GAME CHANGER

The "banality of evil" is a famous phrase.

It was born in 1962. 

That was the year Hannah Arendt published her account of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel for his role in the Holocaust.  Her articles in The New Yorker and her later book's title, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, gave it life.

Since then, a lot of ink has been spilled figuring out precisely what Arendt meant.

One thing she did not mean was that evil itself was banal.

But one thing she did mean was that Eichmann was banal.

And on that point, she was both right and wrong.

She was wrong in thinking Eichmann was not a committed Nazi and anti-semite. He confessed to as much in both a memoir and an audiotaped interview that were only unearthed years after Arendt wrote her book.  

She was right, however, in describing Eichmann's outward affect, how -- in Erving Goffman's telling construction -- he presented himself in everyday life.  There, according to Arendt, he "was terribly and terrifyingly normal", a staid German who observed the law and did his job. 

Arendt has been criticized for reducing Eichmann to a thoughtless bureaucrat who believed in nothing. In her report she turned him into a careerist:  "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement," she wrote, "he had no motives at all."  This was false. But the fact that it was false has undercut the sense in which Arendt's banality theory was right despite itself.

For the Nazi regime to succeed required not just committed ideologues and rabid anti-semites. It required a commonplace appearance.  And there was no better way to manufacture that appearance than by clothing the regime in the “prosaic careerism" of bureaucratic "thoughtlessness", a performance at which Eichmann excelled.  Not every German in the 1930s and '40s was a Nazi or accepted racial extermination.  But those who weren't or didn't kept quiet. And in maintaining that silence, they were aided and abetted by people like Eichmann, people who could treat the Shoah as an exercise in transit management.

In that world, though evil was not banal . . . 

Banality became a useful disguise.

Today, America is in the grip of its own version of banality.

Last Saturday, the House of Representatives passed a $60 billion dollar aid package for Ukraine. Though more than half of the majority Republican caucus opposed the measure, the Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, allowed the measure to come to the floor for a vote and it passed by an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin.

After the measure passed, Dimitry Medvedev, formerly Russia's president (2008-2012) and prime minister (2012-2020) and currently its Security Council's Deputy Chair, issued the following statement: "Considering the russophobic decision that took place, I can't help but wish the USA with all sincerity to dive into a new civil war with themselves as quickly as possible.  Which, I hope, will be very different from the war between the North and the South in the 19th century and will be waged using aircraft, tanks, artillery, MLRS, all types of missiles and other weapons.  And which will finally lead to the inglorious collapse of the vile evil empire of the 21st century -- the United States of America."

Read that carefully.  

A high Russian official living in a country that, but for America's money and material would have become a puppet state of Nazi Germany in the 1940s, and but for the west's victory in the Cold War would be living in a communist state where you had to wait on line to get a quart of milk, is literally praying that America's polarized citizens start killing each other. Unable to win an actual war against the United States, Medvedev nevertheless sees victory for his own fascist autocracy -- and not incidentally the absorption of Ukraine --  in America enlarging its war with itself.

Medvedev's statement should be front-page news here in the United States.

But it isn't.

Instead, more than half the Republican members of the House of Representatives -- 112 of them to be precise -- wanted to cut off funding for Ukraine and permit Russia's seizure of that nation, and the titular head of their party, Donald Trump, supported them. 

By all objective measures, Russia's invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago and its subsequent conduct of the war there was and remains unmistakably evil.  

Russian soldiers have kidnapped Ukrainian children from their parents and exported them to Russia.  They have raped Ukrainian women and murdered civilians.  Russia's  army has bombed hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, electric utilities and power stations.  Its propaganda arm has made Ukrainians out to be Nazis and the government has completely stifled any dissent against the war within Russia itself.  It has arrested and imprisoned thousands of protesters. It killed the regime's greatest opponent, Alexei Navalny. And the International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted Putin for war crimes.

MAGA's affection for Vladimir Putin is no secret.  Neither is its disdain for NATO.  Over the years, Trump has either accepted Putin's lies or ignored them.  He routinely threatens to end the NATO alliance and openly told Putin America will not honor its NATO treaty obligations if he is returned to the White House.  Meanwhile, his MAGA acolytes in Congress have pedaled false Russian claims that American aid dollars are being used to purchase yachts for Ukraine's politicians. Or, as GOP Rep. Mike McCaul recently put it: "Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it's infected a good chunk of my party's base."

The likelihood of America actually descending into the kinetic killing field Medvedev conjures is almost certainly nil.  The likelihood, however, that its current divisions could metastasize and so weaken the country that it becomes a latter-day Rome, divided at home and unable to do much abroad, is not so remote.  The plans for a second Trump administration include mass deportations, criminal indictments of political opponents, the militaristic  elimination of protest and dissent, a gutted administrative state. a restricted franchise and a radically gerrymandered Congress, all packaged in a straight-jacketed Constitution read through the prism of another century and thus incapable of protecting Americans living in this one.  In this world, the fact that some portion of America's electorate will have endorsed Trump's Houdini-like escape from accountability may by then be the least of our problems.

Nevertheless . . .

In the presidential race that he should be losing by enormous margins, the candidate who (i) orchestrated an attempted coup in 2021; (ii)  has now come within a whisker of insuring Russia's rapine and illegal conquest of Ukraine; and (iii) is planning to turn the country into a fascist autocracy starting in 2025, is actually in a close contest.  

Here are the two most important questions America now faces:

1. How is this possible?

2. What is the way out?

In the past, I have regularly upbraided America's political elites for having constantly refused to end Trump's political life.  The Senate that refused to convict him in 2021.  The Supreme Court that refused to remove him from the ballot earlier this year. The lawmakers who side-lined Liz Cheney.

I will un-say none of that now.

But there is more going on.  

We Americans think about politics the way we think about football.  There are two sides, two teams.  Each has its stars, strategists, and game plans. The contest has rules.  And referees. The coaches work the refs. So do we fans. There's a clock. The teams play. One side wins. The other loses. There's always a next time. It's impossible to take the game seriously.  In fact, we are told not to.  We are told "It's just a game."

This background mindset is so ingrained that it has become ordinary, commonplace, well-worn, hackneyed.

Some might even say . . .

Banal.

And it is, I believe, giving Trump and MAGA a lifeline neither deserves. 

Because . . .

Shouting at the refs, calling the other side cheaters, running out the clock and always (if sometimes only barely) sticking around for the next tomorrow basically describes Donald Trump's political ethos to a tee.  He thinks it's all a game.  And we, all of us to at least some extent, are letting him do it.

There are plenty of folks who think I'm nuts.

John Bolton, for instance.

Like many who actually worked for the man, Bolton is a (now) unvarnished never-Trumper.  Unlike some of them, however, he isn't planning to vote for Biden (he plans to write-in Dick Cheney) and thinks America's institutions more than able to withstand Trump's onslaughts, even if Trump is given a second term.  He is practicing the optimism of close-calls.  It is the view that things will not be worse in a second term because our institutions held Trump back in his first. It ignores the prospects inherent in a different Cabinet, a different (and more MAGA-fied) Republican party, and a different Vice President.

To me it is a bad bet.

What to do?

Sometimes the game gets serious.  

When Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line in 1946, the nation noticed.  

Because of Robinson, and what he represented, the game became more than a game.  It mattered.  And people -- everywhere -- noticed.

American politics needs a Jackie Robinson moment.

Something that will shake us free from the notion that what we now have going is normal.

Here's mine.

A Joe Biden/Liz Cheney ticket.

Stay with me.

And if you are a loyal Democrat, as am I, don't bite my head off.

Kamala Harris is a good Vice President.  Smart, loyal, a great messenger on the key abortion issue, a brave one on immigration, and fully able to assume the presidency were Biden to die or become incapacitated.  This is not about her. It is, unfortunately, about us.  We need to be stirred -- no, shocked -- out of our complacency.  A politician has to not just tell us it's not a game this year; that politician has to demonstrate it isn't.

"If you want something said," said Nikki Haley recently, "ask a man."

But "if you want something done," she continued,  "ask a woman."

We need something done.

Now.

So, if I were Biden, I'd ask Kamala Harris to ring up Liz Cheney with the following:

"As you know better than most, the country is in trouble. Hopelessly divided and entirely too complacent when it comes to all things Trump.  Many hate him. Many don't. But under no circumstances can we afford him . Or tolerate him. Or really risk him ."

So . . .

"I'm willing to step down."

"If you're willing to step up."

"It won't be easy.  You'd be a conservative Republican in a sea of liberal Democrats. You'd have to tolerate us on choice and taxes, on spending that actually supports the middle class, and on the Supreme Court.  And we'd have to tolerate you . . . 

 On the whole issue of succession."

Apart from Bolton's institutional claims, there are also political arguments against this suggestion.  One is that the polls are really not predictive. The Biden/Harris record on the economy, infrastructure and jobs is superb, and voters in actual elections over the past three cycles (one presidential and two mid-terms) have rejected Trump generally and election deniers with particular vigor.  On this view, the voters will ultimately come around, any enthusiasm gap will close, Biden will win a second term and the disaster of Trump will again have been averted.

Maybe so.

But the available data still makes this a close call.  

In the past, at least some of the optimism was based on the view that Trump would be convicted in one or more of his criminal cases.  The three strongest cases, however, are probably not going to be tried before the election and the New York case, apart from what legal experts concede is appellate risk given the need to turn a misdemeanor fraudulent records claim into a felony, has all the tawdriness of Trump's more prurient scandals, none of which have taken him down. If rape hasn't moved the needle, it's hard to see how hiding sex with a pornstar will. 

So we are back to square one.

Kamala Harris should serve in a second Biden administration.  

She'd be a great Attorney General.

Biden/Cheney is not about throwing her under the bus.  

It's about shocking Americans.

And saving America.