THE FRAGILITY OF AMERICAN GREATNESS  AND THE BANALITY OF EVIL

I didn’t get really involved in politics until my sophomore year of college, when Ronald Reagan was running for reelection. I was a conservative evangelical and a zealous member of the Reagan Revolution. I was a self-righteous motherfucker.

I’ve made a lot of personal changes since then. I mean, I can still be self-righteous occasionally, but I’m not a Republican anymore…and neither are they. The party of personal accountability, smaller government, and traditional family values has been consumed by blind allegiance to one man. The party platform in 2024 is literally “whatever Trump says” (if anyone is able to extract a coherent idea from what he says). No one in the GOP ever publicly disagrees with him or offers a counternarrative to the story he is telling, no matter how offensive, bereft of facts, or wildly incoherent it is. The current Republican Party is the virtual definition of demagoguery. And the effects on our discourse and democracy are chilling. 

From the beginning of his candidacy, I was more concerned about how he was going to reshape all of us, than I was about him. In the spring of 2016, when Trump was surging in the primaries, and what it meant to be a Republican was undergoing a startling transformation, I posted this on Facebook: “Being a Trump supporter doesn’t make you are a bad person automatically, it just makes you a bad person eventually.” It was an unfair thing to say back then. Some people genuinely wanted change. Many of them were angry, uninformed, and giving in to their worst impulses, but there is a way to see them as operating in good faith. They thought he would disrupt the status quo – the best democratic option for everyone. Theirs was a hasty judgment back then – arguably a form of misfeasance – but it’s not now. It’s premeditated now; there’s malice involved. We’ve heard him and seen him. We know who he is. If we support him now, we are willingly partaking in and are defined by his evil. 

Not only do we know who he is, the person he is has become far more extreme. My friend, Robby Jones, is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). In an email exchange with a New York Times reporter a few days ago, Robby wrote:

We’re rapidly running out of superlatives to describe how extreme Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has become. He’s clearly amped up his harsh and violent rhetoric. Even in 2020, his rhetoric largely focused on building a wall and keeping out undocumented immigrants. But in 2024, his rhetoric has shifted almost exclusively to talking about immigrants as the deranged and violent enemy who has already invaded the country.

He talks about immigrants slitting the throats of housewives in their kitchens and raping young girls and promises mass arrests, militarized encampments and deportation. His rhetoric has now moved — there’s really no other way to say it — fully into Nazi territory. He has called immigrants “not human” and referred to them as “animals.”

Trump has taken his supporters with him on this extremist journey. In 2013, a majority (53 percent) of Republicans supported a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally; by 2019, that number had dropped to 39 percent [I’m sure it’s considerably less today.]

Today, two-thirds of Republicans (64 percent) and a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) agree even with Trump’s dehumanizing assertion, echoing Hitler’s arguments in “Mein Kampf,” that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” We know these words are the bricks paving the road to political violence and even genocide.

A few months ago, Russell Moore, Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today, and  former President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, reported that evangelical pastors are now being challenged regularly by their congregations for using “liberal talking points,” when they preach the Sermon on the Mount.

In an interview a couple of weeks ago, Trump spoke of using the U.S. military against “enemies from within.” After multiple surrogates tried to spin his comments as something other than it appeared, he doubled-down with the Times and started naming specific Democrats he would like to harm, using the power of the presidency. Where you would expect such rhetoric to turn the electorate against him, large numbers of his followers have fallen in line, supporting the idea of Christian nationalism and imprisoning political opponents. 

More evangelicals in the U.S. now resemble the Nazi Gottgläubiger, a religious identity best described as a vague form of deism, with an emphasis on certain moral precepts, but not restrained by the traditional teachings of Christian theology. When your faith becomes more about trust in a leader than transcendent ideas like grace and love, it works best to redefine your faith, rather than reform yourself. When Adolf Eichmann, a Gottgläubiger, said, “Repentance is for little children,” it was a model for Trump, when he said in a 2015 interview that he had never sought forgiveness for anything. He doesn’t consider humbling oneself as manly. Maintaining power is of greater importance than reconciling relationships. Hard to imagine how that fits with evangelical Christianity, since salvation requires confession and forgiveness. At least it used to.

After Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, revealed his old boss had openly praised Hitler and wished for the kinds of generals the Nazi leader once had; and after last Sunday’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, that reached new heights of vulgarity, racism, and hostility toward fellow Americans, there is no escaping the comparisons to Germany in the 1930s. 

All of this has led millions of us to wonder how we could get to this point. How could so many of our fellow citizens, who are otherwise decent and normal people, follow this man with what amounts to cult-like fervor? And doesn’t it make them terrible people?

These kinds of questions have been on my mind a lot, as I’ve been preparing for the graduate seminar in communication ethics I teach in the spring. One of the things we talk about in the class is the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt. For many, she is known as the author of the phrase, “the banality of evil,” which she wrote in The New Yorker about Adolf Eichmann, when he was tried by an Israeli court for war crimes in 1961. 

Eichmann was an uneducated man and nearly pathological liar. He regularly justified his actions as a result of him simply doing his job. He claimed to have no animosity for the Jews, yet nearly all of his known associates spewed the most vile forms of racial and ethnic hatred. His ego often caused him to contradict himself and get in the way of his defense. He was a compulsive braggart, boasting widely before his arrest and during the trial that he was responsible for the Holocaust. “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” And he would go on about how their extermination was his idea (it wasn’t). Arendt ascribed Eichmann’s astounding willingness to admit his crimes to “the aura of systematic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich.” Does this wild cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, dishonesty, and hypocrisy remind you of anyone?

Arendt faced a great deal of opposition when she made the proclamation, “this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” Essentially, she argued the consequences of his life were monstrosities, but not because he had become some sort of cartoon villain, but because his life was replete with poor choices and willful ignorance. Over time, such neglect of one’s moral and ethical life evolves into a form of malfeasance, for which one is responsible. 

“The banality of evil lives wherever persons do not find a way to contend with actions and events that carry destructive consequences and are propelled by thoughtless action.”

My friend Jody Bilyeu once wrote a letter to the president of my former university, after the president behaved like a coward while a colleague of mine was essentially fired from our religious university for teaching evolution. Jody used a metaphor only those fairly familiar with the New Testament will appreciate. He wrote, “While you did not cast the stones, you most certainly held the cloaks.” It wasn’t obviously monstrous behavior. He was just doing his job, but his unwillingness to contend with the humanity of one of his faculty resulted in a horrible, unjust outcome.

Arendt describes this willful inattention to the lives and well-being of others as part of the banality of evil. We don’t have to rise to the level of Hollywood villains to be responsible for immoral or unethical acts. We can start down that path everyday, when we fail to follow Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber’s teaching (I-Thou), and see those around us as people, not objects. 

Here’s another banal example of the banality of evil: When we reached full lockdown, early in the pandemic, I would often pick up food from a taco stand down the street. You would order at a window, and the server would turn a screen for you to complete your sale, deciding if and how much to tip. I noticed a disturbing trend. Customers who approached the window with their masks on, considering the well-being of the essential worker in front of them, always tipped generously. They recognized times were challenging, and they wanted to help. Every single unmasked customer in front of me in line at that taco stand chose the “no tip” option. Every fucking time. They were unconcerned about anyone but themselves. Not a monstrous act, but a small evil that becomes part of a broader pattern of malice.  

Arendt argued Eichmann’s greatest character flaw was not arrogance and hypocrisy, it was his complete inability to see anything from the Other’s point of view. That insensitivity builds a culture within and around us that works on us and shapes us into its own image. Over time it hardens into who we are.

When Betsy and I hit the road in 2017 to listen to stories around the country, and work toward a healing discourse, I believed our society had temporarily taken leave of its senses, and that we could find our way back. I didn’t think average citizens or voters were monsters. 

But…the weight of our choices from then to now has taken on new significance. Mistakes have become malice. The cumulative effect of the banality of evil is co-signing an immorality of historic dimensions. 

I wouldn’t travel the country to listen to stories of our division now. I don’t care anymore. It wouldn’t matter. For us to correct our course and get closer to dialogue in our country, a monologue must precede it. Critiquing before calming. Those who wield voices of power and domination need to receive correction and justice, and those who’ve gone unheard need amplification. Until that happens, “dialogue” and “civility” will often stand in as justifications for oppression. 

So, what do we do? That’s a longer conversation, but for now:

We vote. 

We speak the truth, even if our voices shake.