications to be overcome after the political message has been perfected.

They are the very people through whom any meaningful political future must become possible.

If we cannot engage them as people capable of judgment, what kind of politics are we preparing them to enter?

We might change the content of the political message while preserving the relationship between the lecturer and the lectured. We might replace one set of official truths with another, or even replace the people occupying positions of authority without changing our understanding of how citizens should relate to power.

That possibility should trouble anyone serious about political transformation.

A democratic public cannot simply be announced into existence; it must be practiced, not only in conferences, declarations, and constitutional proposals, but also in the ordinary ways we question one another, defend our claims, acknowledge disagreement, and accept responsibility for what we say.

This does not mean exposing people living under repression to dangerous confrontations. It means recognizing that wherever free political exchange is possible, we should use that freedom to develop the habits of citizenship rather than merely reproduce the language of political camps.

Perhaps the next transformation in our political discourse should begin with a modest but demanding question:

Before declaring what the Eritrean people must think, ask: Whom am I addressing, and what kind of political relationship am I establishing with them?

If the answer is nobody in particular, perhaps we should reconsider what we are doing.

We have spent decades talking about the Eritrean people. We have defended them, condemned them, instructed them, mourned them, and repeatedly called upon them to awaken.

Maybe it is time we learned to talk to one another.

Because we cannot build a political community of citizens while continuing to communicate as though citizenship belongs to an imaginary collective rather than to the people standing before us.