Throughout human history people have feared and been discomfited by “the other.” As a life-long optimist, I don’t believe we’re doomed but I believe we’re in extremely serious trouble and must unite on many fronts to defeat the threats we face. We must speak truth to power, especially corrupt power. We must call out lies when they’re presented as truth. We must promote reverence for freedom, especially speech and press.
Mark Twain famously said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” I’ve been thinking about the political historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘the banality of evil’ and how it relates to us now. Arendt addressed evil in the context of Adolf Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Eichmann blithely considered himself innocent because he personally had never killed anyone.
Eichmann’s perverse blind mindlessness enabled him to create the ghastly, orderly efficiency of the Holocaust. He helped establish the Central Offices for Jewish Emigration for the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps, he scheduled trains, arranged for the seizure of Jewish property and ensured his department benefited from confiscated assets, and was a principal organizer of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
I find frightening echoes in Trump and his Republican-controlled Senate and Congress marching in lockstep, the shockingly compromised Supreme Court, the toadying Cabinet members. Here lies the ‘banality of evil.’ While some in charge may be in ideological agreement, others at lower levels are ‘just doing their jobs’ or fearful of not doing them without fully grasping their consequences (ie: separating families, withholding food from hungry children, and creating other horrors). Trumpism is an evil ideology – one that can exist after him if it is not defeated while he’s here.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Great American Experiment, always an imperfect democracy now in appalling jeopardy, looking increasingly like a burgeoning totalitarian state. In his first term, Trump was surrounded by some rational staffers and advisors and faced with a stronger loyal opposition, which helped keep the worst of him at bay, although he did horrible things.
He lost re-election in 2020 – which he still won’t accept or acknowledge – and the Democratic administration that followed, while doing much good, went a bit off the rails. With his 2024 re-election, we now have a New Age Totalitarian at the helm. Trump is enacting truly harmful policies (remember all the horrors contained in that Big Beautiful Bill?) and stating goals for future enactments that are nothing short of authoritarianism.
He has made the Justice Department impotent and complicit; challenged the independence of the Federal Reserve Chair; dismantled the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, US Agency for International Development, causing unthinkable long-term damage in our nation and abroad. He’s engaging in tasteless vanity by desecrating the White House and naming or renaming public buildings in his image; and so much more.
He has routinely attacked media in an attempt to control information; schools from pre-K to PhD to control what’s taught (and re-write history); turned the National Guard and ICE agents into masked secret police on American streets; perpetrated revenge tactics on legislators, government officials and anyone else who disagrees with him; embarked on astounding military ventures in his take-over of Venezuela and threats to do the same with Greenland and Iran.
Other factors embolden Totalitarian Trumpism. Algorithms give different types of people different versions of facts and circumstances. Literacy is steeply declining and attention spans are shortening. Socially, some young people have little in-person interaction with human friends. They and adults are forming intimate relationships with chatbots. Loneliness, now considered an epidemic, was addressed by Arendt(LS1) long before this tech existed, because social isolation creates fertile ground for fear of both all others and the self.
It’s terrifying but there is strong and growing resistance. I’m heartened by the mass demonstrations against his countless unlawful acts like the spontaneous protests in hundreds of cities immediately after the ICE murder of Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen in Minneapolis, and the global Black Lives Matter movement sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd in that same city in 2020.
I’m equally encouraged by recent elections of Democrats in several local areas and increasing willingness among Democratic legislators to not be silenced by the President’s threats and punitive actions. But everyone needs to do more. The great John Lewis, who encouraged Americans to “make good trouble“in the fight for civil rights, said”We will find a way to make a way out of no way.” Americans need information and guidance to find that way.
In my six decades of work with nonprofit, corporate, and government leaders, I’ve traveled around the world meeting, working, and living with people different from myself. As I’ve written on various platforms from this perspective, I feel it is vital that folks in media of any type speak out and up, bravely and consistently. Media is being assaulted and hog-tied on TV and in print. Newspapers have folded, public media is being extinguished, networks are being co-opted. Much of social media is distracting and dividing us rather than uniting us. The sages of journalism forewarned us.
Former Time magazine managing editor Henry Grunwald said “Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.” Former CBS broadcaster Walter Cronkite, at one point ‘the most trusted man in America,’ said, “Journalism is what we need to make Democracy work.”
You can’t argue with Cronkite, Ahrendt, or brave women journalists of our day like Michel Martin, Amy Goodman, Sarah Kunstler, especially as women and other marginalized people are at the greatest peril of being negatively affected and targeted. (LS2) Nobel Peace Laureate and Rappler founder Maria Ressa said in 2018, “The mission of journalism has never been needed as much as it is now.” In 2019, I participated in the Belfast conference ‘Media in Deeply Divided Societies – Its Role and Responsibilities’ with global journalists, many women.
Hannah Arendt’s important lesson should not be new to anyone acquainted with the words and work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the seminal civil rights icon and human rights visionary who bravely connected the dots that link what he called “Triple Evils”: Racism, Economic Disparity/Poverty and War. His goal was to combat these through activist power and support of light, love, and non-violence, the foundation of ‘the beloved community,’ because he knew that “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?’.”
In his book, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he wrote, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” This resonates with what the 18th Century writer/philosopher Edmund Burke once said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” as well as what Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel said about indifference being more dangerous than hatred when referring to those who stood by silently while atrocities were being committed.
We are not owned by any political party, leader, or greedy corporations willing to capitulate to and capitalize upon current conditions, jettisoning advances in climate change, diversity and inclusion or anything else denounced by demagogues. Journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens unaccustomed to taking time from their daily lives must speak out and act because despite its historic flaws, America can be great. We have much to do to assure that outright authoritarianism and its quiet, deadly assistant, banal evil, is vanquished to restore the best of who we were and help us to evolve into something even better.
