The June 2025 release of a documentary about Hannah Arendt on PBS brought her back into public consciousness—at least for those few who still watch PBS. Her books The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism are masterpieces of insight that speak to every age, none more urgently than our own, as we teeter on the edge of a MAGA world.
She coined the term the banality of evil while covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in the murder of more than six million Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime. The phrase was not well received by good, upstanding people who felt confident they knew right from wrong and believed they could never be misled, as so many were in Nazi Germany. But what she saw—what she understood from the trial and from years of study—was that ordinary human beings can be drawn into societal evil without even noticing it’s happening. Banality refers to the dull, ordinary quality of actions and systems unexamined by critical reflection or moral self-awareness. The good, upstanding readers of her time were humiliated—and angered—to be told they, too, were susceptible to the same quiet drift into evil. She was right then. She is right now.
We are not Germany in the 1930s. We are Americans in the 2020s. But the dynamics of that distant time echo disturbingly in our own. One of the most sinister similarities is the growing acceptance that some people are superfluous—that is, not needed or wanted in a country like ours. Indeed, they are seen as a hindrance to the better life others feel entitled to. They absorb resources rightfully “ours.” And truth be told, they are no longer viewed as fully human—more like animals to be caged and dealt with appropriately.
Surely that is not us—not we who live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the land where all persons are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have a Constitution that guarantees it and laws to enforce it. Don’t we?
We do not—at least, not when complacency, fear, and anxiety create conditions in which bizarre conspiracies flourish, truth loses its footing, and autocrats ascend to high public office.
To avoid the trap of the banality of evil, every American must look with critical eyes at the emergence of our own police state, targeting so-called superfluous people to be rounded up, incarcerated, and eliminated. Humanely, of course. No gas chambers for us. Just ship them off to places they don’t want to go, where their lives will be at extreme risk—and provide no resources for their survival.
Every patriotic American must raise their voice in collective outrage at corrupt courts, spineless legislators, and authoritarian executives who wield power through threats of violent retribution.
This resonates with the Divine Comedy of Dante, which as you may remember I’ve been studying intensively for the past couple of years. One of the messages of the Purgatorio, which I believe is the extended essay on how to live your life (Inferno is about evil, Paradiso is about transcendence, Purgatorio is about how to spend your time) is that it’s easy to slip into a life of wrongdoing by degrees, taking one seemingly harmless step (a little white lie, so to speak), and then finding oneself decreasingly able to backtrack. It would be easy to say that you don’t really mind (for example) Trump’s relationship with Putin — after all, weren’t Roosevelt and Stalin allies? — and then sliding along with him through the allegations of stolen election — after all, aren’t there always going to be some crooked ballots? — and on and on until you’ve become willing to send people to concentration camps, you’ve become the worst of the worst because you couldn’t back up and say, “Wait a minute — I’ve been wrong all along!”
Hi Steven! You wrote, “Surely that is not us.” But truth be told, while that may not be our better angels, we have fed the wolf of genocide and racism countless times in this country, from the genocide of Indians to the dismissal of the humanity of Black folks to concentration camps for Japanese-American citizens; it has been in our lifetime that we finally allowed Asian people to become citizens of the US.
IMHO, we must own this darker side of the bright story of America; until we name it and claim it, we will never recover or find healing for our past.