Follow the news out of Washington for a week, and the usual vocabulary of political criticism starts to feel insufficient. Words like “authoritarian” and “illiberal” describe styles of governance. They say much less about what it is like to watch an administration indulge shameless sadism, pursuing cruelty for its own apparent enjoyment. The word that fits better is one many on the Left have trained ourselves not to use: “evil.”

Our reluctance is not without reason. Evil calls to mind a Sunday school admonition or George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” a phrase that helped sell the immoral and disastrous war on terror. A long materialist tradition treats moral ideas as downstream of economic realities and cautions against idealism that overly concerns itself with the questions of values and culture. Evil conjures childish boogeymen and unhelpful abstractions, not the social structures we want to seriously analyze.

At the same time, the Left’s case for decent wages, housing, health care, and a world beyond class divisions is indisputably a moral case — whatever our theory says about the mechanics at play. And we don’t try to hide this: indeed, our movements often succeed best when we combine people’s self-interest with their sense of justice, neglecting neither.