Welcome back to The Clubhouse. We hope we can provide you a safe space as you whether the post-election storm out there, and we’re sending you all big hugs and a reminder that there’s power in community.

This week, we’re looking at ourselves and our fellow citizens as we try to process what seems like the election result from The Worst Timeline. The election of Trump as our President is about more than just him, or even his political party. It’s about the soul of our country as a whole and what a majority of Americans are willing to accept out of fear.

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Election Day Forces Us to Confront the 'Banality of Evil' in the U.S.

by Teresa Jusino

One of the most infuriating and disheartening things about 2024’s elections—not just the Presidential election, but the elections for Senate and Congress, as well as local elections in every state—is what the results tell us about Our Fellow Americans.

We shouldn’t gloss over the significant gains that were won. Here’s a sampling:

However, these bright spots don’t change the fact that the political make-up of the entire country has been, and is continuing to shift further and further Right. Over half the country consciously chose to vote for Trump as our President, as well as voted for representatives and laws that harm marginalized groups and the poor.

It’s easy to point at a Trump voter and think them a “monster,” or “evil.” We throw around phrases like “I can’t make you care about other people,” as if we are completely unlike those who’d choose these far-Right candidates and policies. It’s easier to believe that those people are a special kind of terrible rather than acknowledging an even scarier truth: it’s possible for regular, normal people to be racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist.

In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil,” discrediting the idea that the Nazis were manifestly psychopathic and different from "normal" people.

However, while some concluded that things like the Holocaust can make even the most ordinary people commit horrendous crimes with the proper incentives, Arendt adamantly disagreed with that, as the Nazi officers were voluntarily following their regime. Arendt said that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism, and that this choice has political consequences even when the chooser is politically powerless.

So, an idea like ‘the banality of evil’ doesn’t mean that extreme situations make ordinary people do extreme things, but rather, that those who choose extreme/harmful/immoral things aren’t any more or less human than those who don’t. It’s absolutely possible for a regular, “normal” human being to actively choose things like hate, or violence, or oppression. And while that might be a terrifying thought at first, what it also means is that it’s more possible for us to understand—and possibly sway—those people than we think.

Fear and ignorance are the two main causes of discrimination and oppression among average citizens: fear that whatever security they have will be taken away, ignorance about how our government actually works, suffering under economic hardship, etc. Powerful people (who are themselves fearful about losing that power) consciously play into those fears and manipulate them into getting the votes they need.

And this happens to all of us. Those of us on the progressive side of things have likely been brought here by politicians or activists who have connected to us through our fears about our rights, freedoms, and livelihoods. We are not immune to media messages. The difference lies in the choices we make to address our fears, and how broad our lens is when thinking about solutions.

It’s no one’s job, certainly not the job of anyone in a marginalized group, to do the emotional labor of trying to “teach” anyone in the dominant group anything about their oppression and pain, or to justify themselves as deserving of basic respect. However, should any of us choose to do so, it’s less helpful to think of the opposition as “evil monsters,” and more helpful to remember that each of those people is also a human being who has a family they love and has certain morals and values they want to adhere to, and they lash out extremely harmfully out of fear.

Acknowledging those fears, rather than writing them off, might be a worthwhile step toward pursuing the change we seek.

ICYMI

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