Neiman - Call It Evil

Neiman, S. (2026). Call It Evil. W.W. Norton

Google Books preview:

Epigraph:

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched
situation. No theoretical checks-no form of government can render
us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure
liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a
chimerical idea.  
	-JAMES MADISON

Introduction PART I WHAT'S AT STAKE

1. What Evil Is Not
2. The Economy, Stupid? PART II WHAT CONVINCED US
3. Elements of an Ideology
4. How to Sell a Red Scare
5. Why Gaza Matters PART III WAYS OUT
6. What Woke Got Wrong
7. Socialism Reconsidered

Acknowledgments Notes Index

Introduction

How to describe these days of nightmare, when each morning brings another infamy that, not long ago, could have shocked us senseless? Some days they come too fast to count, let alone analyze, or even remember. Donald Trump is not the cause but the oversize expression of an international inclination. His ability to govern with impunity encourages smaller and smarter versions from Bengal to Buenos Aires.

Whether these developments should be called fascist is the subject of a small academic industry. You might think the word of General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump's first term, would have settled the debate; Milley called his former commander in chief "fascist to the core." The statement may have been unique in the history of American civilian-military relations, but it had no influence on the outcome of the 2024 election. Is that why the word fell into disuse after Trump began his second term? Oddly enough, as what were merely fascist tendencies took concrete form, both the U.S. and the international media settled on the word authoritarian.

Say what? Count the syllables. Authoritarian takes three times as long to pronounce as the swift word fascist. By the time you get to the end of it, you've taken the sting out of the term. Deciding to use a more bearable word will not make fascism more bearable. It can, however, subdue our alarm.

Authoritarian is a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors, and the softer sort of Latin American military regime. But a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they've never seen? Combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens? A government that coerces media, universities, and other countries to suit its will? A military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications, then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned? As it wrote in 1946, "To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.

This is not a book about Donald Trump. Despite his desire to command our attention, understanding the man is far less important than understanding the conditions that allowed him to rise. More interesting than the qualities of any one individual, however powerful, is the question: Knowing as much as can be known about a public figure whose cruelty and corruption had been on display for a decade, how was it possible that Americans elected him twice? One New York friend pointed out that no one who ever dealt with the man wanted to see him again- except the American people. My concern is with the moral ideas that Donald Trump embodies and reinforces, ideas that are destructive enough to warrant the word evil.

It's a dangerous word, easy to abuse, hard to withdraw, upping every ante and provoking responses that sail beyond the bounds of reason. Evil has been used to light the fires of more than one Inquisition and start terrible wars. What's the point of using it to describe the state we're in, a state that's already inflamed?

Arguments against doing so are so easy to make that ChatGPT can produce them in seconds. Here's part of what it answered when I asked whether Donald Trump was evil.

Calling someone "evil" simplifies a complex reality. If you're
interested in exploring Trump's actions through a specific
ethical, legal, or policy lens, I can help break it down
further. Would you like to look at a particular topic (e.g.,
immigration, race relations, the economy)?

Large language models are illuminating because they reproduce consensus drawn from the vast amounts of texts human beings create. In warning me off the use of the word evil, the machine reflected the view you might hear in any newsroom or classroom:

The term _evil_ is morally and emotionally charged-it implies a
deep level of wrongdoing or malicious intent. So instead of
labeling, it's often more constructive to focus on specific
actions or policies and evaluate them based on their effects and
intentions.

As the author of a book on the history of modern evil, I've heard statements like these hundreds of times. It's one example that shows the gap between large language models and genuine thinking. Those whose words trained the model fear adding fuel to polemics that are fiery enough. I often share their hesitation: evil is the most explosive word we have. Used indiscriminately, it can serve to stir up evil itself. What's the good of it?

Evil is a word that marks a limit. There's a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures- at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot-and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There's no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed. That, said Hannah Arendt upon hearing of the Holocaust, ought not to have happened.

Reactions can change if we become inured-as we have, these past years, to accounts of the Holocaust. If it happens often enough, an act may seem to cease being evil and become merely awful. In such cases the initial evil lies precisely in the way that it hardens our hearts.

But isn't evil a religious concept?

Not at all. As I argued in Evil in Modern Thought, religion is one way of coming to terms with a world where evil is so painfully present. Sociologists speak of the just world hypothesis: the belief that the universe is fundamentally fair and that bad things happen only to bad people. Most people presume it, though they'll often deny it, for any child who's run into a playground bully knows it is false.

What accounts for the tenacity of this cognitive bias? Philosophers can trace it to the principle of sufficient reason: the idea that there is a reason for everything that happens. Some philosophers-notably Leibniz and Hegel-took this as a statement of fact, and for fundamentalist religious leaders it serves as doctrine. That's why the Book of Job, the story of a righteous man whose torments were unbearable, was censored and bowdlerized for centuries. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world—-and if we mortals fail to understand that, it's just because we're mortal. Taken as a statement about the way the world is, the just world hypothesis is not just blind but lame, leading to the view that those who suffer must be at fault-as Job's purported friends were happy to tell him.

There is, however, another way to see it. Justice is not a force we discover in the world, as Job found out soon enough. If there is going to be reason in the world, it is we who have to put it there. Understood as a statement, the just world hypothesis is false; even worse, it's cruel. Yet the longing is as hard to quench as it is to fulfill; even after millennia, Job's story still moves us. No counterexample can extinguish it. Even cynics are usually those who have been more disappointed in the absence of justice than the rest of us.

You can call the premise that the world is just simply wishful thinking; Freud certainly did. But you can also call it determination. Understood as a demand, it can move us to make the world more just. Imagine what it would mean to live with the opposite assumption: The world is so essentially unjust that any good that people do will be punished. Or suppose the connection between action and fate were entirely random: Sometimes those who rape and murder children are showered with wealth and privilege; sometimes they rot in jail. You may say this is exactly how the world is. But that randomness creates both outrage and hope, for this is not the way the world should be.

Religion, in short, is not the source of the concept of evil, which is prior to every idea of religion. Evil is an idea that arises whenever the gap between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be becomes too big to bear alone.

Doesn't that suggest a grandeur that the present does not approach? Our public sphere is relentlessly petty, malicious, vindictive, and vulgar. Is it large enough to carry the weight of a word like evil?

Long before Arendt wrote of evil's banality, modern literature depicted the devil himself as shabby. Milton's Satan is a rare exception. For both Goethe and Dostoyevsky, evil was decidedly unromantic, more likely to be sleazy than bold. It is heroes who are defiant; evil is usually sordid. Faust is a thinker; Mephistopheles is a pedant. The devil who visits Ivan Karamazov is a sniffling flunky, the very sum of human weakness. He describes a meeting with journalists who deny his existence outright. "It's reactionary to believe in God in our age," he tells them, "But I'm the devil. You can believe in me." The devil's need to insist on his own reality is Dostoyevsky's comment on our unwillingness to see the presence of evil-unless it comes wrapped in the sort of flame and sulfur earthly evils rarely wear.

Suppose we grant that evil is more likely to be mean than malevolent. Isn't the word itself inherently demonizing, however we imagine the devil himself?

It becomes so if we restrict our attention to one example of evil, as we all too commonly do. Most recently, for example, the Holocaust was sacralized as the quintessential act of evil that could be profaned if compared to anything else. Most of us can come to participate in evil actions, precisely because--as Arendt explained in calling them banal--they have lost that quality of temptation that once made them easier to recognize. Evil should be applied not to persons but to actions, but the application should never be an excuse for silence. Knowing how easily we can be drawn into evil must lead us to look for ways to understand it. There's no other way to work against it.

But if calling something evil should always be coupled with an attempt to understand it, we shouldn't let understanding deter us from calling things by their proper names. Actions may have multiple causes; circumstances may be murky and responsibility diverse. It's important to untangle them in order to begin to address evils, but there comes a time to judge. The gap between ideals and reality structures our consciousness of the world. Evil occurs when that gap becomes unacceptable; judging something evil is a way of setting limits to what we're willing to endure. The language of good and evil is vulnerable to exploitation because it's the most powerful language we have: Nothing moves us more sharply and surely, for better and worse. We must hone and refine it, but we cripple ourselves when we try to do without it. The language of shame is our most effective moral weapon. To abandon talk of evil is to leave that weapon in the hands of those most likely to abuse it. Our culture's reluctance to trade in moral ideas has left them to right-wing demagogues and brought us to this pass.

Political, economic, and sociological analyses of Trump's second victory are already appearing, and more are on the way. In all the words written in attempt to understand the present crises, what's striking is the scarcity of moral analysis. Perhaps it seems too soft to meet the moment. ChatGPT's answer to my question was enlightening-not about the nature of evil but about the state of moral discourse. We live in a world where its consensus is second nature. Otherwise the machine could not have spit it out.

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Whether you call it the hegemon, with the left, or the indispensable nation, with the right, you're probably following U.S. news. As you do, you are likely asking Where are the checks and balances? as if they were a natural feature of government. I've heard the words spoken in English even when the question was raised in another language, for the United States was the first nation to realize Montesquieu's idea that governments must consist of independently structured institutions to prevent abuses of power. The Founding Fathers had staggering blind spots, but they were not naïve. They knew they were engaged in a project that seemed utopian, but they also knew something about human failings. Contrary to caricature, not even Rousseau thought we are naturally benevolent. Like other Enlightenment philosophers, he simply denied we are damned to one or another form of original sin. So the Constitution was written with an eye to human weakness, and even the possibility of malevolence. That's why it prescribes three branches of government with separate but equal powers, trusting that each would watch out for misconduct by the others.

It was a construction designed not for a nation of saints but for any collection of fallible mortals. Later nations that studied the U.S. Constitution before writing their own usually borrowed this feature.

But even James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, believed that no checks and balances could compensate for the absence of virtue. The law might be carefully calibrated, but it will have little force for anyone who chooses to ignore it. Shame often steps in where virtue is missing; you may not regard the law in itself, but you don't want to lose other people's regard. Guilt is the internal sense that you've done something wrong, even if no one ever discovers it. Shame records your consciousness of wrong before a community whose values you honor. Guilt is often thought to go deeper, but shame leaves marks that are public and private at once. We need not go back to Madison to see what we've lost. Democracy may not require a virtuous citizenry, though virtue makes everything easier. But it does require a culture in which we fear that some actions could lead to disgrace. They no longer do. If enough, and enough well-placed people undertake them, the only disgrace you need fear is the failure to get away with them.

Trump and his ilk could never have come to power without one belief: Moral concepts are for suckers who don't know they're being conned. It's a very old idea that was expressed by the sophist who taunted Socrates at the beginning of Plato's Republic. While the claim has been available for millennia, it came to a boil in a toxic mix of philosophical ideas that have been brewing since the last century, as this book will explain. Donald Trump has made it easy to be shamelessly racist, misogynist, and homophobic at a time when we'd made some progress in beating hatred back. Even worse, he has done so by making it acceptable to have no values at all beyond the search for wealth and power. Everything else is for losers. He's the reductio ad absurdum of a set of old ideas that blossomed throughout the world as the Cold War ended. For as the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran argued in How to Lose a Country, the loss does not begin when you notice that unprecedented breaks with justice have become routine.

Looking back, it becomes clear that the process only really starts
after severe damage has been wreaked on the fundamental concept of
justice, and once the minimal morality you didn't know you
depended on has been destroyed.(2)  

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What is it about the moment that makes the word evil ring true? Social psychologists argue that only 2 percent of the world's population are psychopathic, people who not only lack empathy but take pleasure in others' pain. There's some evidence that the president of the United States is among them. His rise to power reflects a culture that sells cruelty as entertainment and finds buyers willing to pay high prices for it. Yet it's hard to argue that the twenty-first century is fundamentally more brutal than others. The largest structure that remains of a republic once justly proud of its legal system is the Roman Colosseum, built to amuse people by watching others die miserable deaths. ("Bread and circuses" was not a reference to clowns.) Well into the eighteenth century, families in London, Paris, and Madrid vied for the best seats in elegant public squares to watch men and women be dismembered or roasted alive.

Trump's enjoyment of staged violence is unnerving, but I am less concerned with cruelty than with something less obvious and more insidious, the sort of thing signaled by his remark, in an interview on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, that he now had the tallest building in Manhattan.(4) It's unlikely that he actively enjoyed the desperation of those frantically seeking signs of life in the still-smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. He simply focused on the one thing that he thought mattered. Nor did he possess a sense of shame that prevented him from blurting it out.

How could anyone be elected--twice--whose response to the deadliest attack on his country's soil was to crow about its benefit to himself? Before you stop to be appalled, however, consider what George W. Bush said in September 2001: "Lucky me, I won the trifecta." At the time, only fans of horseracing recognized the word; hit the jackpot captures the same emotions. You may be tempted to overlook it as a chance remark that slipped out the under stress and strain of the moment. Perhaps that's how it began, but Bush thought it clever enough to repeat in fundraising speeches that he made to thirteen Republican audiences from February to June 2002.(5) Here's an example:

When I was campaigning, I said, would you ever deficit spend? And
I said, yes, only if there were a time of war, or recession, or a
national emergency. Never thought we'd get (laughter and
applause). And so we have a temporary deficit in the budget,
because we are at war, we're recovering, our economy is
recovering, and we've had a national emergency. Never did I dream
we'd hit the trifecta.

Were this speech, like the others, not documented by the office of the White House press secretary, you might suspect it was invented by hostile critics--a charge made against Paul Krugman when he first reported it in The New York Times. Anyone still persuaded by the myth that the Iraq War was driven by misguided idealism would do well to google the speeches. The repeated jokes about the windfall provided by the terrorists left no visible traces, but Bush's gloating marked a milepost in moral discourse. There is, to be sure, a difference between the presidents' reactions. Trump really did crow over an attack that left him with the biggest, uhh, tower in Manhattan. Bush's joke was not just tone deaf; it reveals a lack of moral seriousness at a moment when that was what we needed. When an international leader cheapens death by jesting about its blessings, moral language is lost between coarseness and kitsch.

In public, however, Bush was concerned to defend the moral legitimacy of his attack on Iraq by presenting a series of excuses that would have been unnecessary had even one of them been true. If heard often enough, this instrumentalization of moral language leads many to conclude that no claim to moral purpose is genuine. Bush's misuse of concepts like moral clarity to describe things that were neither moral nor clear contributed to undermining the legitimacy of both. When ideals are abused to support torture and murder, it's the ideal that suffers most. I'd be willing to bet that neither moral nor legitimacy is a word Trump comprehends. Had he understood them, he would have at least pretended to honor the sacrifices of American soldiers. The renaming of the Department of Defense is especially chilling when you know that even the Nazis called their army a Wehrmacht--defense power. Almost every country in the world uses the same euphemism for ministries that prepare for war. It's one of the ways that hypocrisy pays compliments to virtue. By dismissing the need for compliments, Trump has signaled his indifference to vice. The lack of anything resembling a coherent excuse for his attack on Iran underlined just how far this indifference goes.

Faith in the tyranny of self-interest is nothing new. As Brecht wrote of Threepenny Opera, that worldview is the crime.(6) In his brilliant musical, no ties of love or loyalty, no principles of justice or horror, withstand that worldview's ruthless power-and the audience goes out singing. But ideas that can be traced much further back swelled in the late twentieth century, blossoming till they came to seem self-evident and choked every alternative in their path. Those ideas, I will argue, are far more significant than vicious or malicious cruelty-precisely because they seem so banal that they evade most critique. I'll try to convince you that not malice but vacancy marks the worst form of evil. Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect. Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.

The claim that all human beings are governed solely by self-interest hardly seems an idea at all, since it's usually presented as fact. But the most seductive of all ideologies is the claim that we have none. It's also the most American. Ideologies, we suggest, are for Communists; instead, we have common sense. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1999) reproduces a common definition of ideology as "a disparaging term used to describe someone else's views which one regards as unsound." But as the Harvard economist Stephen Marglin said:

What is ideology, after all, but the unproved assumptions,
beliefs, and values that must underlie any intellectual inquiry,
or for that matter, any form of contemplation or action? ... As
long as we deny the ideological component of our theories, we
shall never transcend it.(7)

This book sketches the routes by which this idea moved from a tenuous ideology to a claim that seems trivially self-evident. One path led through a very partial reading of Adam Smith, another through an equally dubious understanding of Darwin. By the late twentieth century, philosophical claims about truth and power had infected enough universities that Margaret Thatcher's proclamation about neoliberalism -- that there was no alternative-just seemed like good sense, whether you'd vote for her or not.

Any claim to act on principles other than the pursuit of self-interest came to be viewed as hopelessly naïve, deliberately deceptive, or positively irrational. Nobel Prize-winning economists like Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz have long argued that the classic model of economic man is completely inadequate to explain who we are, just as scientists like Frans de Waal carefully discredited some models of evolutionary psychology that supported the worst assumptions of free market fundamentalism. Unfortunately, these models are rarely presented as models of reality rather than as descriptions of it, and they are so widespread that few people notice how many experts have debunked them.

-----

Before we can radically change political course, we must discard some common ideas about what makes humans tick, for the influence of those ideas is global. The rest of the world cannot ignore the leader of its largest economy and the commander of its largest military. Even those who deplore that influence can be swayed by temptation: If the president of the United States does it, without lying or blushing, can't I do it too? If all these acts are out in the open, can they really be all that bad?(8) Acting on principle is hard. With the world's most powerful man showing it isn't necessary, and a barrage of ideas insisting it isn't possible, who can blame those who simply give up?

Trust a philosopher to imagine that ideas are the things that matter. What moves the world are empty bellies and tribal loyalties. How many people ever open a book of philosophy?

Not enough, alas. If more did, they would know that these claims too are philosophical ones, not simple statements of fact. Those who do not read philosophy do not notice how thoroughly theoretical assumptions are reflected and repeated in language we use every day.

Consider the reports that Republican voters were fiercely protesting their representatives at town hall meetings in the summer of 2025. As a result, few congresspeople were showing up at all. In response to the heckling, one Republican congresswoman urged politicians to give up their "fixation" on town halls. "There's a hundred different ways to market our positions," she said. The New York Times did not comment on the earthquake of an assumption contained in that quote. One could note that the absence of claims to defend or argue one's positions reflects the absence of reason and assumes that positions are simply bought or sold. But town hall meetings emerged in the colonial United States as forums for nascent but active democracy, giving citizens and officials the opportunity to discuss matters of interest to all. (It's a relief to know that—-as of this writing--there are still American politicians who speak of what they learn from town halls.) The suggestion that such meetings are nothing but an occasion for politicians to market their policies is a silent but certain assault on representative democracy. Strictly speaking, it wasn't silent, but like hundreds of negligible remarks embedded in stories whose focus was elsewhere, it went by too quickly to notice. Some readers may think it too trivial to mention at all. But like the subliminal advertising that flashes images so quickly you never fully perceive them, linguistic indoctrination is as forceful as it's barely conscious.

The traditional right understood and mastered the tools of moral seduction. Ideas Have Consequences is the name of a 1948 conservative classic, and the words have been a mantra for much of the right ever since. For decades, right-wing promotion of ideas has been remarkably successful: As Donald Rumsfeld said in praising Milton Friedman, ideas that once seemed bizarre are now law in many lands. Given how often the right portrays itself as realist and the left as idealistic, this may seem perplexing. But I will argue that the left's reluctance to appeal to ideas has its roots in a part of Marx that should be abandoned. Instead of focusing on demographics and kitchen tables, isn't it time for the left to consider ideas? As Andrew Breitbart told us, politics is downstream from culture. In a culture where the greatest evil is not sadism but the idea that morality is for losers, the left must learn to take ideas at least as seriously as the culture we hope to replace.

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