It has long been a matter of wonder to me how some people, once approached by journalists or surveyors during elections, suddenly begin speaking in the elevated language of public life. In no time they start describing their expectations in soaring terms, in maudlin phrases like “children’s future” and “development”. They don’t mean anything close to that.

They know their real private worlds in which they live, struggle and navigate for their good – far away from the public world of polls and governments. Earlier this month, as another cycle of assembly elections concluded across India, the familiar spectacle returned once again. Journalists from television channels, digital platforms and YouTube networks moved through different poll constituencies in search of the public mood. Similar scenes now accompany elections in other parts of the world as well, wherever modern political life places citizens briefly under the glare of mediated attention.

Yet the distortions begin there itself. A few fleeting and often exaggerated acts of public speech are elevated into evidence about society as a whole. Media commentary, political reporting, polling industries and even academic discourse increasingly feed upon this enlarged public personality of citizens because the public realm itself is the ground on which these professions thrive. But for most people, life continues to be lived elsewhere – in the private negotiations with the immediate: family, work, debts, obligations and the particularity of life conditions. That is outside the realm of public diagnosis, and political expectations or lamentations that restrict “people” as public actors.

The standard shot misses the frame

A standard shot is that of a middle-aged voter pausing before a cluster of microphones and saying that he was voting for the future of his children, for their employment and security. Contemporary democracies produce such sentences with remarkable ease. The language is public-minded, morally elevated and faintly historical in tone.

Yet one cannot help wondering how much such moments really reveal about the way people conduct their lives. Once the cameras move away, the same man will most likely return to concerns far removed from the abstractions of public policy. He will think about his own effort and interventions in navigating life – ways to clear mounting debts, family obligations, perhaps a relative in another city who may help secure work for his daughter or at least lend some money. He will return, in other words, to the practical negotiation of life long before any political redemption arrives. In essence, he has never imagined his life’s arc within a public frame.

Most media commentary depends upon moments in which ordinary individuals briefly become publicly legible figures: the anxious student, the angry commuter, the disappointed worker, the hopeful first-time voter. Such moments provide not only material for analysis but also the performative empathy through which democratic commentary establishes its own moral and professional legitimacy.

The elite exaggeration of Habermasian imagination

Earlier this year, the death of political thinker Jürgen Habermas prompted renewed discussion of his influential idea of the public sphere – the realm where citizens supposedly shape democratic life through public reasoning and rational-critical discourse. The limitations of this idea, however, may have been present from the beginning. The Habermasian imagination of democracy already had a certain elite exaggeration about how publicly ordinary human beings actually live. The framework emerged from academic, journalistic and political worlds that naturally experienced society through debate, commentary and articulated opinion. Much of human existence, then as now, unfolded at a considerable distance from such arenas.

Most people did not spend their lives as participants in such discourse even in the periods from which these theories emerged. They struggled privately, improvised quietly and depended upon family structures, local ties, religion, labour, migration and personal endurance long before they entered the language of public citizenship. In that sense, the public sphere may always have been less a description of ordinary life than an elite framework imposed upon it. It mistook moments of public articulation for the deeper structure of social existence.

Inflation, unemployment, corruption and civic disorder are not unreal concerns – they can have material impact over the longer span of time. But it is a span so long that an individual cannot afford to waste it merely lamenting; he moves to his private sphere to find a way around it, to insulate his lived years from such impact.

The relationship ordinary citizens have with these problems differs sharply from the relationship maintained by the professions that interpret them publicly. Journalists, commentators, policy experts, activists and academics inhabit a world organised around diagnosis, lamentation and prescription – around identifying what is wrong and proposing what ought to be done. Their professional lives themselves depend upon sustained engagement with public problems. Ordinary people, however, cannot live indefinitely at that register. The arc of their lives compels them to negotiate reality largely through adaptation rather than permanent commentary.

People may complain intensely and sincerely about conditions, yet they must still arrange marriages, educate children, migrate for work, save money, maintain families, endure uncertainty and search for openings within the world as it exists rather than the world as it should be. Their deepest oscillations between hope and despair are often intensely personal: a child’s education, illness, debt, family conflict, uncertain employment, loneliness, ageing parents, the fear of downward mobility. Political commentary cannot easily absorb such intimate anxieties because its vocabulary is overwhelmingly public.

Public language vs private realism

The media universe therefore keeps returning individuals to the political frame even when much of their lives escapes it. Public commentary finds richer material in the articulated political self of citizens, although that self may occupy only a peripheral place within the larger structure of their existence. People may criticise governments and speak emotionally when asked. Yet they also know, often with considerable realism, that their lives will depend upon labour, family discipline, migration, personal initiative, local networks, adaptation and endurance. Public language and private realism coexist within the same person.

One sees this repeatedly among migrant workers. Public commentary often frames migration almost entirely through the language of structural failure or deprivation. The migrants themselves usually inhabit a more practical psychology. They search for openings, contact relatives, share accommodation, adjust to new cities, accept difficult work and continue moving through uncertainty with remarkable pragmatism. A worker may speak bitterly about conditions when approached by a reporter. His life, however, is not suspended within grievance. He acts within circumstances rather than waiting for circumstances to become morally satisfactory.

A similar pattern can be seen on university campuses. A student interviewed after a protest may speak passionately about unemployment, democratic decline or institutional collapse. The clip circulates online as evidence of a generation in despair. But that does not mirror how students as a community, and much less as a demographic group, actually respond. The same student often returns immediately afterward to study, prepares for competitive exams, pursues new courses and broadens skills in an attempt to find a way toward upward social and economic mobility. Public frustration and private adaptation coexist within the same individual. The media moment captures one aspect of experience and quietly enlarges it into a total condition.

The reason why this happens

There are structural reasons why such enlargements keep occurring. Public encounters reward over-articulation. Ordinary people, once placed before microphones and cameras, begin speaking in the register they believe public life expects from them. Complex lives become compressed into morally intelligible statements. Democratic media amplifies these fragments because publicly articulated feeling sustains the entire ecology of commentary and analysis. The more intensely citizens appear to inhabit public life, the greater becomes the scope for media and political commentary to perform intimacy with “the people”. The anxious voter, the frustrated worker and the disappointed student become recurring democratic characters through whom commentary stages a form of performative empathy.

The tendency has become even more visible in the digital age. The older television reporter has now been joined by digital podcasters, YouTube journalists, political influencers, surveyors and social-media commentators, all searching relentlessly for “the mood of the people”. Democratic societies increasingly produce a continuous theatre of public expression. The search itself alters what it observes. People begin performing enlarged versions of their public selves, while commentary increasingly mistakes these episodic performances for the stable centre of social existence.

The paradox of the modern state

Most people, however, do not spend their lives inhabiting politics continuously. They worry about rent, marriages, illnesses, examinations, transport, ageing parents, children’s education and uncertain livelihoods. They seek practical routes through instability. They improvise around systems as much as they depend upon them. They criticise institutions while simultaneously building parallel private arrangements to survive them. More than the “public sphere” will let you believe, the poorest among them rely on their private selves to survive the daily challenges of penury.

A peculiar paradox of the modern state emerges from this condition. The state appears too small for big problems and too big for small problems. It appears too small to decisively resolve anxieties about mobility, insecurity and the uncertainty of modern life. At the same time, it appears too distant and cumbersome in relation to ordinary frustrations: paperwork, drainage systems, municipal disorder, bureaucratic opacity and local inefficiency. Citizens therefore oscillate constantly between complaint and circumvention. They speak publicly in one register while privately negotiating life in another.

Political commentary often misses this distinction because its own institutional world is organised around public affairs. Journalists, commentators, pollsters and academics derive authority from interpreting collective feeling. Their professional legitimacy depends upon the idea that societies are deeply public in orientation and that citizens primarily experience themselves through political consciousness. Democratic commentary therefore overestimates the public character of human existence itself.

That may also explain why elections so often confound elaborate analyses. Voters can express ten grievances and still vote comfortably for an incumbent government. They may complain about unemployment, prices or civic disorder and yet prioritise one overwhelming instinct: stability, identity, welfare access, local leadership, fear of alternatives or simply habit. 

Voting is ultimately a singular act. Public commentary frequently imagines citizens as though they internally maintain coherent ideological balance sheets in which every issue is rationally weighed and politically sorted. Human beings rarely live with such systematic clarity.

Across democracies

The same phenomenon appears across democracies. In the United States, election coverage routinely transforms emotionally expressive voters into symbols of national crisis or democratic salvation. Focus-group politics has become an industry in itself, producing carefully interpreted fragments of anxiety, resentment and aspiration. In Europe too, public reactions around immigration, inflation or populism are often narrated as though they exhaust the deeper structure of social life. Mediated democracies everywhere increasingly privilege the publicly articulated self over the quieter and more decisive realm in which people actually endure existence.

Public life is not unreal or unimportant. Yet the modern understanding of democratic society suffers from a persistent inflation of the public self. The voter standing before cameras and microphones means what he says when he speaks about the future of his children. His practical faith, however, may lie elsewhere. He speaks momentarily in the language of the public sphere while living mostly in the language of negotiation.

Perhaps that is why so much democratic commentary feels simultaneously serious and theatrical. It captures something real about public emotion while also misrepresenting the scale on which most people actually conduct their lives. The media sphere, and increasingly the academic and political worlds attached to it, continue to imagine citizens primarily as public beings because their own existence depends upon such a conception. Societies, however, are lived far more privately than they are narrated publicly. The speaking voter says far more than he really expects from the public realm. His life is too short to wait for the state – he tries to find a way around it, within the private world where he actually lives.

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