Susan Neiman

It’s common to condemn the Trump administration’s contempt for the rule of law. We forget that the rule of law only works if people commit to upholding it even if a legal decision goes against their self-interest — and that’s a moral commitment. James Madison knew that even the best constitution was no protection without “virtue in the people.” The Founding Fathers were less averse to moral concepts than we have become, especially on the liberal left.

Let’s dispense with a widespread misunderstanding that good and evil are religious ideas. Moral intuitions precede theology. Religion is a response to the problem of evil, though I don’t think it’s a very successful one. Every culture recognizes evil, whatever their religious practices. You could call it “awareness of injustice.” That’s something that children, most primates, and according to one study, even rats display.

My favorite argument that morality precedes religion comes from the Bible itself, when Abraham urges God not to punish the innocent with the guilty — not to accept collateral damage. That suggests that even should you have a direct line to the Lord himself, he isn’t the source of your moral judgment.

It’s true that religious believers are more comfortable using moral concepts, and it’s equally true that fundamentalists abuse them. But why should we allow the most powerful tools in our language to be appropriated by those who are least able to use them responsibly? People are moved by those concepts, which appeal to deep intuitions and emotions; better to learn to analyze evil than deny what we can see every day. If the cold-blooded murder of fishermen, or schoolgirls, or peacefully protesting demonstrators isn’t evil, what is? Words like “authoritarian” are simply too weak to do it justice.

I don’t think Zohran Mamdani uses the word “evil,” but his campaign was premised on moral values, and its success cannot be reduced to affordability. He leaned hard on questions of justice, in particular the injustice that most people who keep New York City running cannot afford to live there. And his steadfast condemnation of the genocide in Gaza — which initially seemed a huge liability — is a great source of his popularity. We’re so used to politicians abandoning their principles when it suits them that Mamdani’s display of integrity became a source of credibility, creating hope he won’t sell out on other issues. We should also remember that the most successful (albeit only partially so) leftist movement in US history was the civil rights movement, which roused millions of people through a clear moral message.

Susan Neiman

Most of my work has been devoted to making complex philosophical issues accessible to general audiences, since I believe philosophical assumptions are a greater part of our lives than we recognize. Take statements like “Be realistic” or “That’s just human nature.” As used in ordinary language, they imply a web of assumptions about the world we take for granted because we haven’t reflected on them. Materialism is one of the most basic.

Like anyone who learned from Karl Marx, I’ve spent hours in arguments about differences between materialism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism, whether there are major differences between the early and late Marx, and how to get around the fact that his nineteenth-century predictions did not hold up. A long seminar wouldn’t do those arguments justice, much less a short interview.

Bertolt Brecht’s dictum “First comes the grub, and then come the morals” is chronologically correct. When people are hungry or homeless, they don’t have much energy to reflect on morality. Once their stomachs stop rumbling, they begin to think about justice. Marxism’s biggest paradox is that it inspires people through demands for justice — i.e., moral claims — while theoretically undermining the basis of that inspiration. Ideas move people in powerful ways — often rather bad ones, as nationalism today shows.

I admire the misread and forgotten Eduard Bernstein, a founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Although he was Friedrich Engels’s literary executor, he rejected dialectical materialism, which he thought was an insult to workers, who were just as capable of being moved by ideals as anyone else. He was also an early feminist and supporter of gay rights. Bernstein wrote that “social democracy needs Kant, who shows that materialism is the most deceptive ideology, and that contempt for ideals, the elevation of material facts to omnipotent powers is simply deceptive.”

The Enlightenment is now so dismissed that it’s often forgotten that Marxism was once seen as the culmination of Enlightenment thought — both by its defenders in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, for example, and by its Nazi opponents. On that view, Marx’s contribution was to insist that the ideals of the Enlightenment demand material realization — not that those ideals were reducible to material interests. It’s a subtle but important difference.

Call It Evil argues that we’ve been conditioned to accept materialism as a fact, not an ideology. The idea that moral concepts are just superstructure is supported by crass misreadings of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, reinforced by Michel Foucault. I show how these misreadings of Smith and Darwin created a sense of inevitability you can read in any newspaper, without ever asking whether they are debatable philosophical assertions. Since the end of the Cold War, the sense of inevitability has become stronger.

Susan Neiman

You can measure the rhetorical power of “evil” by the number of people — mostly on the Left — who object to it. It’s striking how many point out that it’s a dangerous term that can be abused, as if that had never occurred to anyone who’s thought about the subject. “Awful” can apply to a filthy apartment or a bad boyfriend. If it’s all you have to say about a genocide, you have failed to grasp what genocide is.

I’m not a Platonist, and I don’t believe that evil exists independently of social realities. Until the mid-eighteenth century, most people did. I do believe that it’s something we recognize and can learn to recognize better.

Arendt’s work was crucial in showing us that the most dangerous forms of evil emerge not from sadism or cruelty but from our tendency to go along with systemic structures around us and not rock any boats that might disturb our lives. That she turned out to be wrong about the man Adolf Eichmann, as was proven by tape recordings that were unknown in 1963, doesn’t undermine the validity of her claims. Genocide cannot be committed by a few consciously evil people alone. It requires millions who accept them.

Susan Neiman

I found Graeber and Wengrow’s book liberating, though I wish they’d given Jean-Jacques Rousseau more credit. His argument should be music to their ears: we have no access whatsoever to the deeds, much less the thoughts and drives, of our prehistoric ancestors, so we project conceptions of human nature onto the past that suit our political projects. The Dawn of Everything was important for that argument; another related book is Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory. You cannot defend socialism without questioning the conception of human nature that capitalist ideology has taught us to take for granted. Everyone reading these words has surely encountered people who insist that socialism is nice in theory, but human nature ensures that it can’t work in practice.

When I began work on this book, I assumed that the various ways this ideology is blasted at us were just unfortunate coincidences; everything else seemed too conspiratorial. Looking further, particularly at Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s excellent The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, I realized how deliberate the mythmaking has been.

Certainly, economic interests can play a huge role in shaping and spreading ideologies. I’m just denying that they always determine them. And you’re right that conservatives are better at promoting ideas than leftists; a classic of mid-twentieth-century conservatism was called Ideas Have Consequences. Once leftists acknowledge that they do, we’ll get better at defending them.

Susan Neiman

Those broadcasts were great background for reading Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, published a few years later. It’s not that I suddenly believed everything the East Germans broadcast, but I understood how context and framing, even without deliberate lying, could create completely different takes on reality.

The experience also inoculated me against a later lie, namely that the West Germans did a better job of dealing with the Nazi past than the East Germans. It’s a West German myth now accepted in much of the world. Few West Germans were spreading that myth in the 1980s, since anyone with basic knowledge of German could tell it was the East, at the time, that was reckoning with the Nazis — incompletely, but far more than the West, which wanted to sweep that history under the carpet. That’s a useful lesson for thinking about Cold War America as well.

Americans are bad at recognizing propaganda because our biggest piece of propaganda is that we have none. Possibly a silver lining of Trump’s attack on the media, and the media’s complicity with it, is that Americans will better recognize how worldviews can be shaped by political interest. I fear, however, that his weaponization of the phrase “fake news” leads people in a different, nihilistic direction: there is no news that isn’t manipulated to maintain power.

I don’t think we can have real moral judgment without considering competing views. We might accidentally behave morally, but it isn’t judgment if it isn’t reflective, and that means not taking your own morality for granted. It’s much easier to reflect if you are confronted with different moral and political assumptions. Too few Americans have opportunities to do that.

Susan Neiman

The problems started before October 7; they came to a head in 2019, when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party proposed a parliamentary resolution banning Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). It was a brilliant and sinister form of — can I call it Jew-washing? By embracing the government of Israel, the AfD hoped to answer charges of neofascism. How could it be fascist if it unconditionally supports the State of Israel? It also advances one of its main goals, which is keeping Muslim immigrants out of Germany.

No one challenged it, because the other parties were afraid to be seen as less philosemitic than the AfD, so they immediately passed a similar resolution, which resulted in canceling artists, writers, journalists, and others who can be described as “close to BDS,” i.e., anyone who supports Palestinian rights. And many of us are Jewish.

This created the biggest political/cultural debate of the last six years, which took place in television, radio, in print, and in parliaments. Learning from the Germans had argued that Germany’s historical reckoning was flawed, but it did better than any other country in facing the evils of its past history. The recent debates exposed the depth of those flaws in ways that forced me to revise my views. German reckoning suggests that as long as one is nice to Jews, any Jews, one has done one’s duty in opposing Nazism. This is an extremely simplistic understanding of fascism, ignoring the real lesson of Nuremberg: the importance of upholding human rights, and that they apply to all humans — including Palestinians.

Susan Neiman

The AfD provides a perfect example, but it is not alone. In 2022, I cohosted a conference in Berlin, Hijacking Memory, examining the weaponization of antisemitism among right-wing parties in seventeen countries. Predictably, the press accused us of antisemitism. The reception illustrated the problem we were analyzing!

People have been fired from jobs and had projects, exhibits, or appearances canceled. Those hardest hit are Muslims and people of color who support them. Americans will see parallels in the second Trump administration. What’s particularly infuriating for leftist Jews like me is this: Even if they don’t give a damn about Palestinians, why in the world do they think these kinds of repression protect Jews? On the contrary: targeting other groups, allegedly to protect us, only increases antisemitism. If I were paranoid, I’d suspect a conspiracy.

Susan Neiman

I agree with Mamdani that there’s no good reason for billionaires to exist. Apart from die-hard ascetics, most of us who work for a living can imagine a luxury or two we wish we could afford. But it’s impossible for anyone to buy a billion dollars’ worth of treats; the point of making that much money is to exercise political power, as billionaires are doing with increasing shamelessness. Particularly given how much of their wealth depends on other people’s labor, that’s an injustice that cancels any form of democracy.

There are profound differences between those who live on dividends and those who work for a living, just as there are profound differences between men and women, and between people of different ethnicities. Those are differences in experience, which is why it’s so important for different voices to be heard, but essentializing those differences is a metaphysical mistake with dangerous political consequences. And the notion of class has changed so much since Marx’s day that it’s unhelpful to depend on it; far better is a universal conception of justice, which occasionally moves even members of the ruling class to action. Where would we be without Engels’s dividends?

Susan Neiman

In my last book, Left Is Not Woke, I offered a normative definition of what it (should) mean to be left today. There are three principles common to both leftists and liberals:

1. We are universalists, not tribalists, because we believe that genuine connections and obligations do not depend on origins.

2. We believe in a principled distinction between justice and power, even though the distinction is often abused.

3. We believe that progress toward more just and fulfilling societies isn’t inevitable, but it is possible.

In that book, I argued for a popular front between leftists and liberals in a time of rising fascism. But there’s a fourth principle that distinguishes leftists from liberals:

Social rights — to health, education, housing, fair labor practices, and leisure — are not “benefits” or “safety nets” but rights as important as political rights to speak, vote, travel, or worship as we please.

Like Bernstein, I think those rights could be achieved through democratic processes. I’m well aware that this can look utopian at this moment. My book is meant as a contribution to the conceptual changes that must happen for a peaceful revolution to take place. In a world that’s armed to the teeth, anything else is too dangerous.