On the evening of March 15, 2025, while government lawyers haggled in a D.C. courtroom, three airplanes delivered 238 chained prisoners to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Better known as CECOT, the center is little more than a twenty-first-century concentration camp, where conditions are tantamount to “torture,” in the words of a Salvadoran jurist. According to Kilmar Ábrego García, a U.S. resident who was sent there for three months in early 2025 as the result of an “administrative error,” inmates are subjected to “severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”
A grotesque abuse of human rights, the administration’s illegal deportations to CECOT caused a furor across the country. Despite the outrage, however, most elected officials remained silent. Republican lawmakers, perhaps unsurprisingly, either demurred or supported the president. Then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the facility, posing in front of a cage brimming with prisoners while sporting a $50,000 watch.
More surprisingly, Democratic congressmen and senators largely stayed mum in the face of administrative evil. “Democrats cannot say a word, apparently,” ex-Republican Bill Kristol seethed on March 31, “without going through some filter of what pollsters have been telling you.” Of the 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, only a handful criticized the deportations (and in April, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen visited Ábrego García in El Salvador). In May, a group of centrist senators introduced a milquetoast fact-finding bill—while deportees languished in the prison.
Their fecklessness was, unfortunately, not an anomaly. Despite Democrats’ eagerness to point out the economic missteps of Trump’s second term, the party’s leaders and most prominent figures rarely denounce its worst human rights violations (which have primarily targeted immigrants and trans people, two groups that most Democratic politicians avoid talking about like the plague). And while the party has spent over a decade warning American voters about the threat Trump poses to democracy, it has done little to actually defend it: Senate Democrats routinely vote to confirm Trump nominees (every one of the party’s senators voted to confirm Marco Rubio as secretary of state), favor arming the executive branch with authoritarian powers such as warrantless wiretapping, and have approved slates of Trump-nominated judges.
In her new book, the philosopher Susan Neiman, recently retired director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, takes Americans to task for failing to call Trump and his administration what they are: evil. Declining to do so, in her view, is not merely a moral failing but has real-world ramifications. “Our culture’s reluctance to trade in moral ideas,” she writes, “has left them to right-wing demagogues and brought us to this pass.” A demand for moral clarity in an amoral world, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era urges us to face “the moral ideas that Donald Trump embodies and reinforces, ideas that are destructive enough to warrant the word evil.”
In making a case to think about the Trump administration in these terms, Neiman offers a potent rebuke to those who would rather talk about “kitchen table issues” than torture. Yet her peculiar definition of evil makes it difficult to actually face the worst cruelties of this administration and to pin down who, precisely, she is talking about when she suggests that “we’ve lost confidence in moral conviction.”
“Make America moral again,” Joe Biden stated on April 30, 2019, when asked if he had a motto to contrast with Trump’s, “Make America great again.” It is not controversial to state, however, that after four years in power, numerous legislative accomplishments, and every effort to restore a measure of comity to American politics, Biden failed in his goal.
Some would undoubtedly point to the genocide in Gaza, mass slaughter that Biden’s administration did nothing to halt, besides throwing off a few tepid rebukes. Others might point to economic insecurity. As the celebrated economist Isabella Weber took to saying in those years, “Inflation kills governments.” While Neiman is unlikely to disagree with these assessments—a chapter of the book is devoted to Gaza, naming it “the moral watershed of our time”—she argues that the true culprit of our present malaise is the neoliberal ideology of self-interest; that, in the words of Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good.”
Neoliberalism is a word thrown around so freely that it has lost much of its meaning. But it did once refer to a specific political agenda that sought not only to unshackle the “free” market, but also to apply market logic to all spheres of life, hence the all-too-common refrain that governments or universities or other public goods should be “run like a business.” In Neiman’s view, this ideology arose from a bastardized reading of Adam Smith: a free market regulated only by the self-interest of its actors. This belief in a “rational” market was, Neiman adds, complemented by similar misreadings of Charles Darwin, which developed “increasingly baroque explanations of human behavior” to show that this self-interest is evolutionary in its origins. The terminus of this ideology is nihilistic: In a world where everyone is out to maximize profit, “moral concepts are for suckers.”
The more we are convinced that people are “rational” actors motivated only by greed, in short, the more likely we are to act that way. We live in a country where we’re told to look out for ourselves alone, to get ahead whatever the cost. In the process, Neiman contends, “the very idea of social rights,” by which she means everything from housing to education to health care, has become “anathema,” precisely because it infringes on the sovereign self-interest of the individual. But depriving citizens of these rights—or passing them off as “a safety net”—has real consequences. “The undercurrent of anger,” which Neiman contends characterizes American society, arises from the subconscious knowledge that it’s nigh impossible to get by this way, that the American dream is little more than a “mirage.” Trump is an expression of that rage, a symptom of a broken system and a bankrupt ideology, rather than its cause.
Neiman is certainly not the first to make this diagnosis. The book departs from other recent works on neoliberalism and twenty-first-century fascism in its focus on evil, which Neiman movingly defines as the “idea that arises whenever the gap between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be becomes too big to bear alone.” Pointing to Hannah Arendt’s formulation of the “banality of evil,” she insists that in order to recognize evil in our own time, we must get away from the assumption that it only appears “as demons in jackboots.” Anyone can do evil. Thus, “the worst kind of evil” is not any particular expression of it, but rather “the refusal to recognize morality at all.”
It’s a beautifully simple formulation. Evil isn’t what you think it is, but rather the inability to recognize evil. It echoes Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s stirring dictum that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And yet, if prompted, most of us would likely come up with rather a different definition. We might arrive at a definition closer to that offered by Judith Shklar, a Harvard philosopher who was intrigued by the role of emotions in rational government. “Human cruelty,” she wrote, is not only “a distinct and unmitigated evil,” but is the “most evil of all the evils.” In Shklar’s view, the hallmark of a civilized society was its intolerance of cruelty.
Disdain for cruelty is precisely what has gone missing in the Trump era and what sits behind the fanaticism of the president’s most ardent supporters. What, after all, is “owning the libs” if not an indulgence in cruelty for cruelty’s sake? The protesters at No Kings marches and anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement demonstrations know this. Adam Serwer knew it when he wrote in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.”
Neiman certainly gestures to the everyday atrocities of the last two years, acknowledging that Trump “reflects a culture that sells cruelty as entertainment.” Still, in her view, “faith in the tyranny of self-interest” is “far more significant than vicious or malicious cruelty” because it has allowed “cruelty to become ordinary.” Yet, that logic, as much as we might wish to believe it, doesn’t sustain the barest interrogation. There are plenty of neoliberal societies in which cruelty has not become normalized in the way that it has in the United States. There have been plenty of cruel societies that were not neoliberal in nature. And history is littered with examples of evil committed in the name of morality.
Neiman’s account of actual evil is thus strangely bloodless, the many atrocities of the last two years glossed over. “Counting crimes,” in her view, “is pointless.” A reader will search in vain for descriptions of the CECOT deportations, mentions of Alligator Alcatraz, or the number of innocents who have died in ICE custody. The so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” which wrecked swathes of the government, putting thousands of dedicated public servants out of work and leading to the deaths of at least seven hundred thousand recipients of U.S. aid, is likewise nowhere to be found. And if you’re looking for sympathy with trans people, whose rights are being systematically shredded, forget it. Neiman tiptoes up to the line of blaming them for their own predicament, writing that a 2019 ACLU questionnaire, which asked if candidates would “ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment,” was “a thumb in voters’ eyes.”
That kind of slippage is, unfortunately, more a feature than a bug in Neiman’s writing. With a fondness for dramatic claims, she often invokes straw men. “Why aren’t more of us in the streets?” she asks, apparently unaware that more Americans are protesting now than in Trump’s first term. Likewise, she suggests that the word fascist “fell into disuse after Trump began his second term.” Really? Perhaps most egregiously, she contends that the famous gender theorist Judith Butler recently said, “Of course there has been progress in my lifetime; now people can change their pronouns.” In Neiman’s view, “A clearer statement of woke bankruptcy has yet to be made.” The only problem? I’ve found no evidence that Butler ever said such a thing.
In fact, “the woke” (a term that Neiman does not define, instead arguing that “woke eludes definition because it’s an incoherent concept”) feature prominently in the book’s concluding section. In her view, “the woke” embraced an identity politics that, much like the reactionaries they claimed to oppose, abandoned morality in favor of tribalism. Because of their insistence on a radical kind of social justice that equated progress with “oppression” and reason with “domination,” this amorphous group of figures (Biden, Neiman assures us, “was woke but not left”) “clearly played a role in the second election of Donald Trump.”
Neiman’s fascination with wokeness (three years ago, she published a book titled Left Is Not Woke) means that although she has indeed identified real flaws in American politics and diagnosed a real inability to speak about them in moral terms, the book is criticizing the wrong people. Why, one might reasonably ask, does it not take aim at the centrists, at the politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who for years stoked fears of cancel culture and wokeness, who compared leftist efforts at social justice to fascism? Where is Bari Weiss, who in a few short years has evolved from “a self-styled free speech martyr” to propagandist-in-chief at CBS News? It is these same figures who breathlessly warned about the danger from the left but have gone silent in the face of state efforts to censor the media, shred academic freedom, intimidate political opponents, punish those who have protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and strip migrants of even a vestige of rights or dignity. Senator Chuck Schumer, whose main objection to the administration’s deportation regime seems to be its lawlessness rather than its cruelty, is never mentioned. Nor is John Fetterman, who has become Israel’s greatest cheerleader on Capitol Hill throughout its atrocities in Gaza. Why are these figures—rather than “the woke”—not the ones whom Neiman chastises?
Neiman’s definition of evil as an absence of moral reasoning also makes it difficult for her to recommend solutions. While contending we could all learn “impatience with clichés,” she resorts to her own clutch of them, arguing that we ought to start “defending truth” and “renewing the moral concepts the right has trampled.” I’m not sure moral handwringing is worth much to the hundreds of babies and toddlers who have been disappeared into ICE custody since the administration took office.
Instead, we could start by acknowledging the truth that a great many ordinary Americans have been moved to action by the moral atrocities they are witnessing each and every day. Communities from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon, to Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have banded together against federal overreach and to protect their neighbors from ICE. State governments have passed measures protecting access to abortion and gender-affirming care. More and more progressives are winning elections, speaking not only about economic justice but also with equal fervor about the moral stain that this administration has visited upon the American people and in which the American people are, to our everlasting shame, complicit.
