Neiman’s understanding of modern evil is deeply indebted to Hannah Arendt’s pioneering description of it as “banal.” She acknowledges that Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann himself as a thoughtless man devoid of hateful antisemitic feelings is untrue. But Arendt’s broader point about modern evil lacking any “Satanic majesty” remains true. Neiman reminds us that the “Holocaust could never have happened without the willing participation of millions of people who were not particularly committed fascists or fascists of any kind. They were simply willing to accept whatever demands made their lives easier.”

This all-too-human tendency to fall not through active malice but selfishness and indifference is one Neiman thinks is very characteristic of modern American history. Neiman notes how since 1945, “it’s hard to find an example of US foreign policy that isn’t principally Schmittian, though they are usually accompanied by the sort of liberal hypocrisy that Schmitt despised.” Carl Schmitt, the German jurist who joined the Nazi party in 1933, understood politics fundamentally as a struggle between friends and enemies and rejected liberal appeals to universal principles as an ideological fiction that masked power. Schmitt would likely be pleased that the second Trump administration has largely dropped even the veneer of liberal hypocrisy. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, even the Bush administration at least had the decency to labor for months to convince the American people that the Iraq War was justified. When attacking Venezuela and Iran, not to mention saber-rattling at arrogant Greenlanders and Canadians, the Trump administration is typically much more transparent about the unbridled self-interest at play. After deposing Nicolás Maduro, Trump relished America’s access to Venezuelan oil, proclaiming “to the victor belong the spoils.”

Neiman’s core worry is that the transparently evil cynicism on display will become so normalized that we ignore its vulgarity. As the “Schmitt-Trump consensus grows, it’s easy to conclude that no other outlook is possible, and cynicism becomes inevitable.” While I sympathize with this outlook, it does seem to run counter to the longer history of American atrocities Neiman chronicles. If it is true that most American foreign policy since World War II has been basically Schmittian, it would seem that Trump simply constitutes a further moral step downward rather than a new kind of wicked hegemony. Sometimes Neiman gestures in this direction as when she insists this is “not a book about Donald Trump” but about “. . . . the conditions that allowed him rise.” These include the “imperialism the US has practiced for over a century,” which she insists can only be called “evil.” If that’s the case, then what is at stake is really more a general American malaise than some transformative and deepening “‘Schmitt-Trump consensus.”

Neiman often seems to want to pull back from such a pessimistic thesis. For instance, while she disagrees with the thrust of US foreign policy, she nonetheless expresses deep respect for “individual members of the military.” Neiman admires how their training prizes duty, fellowship, service, and sacrifice — all ideals someone like Trump simply doesn’t understand. It was exactly these principles that led Neiman to hope that “soldiers sworn to defend the Constitution would never follow the worst of his orders after seeing how thoroughly their commander in chief disdained the values they upheld.” Those hopes were dashed when Trump 2.0 strode to power and replaced the military administration with his coterie of brownnoses and appointed Pete Hegseth secretary of war. Neiman insists that we relearn the watchwords of Trump 1.0: “Don’t normalize this.” Doing so helps make the evil deeds of administration seem typical, and consequently over time, not morally objectionable.

I think this ambiguity over whether Trumpism constitutes a continuation of, or break with, the past flows from a few sources. As a leftist, Neiman is keen to acknowledge the harm wrought by American foreign and domestic policy. However, I suspect Neiman is reluctant to suggest to her largely American readers that the country has always had a predilection toward Trumpy behavior. More strategically, she may worry that doing so would further legitimate Trumpism by making it seem normal. It would also blunt the force of the immanent critiques often used to mobilize Americans against their government’s abuses: holding up the country’s shining principles as a mirror to its often-brutal practices and saying, “We don’t look like we ought to.”

Whatever the case, I think Neiman would be better off following Arendt herself by situating the emergence of Trumpism in a much more concrete historical narrative. There was tendency, until recently, for many — especially conservative anti-Trumpers — to describe the Trump administration as an aberration in the American right’s history. Contemporary historians are increasingly pushing back on this view. In Taking America Back, David Austin Walsh stresses how the American right has always had plenty of overt racists, conspiracy theorists, Augusto Pinochet apologists, and outright fascists. William F. Buckley, the alleged poster boy for a more intellectual and less extreme conservatism, was happy to recommend segregation and defend Francisco Franco to own the libs.

Under Trumpism, the more extreme factions of the Right have simply moved from the back seat to the driver’s seat. But they have always been a part of American life. Taking a dialectical approach to American history, however, means recognizing that, just because many Americans have done evil things, the country as a whole is not evil. If anything, the inspiring story of America is of progressive movements successfully mobilizing against wicked practices to bring about a more just society. The arc of the moral universe may be long . . . 

Much of Neiman’s book ranges beyond its central concern, taking on topics from the hegemony of neoliberal ideology to war crimes in Gaza to her long-standing critique of wokism. At their best, these chapters read more like essays that collectively present a panoramic view of the world.

The chapter on wokism was especially interesting. Neiman is very critical of wokism for both principled and strategic reasons. She insists that the Left ought to reclaim its defining principle of inclusive universalism. As she puts it, the “idea of universalism once defined the Left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the right, which recognized no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The Left demanded that the circle encompass the globe.” Neiman is very critical of identity politics, which eschews universalism in order to insist that “you have deep connections and real obligations only to those who belong to your tribe, though others may have limited use as allies.”

I have considerable sympathy for this view. Neiman is no doubt historically correct that trading Enlightenment reason and universalism for postmodern skepticism and what the Marxist David Harvey calls “militant particularism” constituted a shift from the Left’s historical stance. Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton made a similar observation in The Illusions of Postmodernism, noting the irony that some leftists had come to endorse philosophical positions typically associated with the Right. While motivated by different political concerns, this skepticism shares the conservative privileging of cultural particularity over reason and universalism.

A Left that embraced universalism would, of course, be more comfortable with the language of “moral idealism” Neiman affirms, and that would, by and large, be beneficial. That said, I think the question of how to recommit to universalism without falling back into exclusionary modes of thinking that imagine a single perspective ought to speak for everyone remains unresolved. Here, I think the best work has been done by philosophers working at the intersection of liberalism, Marxism, and black radical thought, notably Tommie Shelby and the late Charles Mills.

Both Shelby and Mills are comfortable couching demands for racial justice in the universalistic terms of Rawlsian political theory. But they recognize that universalism risks becoming what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel criticized as an “abstract universalism” if it is insensitive to the particular forms of subordination experienced around the globe. In the United States, securing the basic rights and liberties to which everyone ought to be entitled means renouncing the legacy of systemic racism.

I was slightly more frustrated with the Chapter on “Socialism Reconsidered.” Despite the title, much of it reads like a microcosm of the book itself, weighing in on any number of different issues in quick succession. The most interesting sections of the chapter reintroduce readers to the socialism of Albert Einstein.

Einstein was, of course, a self-described socialist who was outspoken about his desire for humankind to evolve past the predatory capitalist phase of existence. But, as Neiman points out, these political convictions are rarely addressed by American biographers and commentators, who are usually content to footnote Einstein’s nonprofessional interest in “social justice.” Reacquainting readers with Einstein’s convictions is worthwhile, but the chapter would have been far more interesting if it had remained focused on reconstructing and developing his political ideas more systematically.

It’s perhaps inevitable that Neiman’s book sometimes ranges too broadly, given the complexity of the era it attempts to understand and critique. Anyone who wades into American politics these days can feel immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume of issues demanding attention: wokeness, neoliberalism, identity politics, Trumpism, the rise of fascism, oligarchs’ control of social media, war in the Middle East, and so much more. There is a risk that the crushing weight of all this might lead many to lapse into the apathetic withdrawal Neiman worries about. Or perhaps worse, to reach for simplifying ideologies that offer a retreat from the complexity of the world. It’s to Neiman’s Socratic credit that she offers moral clarity without resorting to the comfort of cheaply bought moral certainties.