Susan Neiman      Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era

W.W. Norton & Co. 2026. £19.99. 240 pages. ISBN 978-1-324-13104-5

Reviewed by Tony Roberts    

                                           

 

 

In Susan Neiman’s recent NYRB review of Steven Lukes’s The Diversity of Morals, the last paragraph foreshadows the concern of her new book, Call It Evil: ‘The threat to morality today is less our consciousness of its diversity than the growing consensus that it is a sucker’s game.’ Call It Evil is concerned with the ideas and misrepresentations behind the current parlous state of moral discourse. Its intention is to ‘sound an alarm’ at ‘the erosion of moral judgment and the rise of self-interest, cynicism, and raw power as its substitutes’.  

Her subtitle ‘Understanding the Trump Era’ highlights the man who has come to personify the problem, the man who has made it ‘acceptable to have no values at all beyond the search for wealth and power’. But Neiman makes it clear that her book is not just another polemic against President Trump—tempting as that might be — but a study of the ideas that have given rise to him. 

It is a relatively short book, which make frequent reference to this moral philosopher’s earlier work, from the 2002 book Evil in Modern Thought onwards, and is typically dense with ideas. As such it might be seen as a useful introduction to her evolving views. It also bears her characteristic urgency, informed by a scholarly understanding of how history continually impacts on present affairs.         

Firstly Neiman addresses the emotive if nebulous term ‘evil’: ‘The gap between ideals and reality structures our consciousness of the world’, she writes. This is the gap between what ought to be and what is. ‘Evil occurs when that gap becomes unacceptable: judging something evil is a way of setting limits to what we’re willing to endure.’  

Part 1 of her book, ‘What’s At Stake’, examines the ways in which the concept of injustice has come to be seen as ‘banal’. So chapter 1, ‘What Evil Is Not’, begins appropriately with Hannah Arendt, whose use of the term (in Eichmann in Jerusalem) tied it to war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s behaviour. It turns out to have been inappropriate on the personal level —he proved to be more actively nefarious— but it went some way to dispelling the myth that monstrous deeds are committed by easily recognisable monsters and to the recognition that monstrous acts may be more insidious than dramatic. 

One traditional problem we face in evaluating evil is that we have no adjudicating authority before which to trial the morality of events. Nor did we ever, she argues, since ‘Evil is not a theological concept.’ Neiman illustrates this in returning to an earlier focus —from Moral Clarity (2008) —on the Hebrew Bible and the moral implications of the story of Abraham. There the first patriarch of the Israelite people confronts the Lord over his punishment of the city of Sodom. In doing so he gives God ‘a lesson in ethics’ (Why should the innocent suffer with the guilty?)

This leads Neiman to consideration of an opposite perspective: that of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, a political theorist and unregenerate German extremist, promoted the notion that given the dark heart of man, ‘the only political categories are friend and foe’. The commitment to such a world view and to the blatant exercise of power, Neiman argues, has characterised the Trump presidency: ‘The absolute power he craved must be totalitarian, and in control of the military. It must capture all the institutions that might provide balance, whether political or cultural, legal or educational. And in doing so it must root out anyone who could challenge the morality of no morality. For that’s the challenge that grounds every act of resistance.’  

In Chapter 2, ‘The Economy Stupid’, Neiman questions why so many Americans pointed to inflation as the grounds for their discontent with the Democrats, even in the light of evidence to the contrary. This takes the author into an examination of the absence of social rights in America (medical care, food, shelter), the uncertainty of employment (and its implications), and the flaunting of the glamorous world of tv and advertising that most have no access to. For Neiman, the culture ‘deprives its citizens of the language they need to describe’ this ‘complex of forces’ and so ‘voters called their unhappiness “inflation”’. 

The problem is compounded by the adoption of an unfounded economic theory foisted on the American people, which promotes self-interest. ‘The self-regulating free market [that] neoliberals champion has never existed,’ Neiman writes. This we learn is a misreading of the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, Adam Smith. The author quotes approvingly the views of Nobel Prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, who question this dominant self-interest model of ‘economic man’.    

Part 11, ‘What Convinced Us’, is concerned with such marketing of false ideas, which damages ‘the moral sense’. In chapter 3, ‘Elements of an Ideology’, the author explores the philosophical assumptions that influenced the American public to adopt this ‘market fundamentalism’. We meet the influential economist Milton Friedman and the writer Ayn Rand, effectively believers in economic greed and selfishness, whose views influenced many Americans in and out of government. They have contributed to the pessimistic climate of opinion regarding human nature which sees self-interest as the driving force in life.

With reference to a number of writers from Adorno to John Rawls, Neiman contests this ‘reigning ideology’. She underlines the fact that we are not always driven by material interests and the thirst for power, that the model is flawed, morally and economically—except in the case of Trump, who ‘permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior. Nor does he appear to understand any other.’ This, she is surely correct in thinking, explains the hypnotic, ‘the baleful fascination he exerts over the many who loathe him’.  

The easy route to political power in American public life has always been to smear an opponent as a communist. It remains a viable slander (as do the words ‘radical’ and ‘socialist’). Chapter 4, ‘How to Sell a Red Scare’, recounts propaganda’s role in manipulating the American people. Socialism is regularly denounced as communism (itself often equated with fascism). Neiman reminds us that there was of course a hiatus when Russia became an ally during the war, but the Cold War ended that. Positions were ‘redefined’: ‘Social responsibility was cast as an obstacle to individual responsibility instead of an extension of it. And any attempt to balance social and individual rights was viewed as the first step down the road to Stalinist tyranny.’  

Through constant repetition by the conservative faithful, the self-interest economic model was twinned with the political: ‘If you believe that any restriction on economic freedoms will lead to restrictions on political freedom, you are primed for a story that sells market regulation as tyranny.’ This sleight of hand was the product of the kind of public relations pioneered by Edward Bernays, the opinion maker and nephew of Freud. It was subsequently taken up by a number of industries which reinforced the notion that American freedom depended on free markets. Another strategy to enforce conformity would be to accuse opponents of having a hidden agenda, one certainly subversive of American values (Trump’s ‘deep state’).   

At the same time, market fundamentalism needed to sell self-interest to America’s powerfully influential religious groups, whose gospel naturally preached something a little more self-sacrificing. Gradually the propaganda of business-sponsored magazines like Christianity Today and the evangelism of figures like Billy Graham and Ronald Reagan helped to give respectability to the monetising of religion. Business found God. 

In Chapter 5, ‘Why Gaza Matters’, Neiman presents us with what she believes ‘became the model watershed of our time, because its justification abused the last example of evil that commands moral consensus’. Gaza also matters — beyond the appalling suffering —for its shredding of the concept of international law, which the invasion of Iraq in 2003 had earlier violated [A Guardian editorial (12/10/26) refers to Trump’s ‘belief that might is right and the rule of law is an obstacle rather than an essential foundation stone of international order’].  

In the author’s view, the war caused widespread cynicism about ‘Western rules-based order’ which prioritised Israel’s over other war zones. We have been louder in condemnation of Russia’s attack on Ukraine than on Israel’s attack on Gaza, for instance. Governments have been notably slow to condemn Israel, because it is an ally, and one that since its founding ‘has claimed to hold itself to a higher standard than other nations’.  

The American young have protested, but the Democratic party’s response has been weak and vote-losing. Elsewhere in Europe (as in Britain) protest has been controlled. Nevertheless there has been an international rise in incidents of anti-Semitism on the streets of cities and, among critics, moral outrage when defenders of Israel’s policy turn to relativising atrocity, or to hijacking the Holocaust experience in rationalising Israel’s actions.  

Neiman has been director of the international public think tank, the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, for the past twenty-six years. She writes of what she has observed since her 2019 book, Learning from the Germans, in which she discussed the national reckoning (‘The Germans were the first people in the world to forge an identity from their crimes’). Since then she has seen an excess of repentance, which has rendered any criticism of Jewish affairs unacceptable. Even Germany’s far-right AfD party publicly, at least, denies any anti-Semitism. 

Part 111 of Call It Evil, ‘Ways Out’, explores ‘ideas and moral language that move progressives forward’ —and backward. In Chapter 6, ‘What Woke Got Wrong’, Neiman returns to the argument of her book Left is Not Woke (2023), because ‘the war on woke has gone nuclear, using all the resources of the U.S. government to attack every struggle against racism, sexism, or homophobia as a dangerous affront’. On the liberal side, many have been overzealous (cancel culture being one example). The author maintains that core principles of the left have been undermined: universalism (international solidarity) has been challenged by identity politics; the distinction between justice and power has been undermined by Republican rhetoric, which breeds cynicism, as does the denial of the possibility of human progress by church and state (‘Give up the prospect of progress, and politics becomes nothing but a struggle for power.’)  

The American obsession with Socialism as communism is the subject of Chapter 7, ‘Socialism Reconsidered’. Here she discusses Marx, the ‘moral fervor’ of his appeal and the limitations of his ideas. She also offers some very interesting comments on Einstein’s contribution to politics: his activism and his vision of socialism.  

In Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (2008) Neiman diagnosed the left’s difficulty: ‘Right-wing talk of moral clarity and honor and heroism is often empty, but that is not the same as being meaningless… What the left lacks isn’t values, but a standpoint from which all those values make sense—and a language with which to defend them.’ The left however, has still largely failed to offer a viable vision today, forsaking ‘utopian visions for the solider ground of interest-based politics’.  

All is not lost; there are tendrils of hope. ‘Now that the U.S. government has abandoned moral concepts for the language of wealth and power, it may be easier to see what we’ve lost.’ Neiman sees signs of recent renewal: ‘Enthusiasm for socialism has risen as the failures of capitalism become clearer and its moral bankruptcy transparent. According to Gallup in September 2025, 66 percent of American Democrats have a favorable view of socialism’. She also references recent left-wing Democrat campaign successes, like that of New York City’s Zohran Mamdani. And on a community level she is encouraged: ‘Every form of community organizing that brings diverse people together on the basis of shared values is a form of resistance, however small or local.’  

And so Susan Neiman’s message is that ‘Progressives must respond by losing the fear of sounding old-fashioned, and renewing the moral concepts the right has trampled.’ Call It Evil is admirably clear-sighted in these dark times. Highly recommended.