The banality of evil

When I was coming up through middle and high school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, bullying was frowned upon but still a part of the social fabric. Queer people knew that they had to make themselves small or invisible to survive, just to give one example of the social climate. Watching bullies was clarifying. To see their disregard for the humanity of others was chilling. For some, the bully and his lackeys certainly, it was thrilling. For others, they were just happy it wasn’t them on the receiving end. Others would capitulate in order to stay in the good graces of the bully. Many tried to find the courage to stand up to the bully, but their courage failed them. Everyone made a choice. They saw cruelty, injustice, and made a choice. The fate of the victim, usually just a person who just wanted to exist in public, was in the hands of this collection of individuals. Everyone had a choice.

Marco Rubio was once an opponent of Donald Trump, because Marco Rubio once had the courage of his convictions. In 2013, Rubio helped to write a bill that provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. This bill passed in the Senate. It would have passed in the House, but John Boehner refused to hold a vote on it (because it would have passed, but with more Dem reps voting for it than GOP reps! Yes, the GOP has been the problem for more than a decade!).

In 2014, following the Russian takeover of Crimea from Ukraine, Rubio said the following: “You look what’s happening in Crimea and why that matters, and here’s why that matters: because if in the 21st century it is acceptable for a country to simply invade a neighbor and take their land, we’re back where we were in 1939 and 1940 and 1941.” Rubio wrote a Washington Post op-ed in 2014 that included lines like this: “Some have suggested that Crimea is not worth triggering tensions with Russia, given other interests that are more important. While it is best to avoid conflict whenever possible, history shows that illegitimate aggressions that go unchallenged are a virtual guarantee of even more dangerous conflict in the future.”

Rubio excoriated Trump in 2015 when both were running for the Republican presidential nomination: “You all have friends that are thinking about voting for Donald Trump,” Rubio said. “Friends do not let friends vote for con artists.”

Rubio’s transformation helps me to understand the banality of evil, as described by Hannah Arendt: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Adolf Eichmann was in charge of identifying, assembling, and transporting Jews in Nazi German-occupied parts of Europe to extermination camps in German-occupied Poland, including Auschwitz.

The way that Trump and Vance treated Zelensky in the Oval Office should have led to mass resignations, including that of Marco Rubio. Instead, Rubio released a statement criticizing Zelensky, who was the only honorable politician in the room. Even as I write, Marco Rubio could do what he knows to be the right thing. He could resign. He could say that Putin is the aggressor, the war criminal, and thus the United States comes to any negotiations in support of Ukraine, its independence, its territorial integrity. For God’s sake, how can it be that I even need to say these things! That episode in the Oval Office was a mob hit, a mob hit on an ally we agreed to defend in 1994. And this hit was carried out in support of Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who literally poisons his enemies!

Timothy Snyder explains the likely rationale for all of this: “It has been the policy of Musk-Trump from the beginning to build an alliance with Russia. The notion that there should be a peace process regarding Ukraine was simply a pretext to begin relations with Russia. That would be consistent with all of the publicly available facts. Blaming Ukraine for the failure of a process that never existed then becomes the pretext to extend the American relationship with Russia. The Trump administration, in other words, ukrainewashed a rapprochement with Russia that was always its main goal. It climbed over the backs of a bloodied but hopeful people to reach the man that ordered their suffering. Yelling at the Ukrainian president was most likely the theatrical climax to a Putinist maneuver that was in the works all along.”

So here we are. We have a tyrannical, anti-democratic, anti-rule-of-law regime in power in the United States. We have to accept this. This American regime is in the process of allying with Russia. The Trump regime is trying to fundamentally alter the character and make-up of the government of the United States. Trump-aligned people have said that this is the plan (Project 2025) and they are currently carrying it out through the appointment of loyalists to key cabinet posts (DOJ, State, Defense, FBI) and mass firings of federal workers.

We all have the capacity to justify ourselves into becoming accomplices of great injustice and evil. These are mostly “normal” (even formally good) people going along with this. People like Marco Rubio have made accommodations to evil because…

As we’ll see in the coming weeks, months, and years, there will be no end to the “becauses.” People you love or respect or “thought you knew” are going to explain to you why Europe is actually bad and Russia is actually good (Russia is more “Christian,” will be the explanation), or why we shouldn’t be helping babies born with HIV in Africa, or why we have to send “those people” to Guantanamo Bay or to Bukele’s mass prisons in El Salvador, or why “Trump Gaza” is a good business decision, or something else that I cannot even imagine.

And yet, we still get to make choices. I do not only believe in the banality of evil, but also in the banality of goodness. It’s what I try to practice. It is made manifest through small choices, made day after day. When I feel strong, it includes confronting people’s lies and their casual cruelties. When I am weak, it means retreating from public, maybe venting to friends and family, maybe just staring out the window and taking deep breaths.

Silence or acquiescence to evil and cruelty are now becoming the paths of least resistance. We must learn to resist these paths, and we must do so now. There are, I fear, more difficult times to come, in which more will be required of us.