Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (w/ Susan Neiman) | TCHR

The Chris Hedges Report

In this episode, Susan Neiman discusses her book 'Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,' exploring the moral vacuum that allowed Donald

Key takeaways

• Neiman defines 'evil' not merely as malice but as a 'vacancy' where empathy and shame are replaced by pure self-interest.
• The ideology of neoliberalism is presented as a distortion of Adam Smith's ideas, reducing all human motivation to individual advantage.

Main topics

• Moral philosophy and evil
• Neoliberalism and economic distortion

Notable quotes

Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop.

Conclusion

The discussion serves as a call to reclaim moral clarity and advocate

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:10) The philosopher Susan Niemann, in her new book, Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump Era, examines the ideas that Donald Trump embodies and reinforces. Ideas, she writes, that are destructive enough to warrant the word evil. Evil, she writes, 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 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 is no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your draw begins to drop. if you sense that a line has been crossed. Trump and his coterie of Christian fascists, billionaires, grifters, and incompetents could not have come to power, she argues, without a moral collapse in American society. It is not malice, she writes, but vacancy that marks the worst form of evil once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as a common-sense realism rather than a philosophical idea, Moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naive 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. Joining me to discuss her book, Call it Evil, Understanding the Trump Era, is Susan Neiman, Director Emerita of the Einstein Forum and former philosophy professor at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of nine previous books, including Evil and Modern Thought and Left is Not Woke. She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Guardian, and other publications. So you, in the book, to really single out the ideology of neoliberalism, which I think you quite correctly tie to the kind of economic determinism of Marxism as, I think, the genesis of where we've ended up today in the Trump era. And I wondered if you could talk about that. Speaker 2 (2:45) Sure. Speaker 2 (2:48) It's bigger than neoliberalism, and it's bigger than Marxism, although it is the reason why I am happy to call myself a socialist, but I'm not a Marxist. It begins, I think, with an incredible distortion of the ideas of Adam Smith, who very few people have actually read at length. In the 20th and 21st centuries, they've read a little... that was deliberately put together by the National Association of Manufacturers, which is still the biggest business lobby in the United States. And the claim that always gets emphasized is the butcher, the baker, the brewer don't produce things out of charity for us, but out of self-interest. Well, that's true, okay? Speaker 2 (3:42) But to then conclude that all we ever do is done out of self-interest is a leap that, unfortunately, it gets questioned, of course, by some of the major economists of the world, but it doesn't get into the popular culture. So we had a distortion of Adam Smith's ideas. And it's so interesting because in the 18th and 19th century, nobody thought we did everything out of self-interest. We did some things out of self-interest, but nobody thought you had to reduce all other motives to that. But through a distortion of Adam Smith and then a similar distortion of Charles Darwin, And then in the 20th century, with a little soupçon of Michel Foucault, more than a little soupçon, he is the most cited writer in social sciences and humanities in the entire world. The idea that everything we do is directed at increasing our own wealth and power got into the water stream. And not necessarily by people who read Smith, Darwin, or Foucault, but by journalists who had gone to college and read some version or other of one of those people and kept passing it on. It's an ideology that's been growing in the 20th century, but really revved up after 1991 at the end of the Cold War. Speaker 2 (5:28) Americans are used to the idea that our ideology is no ideology, and ideology is something that communists have. Ideology is just the set of assumptions that we learn to take for granted, and we get from all sides, sometimes in churches, sometimes always in, you know. mostly in movies, in education, just a set of assumptions that we hear so often that we forget that they actually are assumptions and philosophical ideas which we could question if we wanted to. Speaker 2 (6:06) So when, for example, Stephen Miller said a few months ago to Jake Tapper, forget about the niceties, the iron laws of the world are that the world is governed by strength and force and everything else is a nicety. That is a philosophical claim. It's a very old philosophical claim. You can find it in the Greek historian Thucydides, where it was used by the Athenians to justify the first recorded genocide in the world. You can also find it in the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. But it's far from being an iron law of the world. It's a philosophical claim. We can call it into question, and we have called it into question in many parts of our history. Think about colonialism. Colonialism used to be considered simply a fact from Peru to Cambodia. I mean, big countries swallowed up, and of course the Greeks and the Romans, big countries swallowed up little countries and it was not something that people very often questioned. Over time, starting in the 18th century, when the philosophers of the Enlightenment first began to criticize the idea that big countries necessarily can colonize and enslave or oppress other countries, people began to ask the question if this is an iron law of the world or maybe it's something we could oppose. Now, it took those philosophical questions to a good two centuries to actually have an impact on the world, but they finally did. Speaker 2 (8:08) In the 50s and the 60s, I guess starting India was 1948, people began to think, well, of course, the United States also was an anti-colonial movement, which we forget. But in the... Speaker 2 (8:26) middle of the twentieth century people began to think maybe this isn't an iron law maybe this isn't a fact about the world this is a philosophical political claim that we could question now of course Speaker 2 (8:42) Donald Trump just said, was it yesterday or the day before, to the victor belong the spoils. That is bringing back a very straightforward idea of colonialism to the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations having been formed in the wake of World War II, in the middle of the anti-colonial struggles, precisely Speaker 2 (9:12) to enforce a rule of law, but there he is simply flouting it in front of the world's face. I should perhaps say one more thing that I think is really important. It's trivial to say that this administration has no respect for the rule of law. We've been saying that for quite some time. What we forget is something that James Madison knew, which is that the best constitution in the world cannot guarantee itself because respect for the rule of law depends on people committing to obey the rule of law, even if it goes against them in one legal judgment or another. And that is a moral... a commitment that is not something that you can simply presuppose. Madison said, without virtue, no set of laws will protect our liberty and happiness. And I wrote this book because there are lots of books trying to explain how Americans could have elected Donald Trump. and gone along with his administration, particularly after we saw him the first time around. But, and some of them are quite good, and I've learned from them, but nobody has really focused on the moral background to this administration and to our acceptance of it. And this book argues that's the thing we have to do if we are ever to get out of the moral morass that we've been left in. Speaker 1 (11:07) Well, you talk in the book about how this mercenary embrace of neoliberalism or cutthroat capitalism, this idea that we exist to perpetuate our own self-interest, has infected not just economics, but all sorts of disciplines, academic disciplines, including religion. Speaker 1 (11:37) Yeah, Speaker 2 (11:37) that's the really amusing part, because one would have thought that religion was invented. I mean, I strongly believe that morality comes before religion, okay? A lot of people think that morality is a product of religion. I think that's a great mistake, and you can see in all cultures that you first have moral intuitions that are very often expressed. as religious intuitions, and that's why religious people generally feel more comfortable with moral language, with words like good and evil. That's why it's really extraordinary. But religion is one way, has traditionally in most cultures, been to express moral intuitions to help people Um... behave more morally, to restrain the more rapacious sides of our nature. Every religious culture has some kind of provision for taking care of people who are weak in a society. Every culture has provision for the widows and the orphans and the people who are sick, arguing that it is our duty. not simply to leave weak people behind. So it's particularly bizarre, I find, to hear some Christian, obviously not all of them, some Christian evangelicals support an administration which is all about leaving the weak behind or simply ignoring them. Speaker 2 (13:33) But I did some research on this because it's very hard to understand. I'm Jewish, not Christian, but I certainly have done some studies of Christianity, part of the culture. And it is... One branch of Christianity is actually the fastest growing in the world. The branch that takes over a number of different churches, the prosperity gospel. Namely, if you follow these commandments, you Speaker 1 (14:13) will Speaker 2 (14:13) be rewarded with wealth and power in your lifetime. And it turns out that Norman Vincent Peale was the... the religious figure that the Trump family most admired, and it's not surprising. Now, this is a really thin