In 2025 a record forty-five percent of Americans told Gallup they belonged to neither party, the highest share since the pollster began asking in 1988; Democrats and Republicans drew twenty-seven percent apiece. Both major parties now draw unfavorable marks from most Americans. Heading into this fall’s midterms, more than two hundred independents are running for Congress, by one Newsweek tally. The word that keeps surfacing in the coverage isn’t “moderate” or “swing voter.” It is “politically homeless.” Pollsters mean it as a demographic category. But I contend it is better heard as the description of a spiritual condition, one a Florentine had named seven centuries before Gallup.
Dante Alighieri knew what it is to lose a political home, because his was taken from him by force. He came of age in a Florence that had beaten back the imperial Ghibellines, only to watch the victorious Guelphs turn on one another and split into White and Black. The Whites meant to guard the city’s independence; the Blacks threw in with Pope Boniface VIII. Dante was a White. In 1302, while he was away on an embassy to Rome, the Blacks took the city with French help and condemned him in absentia. He was stripped of office and fined, and a later decree ordered him burned alive if he ever set foot in Florence again. He never did. The Commedia is the great fruit of nineteen years of wandering. He died in Ravenna in 1321, still an exile.
The poem is soaked in that exile. In Canto XVII of the Paradiso, Dante has his ancestor Cacciaguida foretell the whole ordeal. He will leave behind everything he loves most; that, the old crusader tells him, is the first arrow the bow of exile fires. He will learn how salty the bread of others tastes, and how hard it is to go up and down another man’s stairs. It is one of the great passages on exile in Western literature—the homelessness of a man thrown out by his own city’s quarrels.
Dante does not write merely as a wronged partisan settling scores, the White who wants Blacks in Hell and his own side in Heaven. He damns and saves across every faction. He sorts Ghibelline and Guelph, White and Black, pope and emperor by the state of their souls, not their party. Farinata, the Ghibelline captain who had once saved Florence from destruction, stands defiant in a tomb of fire. Boniface, the pope whose maneuvering wrecked Dante’s life, is bound for Hell before he has even died. Exile did not leave Dante a mere partisan. It made him a judge.
From outside the fight, Dante could see what those still in it could not. Past a certain point, faction stops being a disagreement about the good and turns into a good of its own. The partisan no longer loves justice and then picks a side; he loves the side, and calls whatever it wants justice. Dante’s Florence had reached the point where neighbors knifed neighbors over a distinction most of them could no longer explain. He compared the city to a sick woman shifting in bed all night, never finding a position that didn’t hurt. He had watched a common civic life come apart into warring loyalties, and it had cost him his home.
But Dante does not make a home of his homelessness. He refuses the exit of the above-it-all shrug of the man who calls both sides equally rotten and washes his hands of the whole business. That posture earns Dante’s ire: he puts the souls who “lived without disgrace and without praise,” the ones who took no side at all, in the vestibule of Hell, turned away by Heaven and Hell together. His homelessness sends him looking instead for the one city no faction can seize: a rightly-ordered commonwealth under a well-ordered heaven, and past that the City of God, where a citizen’s final loyalty settles.
Those among the forty-five percent who feel politically unhoused are not wrong to feel that way. When both parties behave as factions in Dante’s sense—demanding that you love the team more than the truth and treating every question as a test of loyalty—a person whose deepest love points somewhere higher will not be at home in either one. That homelessness is a kind of health. But the poem also warns against two temptations for anyone newly in exile.
One is to join a new team: a third party, a movement, some outsider who promises to burn it all down, and to pour the same unthinking loyalty into that. The exile only changes his colors. The second is to make a permanent identity of standing above the fight and mistake sitting it out for wisdom. Dante did neither. He went on loving the actual Florence that had thrown him out, he went on judging plainly what was right and what was wrong. That is the harder road exile teaches. It goes up and down another man’s stairs; it lives on bread that tastes of salt. It does not hand you a new team to cheer, and it does not let you retreat into stoic apathy. Rather, what it gives you is a home that no election can take away, a place to stand from which you can love your neighbor and your country without worshiping either.
Image: “Dante in Exile” by Frederic, Lord Leighton. From Wikimedia Commons.
John Sandy
John M. Sandy is a judge on the Iowa Court of Appeals. A graduate of the University of St. Thomas, where he studied philosophy and Catholic studies, he writes on the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution, and Catholic social thought and culture, with work forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law. He hosts The Catholic Passage Podcast.He lives in Spirit Lake, Iowa.
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