Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (w/ Susan Neiman) | TCHR

In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Susan Neiman investigates the structural evils of the Trump administration and how people are becoming ‘Good Germans’ in our fascist era.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

There are many books exploring how and why voters in the United States elected President Donald Trump, but author Susan Neiman argues that “Nobody has really focused on the moral background to this administration and to our acceptance of it.” It was that void she sought to fill in her newest book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era.”

Neiman joins Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her new book and examine the crises of today: the rise of fascism, the ravages of neoliberalism, and how institutions and individuals have surrendered to them.

Ideology, Neiman explains, are assumptions so ingrained in a culture that individuals often see them as “iron laws,” rather than ideas they have about the world. In reality, they are “philosophical ideas which we could question if we wanted to,” as has happened in the past. Most are unable to offer this analysis, Hedges claims, because these assumptions of American hegemony have “infected not just economics but all sorts of disciplines, academic disciplines, including religion.” Our beliefs drive our motivations and actions. People behave differently when they believe that “we exist to perpetuate our own self-interest,” a notion driven by neoliberalism and capitalism, than they do in more socialized nations where social and political rights are recognized and integrated into the body politic.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Milena Soci and Thomas Hedges

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Transcript

Chris Hedges:

The philosopher Susan Neiman in her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” examines the ideas that Donald Trump embodies and reinforces. “Ideas,” she writes, “that are destructive enough to warrant the word evil.” “Evil,” she writes, “is a word that marks a limit. There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures, at least for punishing, if not preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action ‘evil’ is to suggest it cannot, and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to job drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.”

“Trump and his coterie of Christian fascists, billionaires, grifters, and incompetents could not have come to power,” she argues, “without a moral collapse in American society.” “It is not malice,” she writes, “but vacancy that marks the worst form of evil once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as a common sense realism rather than a philosophical idea. Moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naive but suspect. Sadists exists and cause no end of pain, but the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.”

Joining me to discuss her book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” is Susan Neiman, Director Emerita of the Einstein Forum and former philosophy professor at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of nine previous books, including “Evil in Modern Thought” and “Left Is Not Woke.” She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Guardian, and other publications.

So, you in the book really single out the ideology of neoliberalism, which I think you quite correctly tie to the kind of economic determinism of Marxism as I think the genesis of where we’ve ended up today in the Trump era. And I wondered if you could talk about that.

Susan Neiman:

Sure. It’s bigger than neoliberalism, and it’s bigger than Marxism, although it is the reason why I am happy to call myself a socialist, but I’m not a Marxist. It begins, I think, with an incredible distortion of the ideas of Adam Smith, who very few people have actually read at length. In the 20th and 21st centuries, they’ve read a little summary that was deliberately put together by the National Association of Manufacturers, which is still the biggest business lobby in the United States. And the claim that always gets emphasized is the butcher, the baker, the brewer don’t produce things out of charity for us, but out of self-interest. Well, that’s true, okay, but to then conclude that all we ever do is done out of self-interest is a leap that unfortunately it gets questioned, of course, by some of the major economists of the world, but it doesn’t get into the popular culture.

So, we had a distortion of Adam Smith’s ideas, and it’s so interesting because in the 18th and 19th century, nobody thought we did everything out of self-interest. We did some things out of self-interest, but nobody thought you had to reduce all other motives to that. Okay? But through a distortion of Adam Smith and then a similar distortion of Charles Darwin, and then in the 20th century with a little soupçon of Michel Foucault, more than a little soupçon, he is the most cited writer in social sciences and humanities in the entire world, the idea that everything we do is directed at increasing our own wealth and power got into the water stream. And not necessarily by people who read Smith, Darwin, or Foucault, but by journalists who had gone to college and read some version or other of one of those people and kept passing it on. It’s an ideology that’s been growing in the 20th century, but really revved up after 1991 at the end of the Cold War.

Now, Americans are used to the idea that our ideology is no ideology, and an ideology is something that communists have. An ideology is just the set of assumptions that we learn to take for granted and we get from all sides, sometimes in churches, mostly in movies, in education. It’s just a set of assumptions that we hear so often that we forget that they actually are assumptions and philosophical ideas which we could question if we wanted to.

So, when for example Stephen Miller said a few months ago to Jake Tapper, “Forget about the niceties, the iron laws of the world are that the world is governed by strength and force and everything else is a nicety,” that is a philosophical claim. It’s a very old philosophical claim. You can find it in the Greek historian Thucydides, where it was used by the Athenians to justify the first recorded genocide in the world. You can also find it in the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. But it’s far from being an iron law of the world, it’s a philosophical claim, and we can call it into question, and we have called it into question in many parts of our history.

Think about colonialism. Colonialism used to be considered simply a fact from Peru to Cambodia, and of course the Greeks and the Romans. Big countries swallowed up little countries, and it was not something that people very often questioned, okay? Over time, starting in the 18th century, when the philosophers of the Enlightenment first began to criticize the idea that big countries necessarily can colonize and enslave or oppress other countries, people began to ask the question: if this is an iron law of the world or maybe it’s something we could we could oppose. Now, it took those philosophical questions a good two centuries to actually have an impact on the world. But they finally did. And in the 50s and the 60s, I guess starting India was 1948, people began to think well, of course the United States also was an anti-colonial movement, which we forget. But in the middle of the 20th century, people began to think, “Maybe this isn’t an iron law, maybe this isn’t a fact about the world, this is a philosophical political claim that we could question.”

Now, of course, Donald Trump just said, was it yesterday or the day before, “To the victor belong the spoils.” That is bringing back a very straightforward idea of colonialism to the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations having been formed in the wake of World War II, in the middle of the anti-colonial struggles, precisely to enforce a rule of law, but there he is simply flouting it in front of the world’s face.

I should perhaps say one more thing that I think is really important. It’s trivial to say that this administration has no respect for the rule of law. We’ve been saying that for quite some time. What we forget is something that James Madison knew, which is that the best constitution in the world cannot guarantee itself because respect for the rule of law depends on people committing to obey the rule of law, even if it goes against them in one legal judgment or another. And that is a moral commitment that is not something that you can simply presuppose. Madison said, “Without virtue, no set of laws will protect our liberty and happiness.” And I wrote this book because I there are lots of books trying to explain how Americans could have elected Donald Trump and gone along with his administration, particularly after we saw him the first time around. And some of them are quite good and I’ve learned from them, but nobody has really focused on the moral background to this administration and to our acceptance of it. And this book argues that’s the thing we have to do if we are ever to get out of the moral morass that we’ve been left in.

Chris Hedges:

Well, you talk in the book about how this mercenary embrace of neoliberalism or cutthroat capitalism, this idea that we exist to perpetuate our own self-interest has infected not just economics but all sorts of disciplines, academic disciplines, including religion.

Susan Neiman:

Yeah, that’s the really amusing part because one would have thought that religion was invented... I mean, I strongly believe that morality comes before religion, okay? A lot of people think that morality is a product of religion. I think that’s a great mistake. And you can see in all cultures that you first have moral intuitions that are very often expressed as religious intuitions, and that’s why religious people generally feel more comfortable with moral language, with words like good and evil. Okay? But religion is one way, has traditionally in most cultures, been to express moral intuitions to help people behave more morally, to restrain the more rapacious sides of our nature.

Every religious culture has some kind of provision for taking care of people who are weak in a society. Every culture has provision for the widows and the orphans and the people who are sick, arguing that it is our duty to not simply to leave weak people behind. Okay? So, it’s particularly bizarre, I find, to hear Christian, obviously not all of them, some Christian evangelicals support an administration which is all about leaving the weak behind or simply ignoring them. But I did some research on this because it’s very hard to understand. I’m Jewish, not Christian, but I certainly have done some studies of Christianity, part of the culture. And one branch of Christianity is actually the fastest growing in the world. The branch that takes over, and there a number of different churches, the prosperity gospel. Namely, if you follow these commandments, you will be rewarded with wealth and power in your lifetime. Okay? And it turns out that Norman Vincent Peale was the religious figure that the Trump family most admired and it’s not surprising.

Now, this is a really thin notion of religion and it’s certainly not the one that I think seriously religious people teach to their children. We don’t want our children to behave just because they will be rewarded if they behave well or punished if they don’t. So, it’s a very kind of infantile notion of religion. You do find it in different religious cultures. “Do what God tells you, otherwise you’ll go to hell,” but I think serious religious thinkers say, “Well maybe this is a view that you need in the beginning of cultural history or teaching children not to hit other children, whatever, when they’re very, very young. But this is not a genuinely religious view.”

Chris Hedges:

Well, it’s magical thinking. And I speak as a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. They’re heretics, which is why I wrote my book, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War in America.”

Susan Neiman:

Thank you. I can’t say that so easily since I’m not a Christian.

Chris Hedges:

I’m actually an ordained Presbyterian minister, which I don’t advertise, and I grew up in the church. My father was a minister. My mother was a seminary graduate. So, I come grounded in that social gospel.

Susan Neiman:

So, you get to call them ‘heretics.’

Chris Hedges:

I call them fascists.

I love passages of the book. I’m probably not going to get into your chapter on Gaza, which is very good. But you had this at the beginning of the book. I’m just going to read this paragraph because it’s smart. You talked about how we won’t name fascism for what it is, and you had that quote from Mark Milley, which I didn’t know from the first administration, where he calls Trump “fascist to the core.” This is Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So, we’re not talking about the radical left here, but you talk about how not only do we not name the ideology that has vomited up a figure like Trump and Miller and those around him, but we won’t use the word ‘fascist.’

And you had this paragraph, you said, “Authoritarian is a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors.” I want to as a caveat, I had a few at Harvard. “And the softer sort of Latin American military regime, but a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they’ve never seen, combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens, a government that coerces media, universities and other countries to suit its will, a military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned, as it wrote in 1946, ‘to ignite a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes, in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.”

And I think part of your book is one, our inability to use the kind of language to describe what is happening around us, and which I want you to discuss, but also in your book you talk about how swiftly the institutions, the universities, the courts, the law firms, the media surrendered without any kind of, just fell to their knees before the Trump administration, which I think for you and I think for me, is an example of the moral rot within those institutions and you do talk a little bit about the ‘woke culture’ at the end of the book. But can you address those points?

Susan Neiman:

I certainly can, and I just want to point out that Mark Milley said this not in the first administration, but in October ‘24. So, he was clearly hoping to influence the election. It is an extraordinary statement. As you well know, the military normally really takes seriously its duty to be apolitical. So, he would not have said that in an interview that he knew would be public, did he not really want to warn about the dangers. And I have to say that it’s probably the reason that I wrote this book is I could not stand to hear the word authoritarian again. Because as soon as he was in power, a number of people have used the word fascist. I saw that you did. Naomi Klein and Astrid Taylor have used it in their new book. But very few people did and the kowtowing that we saw from people who had no need to kowtow was and is excruciating.

I always thought the point of having more money than any family could possibly spend in one lifetime was that you get to say no. Right? I mean, a billion dollars or more, honestly, I mean, I can imagine having a bit more money than I have. I can’t imagine having that much money. I don’t know if you can, but the whole point, it seems to me, is you don’t have to let people push you around if you’re not materially dependent on them. So, when Google decided to change its maps to call Lake Ontario “Lake America.” I just do not understand the world.

I will tell you and your listeners one book that has helped me to understand the kowtowing to the Trump administration better than anything else. It’s a novel by my friend, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. It’s called “The Director.” It was one of the New York Times’ ten best last year and it describes the way various people who were by no means Nazis. I mean l lived for more than 30 years in Berlin and I have spent quite a bit of my lifetime studying the history of fascism there. Americans have the idea of Nazis as, I don’t know, monsters, others, completely different sorts of people. What Kehlmann does is to show how really very good people, in fact, people who began being opposed to the Nazis and actually decided they were going to say no and there was a red line, and how they crossed red line after red line until they were completely complicit with the Nazi regime. I’m sure the timeliness of that book was one reason why it was a best seller shortly after the beginning of the second Trump administration. But I really recommend it as an aid to understanding how people do capitulate.

But I think language is a big part of it. I think if you call something ‘authoritarian,’ well, I don’t really like authoritarianism, but if you call something ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘illiberal,’ well it’s not my political party, but this is a democracy, and so what if half the people didn’t vote? It was still, particularly the second one, it was still a free and fair election, so I’m going to simply go along with it. And you convince yourself, as people did. I mean, the Nazis did not confront people with Auschwitz in 1933 or ‘34 or ‘35, okay? People really did not know much about the mass murder going on at the Eastern Front until the 40s. And there were a few people who did oppose it, but it was too late to have a kind of mass opposition. But if we don’t name things properly, if we don’t use language that rings alarm bells, it’s much more easy to sit back and say, “Okay, well, I’m not really keen on this administration, but I’ll sit it out, and maybe next time it’ll be a little better. And besides, everybody else is doing it.” And this is what I think is crucial, and that’s in some ways the main point of my book, if we are all subject to the idea that actually everybody is just out for their own self-interest and morality is something for suckers. Okay? If that’s the kind of music in our ears or noise in our ears most of the time, it’s really very hard to stand up for principle.

Chris Hedges:

I think the other issue you raise in the book is you become acculturated to these outrageous, I mean, you had Trump go before the United Nations and talk about annihilating Iran. That’s called genocide. But it isn’t the first time he’s done this. So, when you have a normalization of evil, I think, which builds a kind of acquiescence or at least indifference.

Susan Neiman:

Absolutely, and this is what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the ‘banality of evil,’ a term that’s been often understood and criticized. Now it turns out that she was wrong about the man Adolf Eichmann. We have evidence from 1,000 hours of taped sessions that were made in Argentina after the war. Arendt had no access to those tapes.

Chris Hedges:

Well, let me just interrupt. This is where, so she goes to the trial, describes him as the kind of bureaucrat or technocrat that he actually loathed. And then these recordings, let’s sum it up. He just wished he’d kill them all. And there was that, but I think, as you point out in your book, that doesn’t invalidate Hannah Arendt’s, I mean it’s clear you worship Hannah Arendt, as I do. I think she’s great.

Susan Neiman:

No, I don’t worship Arendt at all. I disagree with her on a number of points. No, I think she’s great. I’ve learned from her and I think that book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, is one of the great books of the 20th century.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah, yeah. Without question. And “The Human Condition” and we won’t get into her equation of communism and fascism, where she probably was wrong.

Susan Neiman:

She actually doesn’t quite do that, but people think she did.

Chris Hedges:

Okay, well, but let’s go back to this idea of these mediocrities, these banalities, who in and of themselves are banal, but that doesn’t mean that the evil they perpetuate is banal.

Susan Neiman:

That’s absolutely right. And the fact that it turns out that Adolf Eichmann was not one of those people who, as she put it in her great classic, didn’t know what they were doing. He knew exactly what he was doing. But Eichmann alone, or even a thousand Eichmann’s, could not have carried out the Holocaust by himself. It was absolutely dependent on millions of Germans who behaved just the way that Kehlmann’s novel, “The Director,” describes, going along because they were used to the idea that evil is not something systemic. It’s something that you have to have evil intentions and preferably sadistic tendencies to carry out. And that that’s what I think is so important about Arendt’s book is to show that actually the most dangerous forms of evil are systemic and often quite thoughtless.

Something like two percent of the population, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo did some studies on this. Two percent of population is sociopathic, that is people that genuinely enjoy cruelty and get some pleasure from other people’s pain. Whether certain members of this administration belong to that group is something that I’m happier to leave to psychologists because again, I don’t think it matters. Although there was a good book, came out last year, “The Cruelty is The Point.” It does look like some of them are enjoying the cruelty. But what’s much more important is I think 98 percent of Americans do not enjoy cruelty, okay? Most of us have impulses which are generous, warm-hearted, compassionate, sympathetic. They’re not all the impulses we have. Of course, we have meaner impulses, but we have those impulses. But it’s our ability to go along with evil without recognizing that that’s what it is that is really affecting us at the moment and allowing us to accept this regime.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk a little bit about the counterweight to this ideology which has produced Trump, this idea of that we’re driven solely by self-interest. You had a little thing in the book about how there are studies that people who take economics courses inevitably become more selfish. We are indoctrinated. There’s a wonderful passage actually in the book because you’re living in Germany before the wall came down, where you’re listening to East German broadcasts and you’re listening to West German broadcasts. And, of course, the East Germans are lying about their own society, but by listening to those broadcasts you have a kind of lens to the extent that our own media universe distorts or lies about our reality. And talk a little bit about that.

Susan Neiman:

Yeah, well let me say it’s not so much that I was noticing that they lied about their society, though I’m sure they often did. It’s just that they reported certain things and not others, as the Western media did. This was my learning German experience or part of my learning German experience when I first got to Berlin in 1982, 83, and it was not simply that they reported, for example, on Reagan’s war on Central America, which was not reported particularly in the West. Of course, the West was reporting on their war in Afghanistan. So, if you listen to both sides, you could actually be pretty well informed. But what was so interesting is the way that things were reported, and this is something that we continue, okay?

And, you said you didn’t want to talk about Gaza, though I’d be happy to, since it’s an issue I’ve been very involved with in the Berlin public debates or the German public debates. But look at the way that victim stories are reported on both sides. Now, thank heavens the American reporting on Israel-Palestine has really changed over the past year. Even longer ago than that, okay, I can remember, there have been other wars on Gaza, where the New York Times, for example, printed in 2021 pictures of 67 children who were bombed and with the heading “Say Their Names,” okay?

Now I tried to bring that into the German public discourse, which wasn’t even discussing that war, and it was considered really extremely controversial, and I’m a Jew who’s been called anti-Semitic by Germans over and over again. Just got another letter for that. So, the question is not only what we report, but how we report it. If we report a number of people have been killed, it’s very different from showing their faces or interviewing one of them, somebody who’s lost family. That humanizes a certain side of a conflict, and it’s very clear who does and doesn’t get humanized.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk about social rights. That’s a key part of your book and I think you make a very important point about how that absence of social rights, you actually compare it to the kinds of things Germans and many Europeans take for granted. But erasing that concept, which is kind of part of the neoliberal ideology, has devastating effects.

Susan Neiman:

It does indeed. Let me go back a little bit historically because when I bring up socialism or social rights, the main thing that I hear is, “Yeah, but it’s un-American and Americans will never go for it, they’ll only take advantage.” Okay. We had a very strong labor movement in the 20s and 30s in this country. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the beginning of his final term, argued that we need a second Bill of Rights, which included a right to health care, a right to fair labor practices, a right to education, a right to housing, and a right to leisure. Okay? I was talking to a waitress the other night who was just astonished to hear that everyone in Germany get actually more than 30 days paid vacation a year. That’s just a right, okay?

Chris Hedges:

Let me Susan, I have to interrupt you because there’s a passage in the book where you’re writing an article about Americans and the employer is going to allow them six weeks to only work halftime after she’s had a child and the editor is I guess in Germany won’t print it because he said no one in Germany will believe it.

Susan Neiman:

It’s true. But nobody here, or people have a hard time believing that 30 days paid vacation, and that doesn’t include Christmas, New Year’s, and a few other federal holidays, is considered a right. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt did consider a right to leisure, among other things, healthcare, housing, fair labor practices. Unfortunately, this was at the end of his very short final term. And he was ill in the final year and also trying to win a war or help win a war, but Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the UN committee to write a Declaration of Human Rights. Everybody should look it up and see what’s included because it includes all those social rights as well as political rights.

Now consider what it means to call something a right rather than a benefit. Okay? If it’s a benefit, it’s a privilege that you might or might not have that’s granted in the US at the will of your employer. If it’s a right, you consider it natural. And you’re outraged if someone tries to threaten your right to a free press, as is going on just this week in the United States. I mean, that’s something that people can get outraged over, or right to travel, or right to worship as you please. All of those things are political rights. And socialists argue that they’re not much good if you don’t also have social rights to back them up.

Think about free speech. I mean, you’ve got a right to free speech, write books and you have a podcast. I’ve got a right to free speech. I write a lot of books and appear on podcasts and interviews. Our right to free speech is nothing next to Rupert Murdoch’s right to free speech, okay? Now, you can say that’s just the breaks. If we had been cutthroat media moguls, our political right to free speech could have had more range. But if you look at the way that the media systems are bought, sold, and funded, you can see right away that this is not an equal political right. This is something that’s very much dependent on economics. Now again I’m not a Marxist, I don’t believe that everything is reducible to economics, but I do believe that we need to pay way more attention to realizing political rights than we have done in the past.

Chris Hedges:

Well, those social rights, you have a passage here, this is from your book. You write, “What needs spelling out both for Americans and those who’d like to understand them. In the US, fear of losing your job is connected to the fear of losing your home. Few banks will accept a default, and few landlords a rent freeze for more than the briefest of respites. In 2024, the Supreme Court criminalized homelessness, allowing states to jail the unhoused even when no shelter was available. But even before that ruling, countless people who sleep in their cars, though many are employed, lived in fear. Even more terrifying, losing a job is tantamount to losing your health insurance. While Barack Obama’s health care reform was an improvement over its predecessors, the insurance companies’ lobbyists and their Republican servants forced compromises that are both convoluted and costly, leaving millions without adequate health care. In many cities you are eligible to receive care only if you earn so little you cannot pay your rent. Thus, losing a good job could cost you or your family a life. Jobs that are less good provide no insurance at all. Americans know this in their bones. What they don’t know is that it isn’t normal.”

What we’re talking about is the lack of social rights and the consequences, which I think, and I think you would agree, has pushed people into the arms of a demagogue like Trump.

Susan Neiman:

Absolutely, but they don’t know what they’re missing. Okay, so they call it inflation. I mean when people said the election was about inflation, of course it wasn’t. And of course, the Democrats kept saying, “No, no, no, inflation’s not so bad.” That’s not what anybody was talking about. It’s just we didn’t have the vocabulary. Look, Bernie Sanders, and I have a lot of respect for the way that he has brought up questions that were not on the table in the United States ten years ago. But Bernie Sanders, first of all, he only focuses on health care. One of the things that I’ve said in public, which Europeans find very funny, Germans in particular, Bernie Sanders is to the right of Angela Merkel, who was the head of a center right. Yeah, you’re laughing, but look, the social rights that Merkel took for granted were beyond anything that Bernie ever imagined. And when he was running for the first time in 2016, he started talking about Denmark. And Hillary Clinton rightly said, “Well we’re not Denmark.” What neither of them seemed to realize is we don’t need to talk about the Scandinavian countries. We could talk about all of Europe, but do you know what we could talk about Brazil and we could talk about South Africa. And both of those countries guarantee health care to everyone. Okay? I mean, it’s not as if this is a rarity in the world. Now it’s something of a problem in South Africa, but if you go to the hospital with a broken bone, and I happen to know this because it happened to be in Johannesburg, as a non-South African I had to pay a very small amount, okay? But any South African can walk into a hospital with a broken bone and walk out without a bill, okay, and be taken care of, all right. And in Brazil the kinds of healthcare treatments that you can get are very, very broad, and it’s not as if this is a gift, this is something that we can’t possibly afford, and only the wealthiest, smallest countries in the world can do it. On the contrary, we’re an outlier.

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk about the hypocrisy of the liberal class, which you I think correctly call out as again one of the reasons people turn to Trump, because once that hypocrisy was exposed and understood, there’s something kind of refreshing about somebody who is just so open about how everything in his life is transactional and everything in his life revolves around his own further accumulation of wealth and power.

Susan Neiman:

I think the person who put the last nail in the coffin of the idea that politicians mean it when they use moral language is George W. Bush, okay? To use the word ‘moral clarity’ to describe a war that was neither moral nor clear, for which the justification kept changing. I can remember when Hillary Clinton said, “Well, if she knew then what she knew later, she wouldn’t have voted for the war against Iraq.” And I thought, I’ve never had a security clearance, probably never will, but just simply thinking, I mean I was trained to read philosophy, okay? Simply looking logically, if they had one genuine justification for the war, they wouldn’t have to keep coming up with others. That seemed clear enough to me that the excuses for the war were made up and not genuine. So, words like ‘moral clarity’ or ‘axis of evil’ really I think created in many, many people a kind of cynicism about anybody who uses moral language in politics and created the sense that, if it’s used at all, it’s used as a kind of hype to cover up your real motives.

And I try to understand why so many of Trump’s supporters call him authentic when I believe the Washington Post stopped counting the number of recorded lies at the number 30,000 in his first term. It’s clear that he lies. But the reason why I think they call him authentic is that he’s very straightforward about his motives for doing everything and anything.

Yeah, well we’re taking the oil in in Venezuela, to the victor belongs spoils, etcetera, etcetera, et cetera. It’s very grotesque. “Oh, I’m not going to stop wars anymore because Norway didn’t give me a Nobel Peace Prize.” I mean that was one of the most grotesque instances of “I’m in the business of peace if I can get another prize for it.” So, it’s those kinds of statements that make people think, okay, he’s appealing to the better demons of our nature, to change a phrase a little bit. I think he is. I think many of us have well, pretty destructively self-interested motives. Not every kind of self interest is destructive, but some of it’s pretty vulgar and pretty low. I think most of us struggle with those impulses on occasion. Someone comes along and says the quiet part out loud and says it all the time. And I think there’s kind of a sense of relief among some people, that at least he’s being honest about it. That’s a terrible thing to say, but again, given that we are blasted with ideas that have become very common in the culture, especially since the end of the Cold War, it feels like a relief to have somebody being allegedly authentic.

Chris Hedges:

I would just have to call out the hypocrisy of the Clinton administration - NAFTA deregulating the FCC, destroying Glass-Steagall, the rise of the carceral state.

Susan Neiman:

I’m with you, by the way. And indeed, this is an international problem. I mean I’m focusing on the United States right now because it is the most powerful country in the world still. Although contra the man in the White House, they are laughing at us. I mean, boy are they laughing at us and shaking their heads. But it is still the most powerful country in the world. But this is not only an American phenomenon.

Chris Hedges:

Well, the ideology has infected most Western societies, which is why you’re seeing the rise of proto-fascist movements in Germany and Orban, etcetera, etcetera. How do we dig ourselves out of it?

Susan Neiman:

First of all, we have to really understand what we’re up against and stop trying to prettify it or make it more acceptable. And that’s why I wrote the book, to encourage people to speak out and to understand where those ideas are coming from, because if we don’t understand how they’ve gotten into the water stream, we’re never going to be able to reject them.

The second thing, I was actually really pleased to see this week that after Trump banned CNN, Politico and one other media organization…

Chris Hedges:

Yeah, it’s MSNBC. It’s not MSNBC anymore, but whatever it’s called.

Susan Neiman:

Finally, the other organizations stood up in solidarity. And I’ve been waiting for this to happen across universities and law firms and media companies, now for over a year. They finally did it, okay? And obviously things aren’t going to change in a day, but that is the kind of guts and the kind of solidarity we need. I will end, I know it’s controversial, although fortunately less so now in the United States than in Germany. I have been really impressed by the campaign and the first few months of the administration of Zohran Mamdani. And I want to say a few words about what I think animated 100,000 volunteers to work for what seemed like an absolutely hopeless cause a year ago or a bit more than a year ago.

Everybody talks about affordability, and as somebody who’s been the single mother of three children worrying about daycare and all of those things, I’m the last person to trivialize those questions. Okay. But that’s not the only thing that won him the election. He was dealing with moral concepts. When he talked about affordability, he was talking about justice, or rather the injustice of the fact that the people who keep New York City running, the nurses and the bus drivers and the street cleaners, and all of the people who are responsible for keeping things going, as we discovered during the pandemic, okay, that they cannot afford to live in the city. And that’s the idea that captured people whose pockets were fuller than the other, but realized this cannot happen. And his stand on Gaza, which people thought would lose him the election, actually gave him the moral weight that moved people to say, “We’ve gotten used to the idea that politicians compromise on everything if it’s not in their interest. This man doesn’t. He has integrity. And maybe if he didn’t stand down on that question, he won’t stand down on others, or he will stand up for questions of principle.”

And it’s that kind of politics that we need that has a beautiful intelligent and moving blend of sure, we’re all self-interested. Many, many people in this country are hurting economically terribly. I mean the number of people who would be distraught by an unexpected bill of $400. That’s half the country. I am fortunately no longer in that category, but boy, I was in it till I was about 50. And it’s awful to be on that kind of a precipice. So, let’s pay attention to that. But let’s also pay attention to the sense of justice that most people, whether or not they’re in that category, are moved by. And let’s campaign on that. John Ossoff is doing a good job on that. Let’s all turn out for the midterms.

Chris Hedges:

Great, thank you. And I want to thank Milena, Thomas, and Max who produced the show. You can find me at Chris Hedges.substack.com.