The Decriminalization of Evil: Why It’s All Our Fault

Hannah Arendt is not a name that tends to come up in history class. I never heard it in college and I certainly never heard it in high school. In fact, I can’t even really say when I first heard the phrase which became more recognizable than the woman who created it; the banality of evil.

Now, I am not ashamed to say (okay, maybe I am a little), that when I first took an interest in the phrase, I had to look up what the word banal even meant. For those who are curious, it means something so unoriginal that it’s boring. What’s interesting about the definition is that it very much speaks to the only reason that I know the phrase.

When I think of the banality of evil, the only image which comes to mind is a line recited by John Cusack in 1408, a film based off a story by Stephen King which I haven’t read. I also haven’t read Hannah Arendt’s book, which was published nearly twenty years before I was born. I have however, read enough articles and opinions about it to know two things.

Everything has a precursor. And every precursor has something which comes close to burying it.

Now, this burial might not always be done through maliciousness or opportunity, but through the simple passage of time.

Time grants us perspective, but it also gives us the chance to rationalize our own behavior. Much like mother nature abhors a vacuum, times hates a blank calendar and seeks to fill it, with new perspectives and new opinions, until it becomes so hard to reach the original, that it is easier to accept what came after than to try and go digging.

In fact, it was only after I decided to go digging that I began to understand how ‘the banality of evil’ continues to describe the world we live in today.

Not long ago, while in conversation with my mother, who is very much of the boomer generation, the topic of Biden came up and my mother uttered these words; “I’m not saying Trump was an angel, but Biden, oh my God!”

Not long after this conversation, I was watching wrestling videos on YouTube, when an ad popped up. It was one of those surveys which are ubiquitous on the internet, but for some reason, this one caught my eye. The survey asked, ‘Is Biden a good president?’ and then sandwiched a picture of Biden in with Trump, who was looking very much power-suited and power-tied and staring proudly into the middle distance.

Spurred on by this, I did a little digging and found that the top story on the criticism of Biden was a post from CNN taking Biden to task over the pull-out from Afghanistan. Saying that in the (then) seven months of his presidency, Biden had already lost the appeal that, well, at least he wasn’t Trump.

Now, it took me all of one article to be sure that the pull-out from Afghanistan was a giant screwup which will likely haunt Biden for the rest of his life. But I, being an older millennial, found myself wondering if there has ever been a president in living memory who hadn’t screwed up royally while in office.

Clinton dropped bombs on civilian targets during the Persian Gulf War. Reagan authorized the CIA to establish the Contras. Bush patently failed to aid New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. And even Obama (a man I voted for twice) super-charged the immigration and deportation system which led to the separation of families.

These were all major screwups which continue to have national and global consequences.

But this campaign to treat Biden as if he is the same as Trump, is not just a simple comparison. It is an attempt to decriminalize Trump’s actions. To treat him as if he were just another president, albeit one who may have screwed up…a tad more than most.

Trump outright ignored the horrors of COVID until it was far too late. He raided the National Treasury and provided tax cuts to his friends and even his own business. He weaponized a broken police force, separated families, placed children into internment camps and fomented an attack on our nation’s capital.

These were not screwups. These were deliberate, vicious attacks on our democracy. They were evil, plain and simple. And our rush for normalcy is not merely a way to decriminalize the man, but to assuage our own fears that we are part of the problem. It is a way of providing ourselves with enough distance as to say, ‘This was not that bad,’ and ‘I am not at fault.’

I am at fault. We all are. Either through action or inaction, we allowed it to happen. And we, the writers and millennials and boomers and newscasters and social media outlets, all owe it to ourselves and to history to remember this.

When we choose not to go digging, or when we allow things to be buried, we risk losing ourselves to the banal, the unoriginal, the common, the obvious and the boring. Because at the end of the day, nothing is more common than our own need to downplay the evil that we have done.