Susan Neiman spent decades writing about evil — Evil in Modern Thought, Learning from the Germans, Left Is Not Woke — and she opened the Einstein Forum in Potsdam from 2000 until earlier this year. Her new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, argues that the Left’s long reluctance to use moral language has left it disarmed. Kristen R. Ghodsee interviews her for Jacobin.

Why the reluctance, and why it’s a mistake:

  • “Authoritarian” and “illiberal” describe styles of governance; they say nothing about cruelty pursued for its own apparent enjoyment. “Awful” can describe a bad boyfriend. “If it’s all you have to say about a genocide, you have failed to grasp what genocide is.”
  • Good and evil are not religious ideas. Moral intuitions precede theology — every culture recognizes evil, which you could as easily call “awareness of injustice.” Her favorite proof is Abraham arguing God down over collateral damage: even with a direct line to the Lord, he isn’t the source of your moral judgment.
  • Hannah Arendt’s real insight survives the Eichmann tapes: the most dangerous evil comes not from sadists but from people who won’t rock boats. “Genocide cannot be committed by a few consciously evil people alone. It requires millions who accept them.”

On materialism, she parts ways with much of the Marxist tradition. Brecht’s “first comes the grub, and then come the morals” is chronologically right, but Marxism’s paradox is that it inspires through moral claims while theoretically undermining the basis of that inspiration. She points to Eduard Bernstein — Engels’s literary executor, who rejected dialectical materialism as an insult to workers — and to the Enlightenment view that Marx’s contribution was insisting ideals demand material realization, not that they reduce to material interests.

The book’s sharpest section traces where the cynical view of human nature came from. Crass misreadings of Adam Smith and Darwin, reinforced by Foucault and funded deliberately — she cites Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market — produced a sense of inevitability now legible in any newspaper column. “You cannot defend socialism without questioning the conception of human nature that capitalist ideology has taught us to take for granted.”

Two more arguments worth carrying:

  • On Gaza: Germany’s BDS-banning resolutions — first from the AfD in 2019, then copied by every other party afraid of looking less philosemitic — turned “close to BDS” into grounds for cancelling artists, writers, and journalists, many of them Jewish. Nuremberg’s actual lesson is that human rights apply to all humans, Palestinians included.
  • On billionaires: “the point of making that much money is to exercise political power.” She agrees with Mamdani that there is no good reason for billionaires to exist — an injustice that cancels any form of democracy. Universalism, not class essentialism, is the way to meet it.

Her socialism is Bernstein’s: social rights to health, education, housing, fair labor, and leisure are rights as fundamental as speech or the vote, winnable through democratic means. She calls the book a contribution to the conceptual changes needed for a peaceful revolution — “in a world that’s armed to the teeth, anything else is too dangerous.”