She Calls It Evil: Susan Neiman on Germany, Capitalism & the Banality of Trump

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Monday, September 14, 2026. Couple of weeks ago, we had the Berkeley and Berlin based writer Wendy Lesser on the show talking about what Berlin teaches us about resisting tyranny. She has a new book out, Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times. Of course, she had one eye on Donald Trump and seemed to have a particular perspective, maybe a wisdom of looking at Trump from Germany. My guest today is also looking at Donald Trump and America from Germany. Susan Neiman is a very distinguished political philosopher and writer. In fact, she even has a book out from several years ago called Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. She has a new book out. It's coming out tomorrow. It's called Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. She's actually spending this year in New York City as a fellow at New York University, and she's joining us, from her empty office. There are gonna be many books, Susan, I'm sure, on those shelves behind you in the next few weeks. Coming back, I know you haven't read the Lesser book, but you're you know about her work. Do you think it—

00:01:51 Susan Neiman: Sure.

00:01:52 Andrew Keen: In your experience in terms of this new book in particular, not the German book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, do you think it helps to look at America and Trump from Germany? You've lived or you had lived it for many years in Berlin.

00:02:12 Susan Neiman: I do think it helps. Although when you flash that on the screen, I started thinking, my god. People will think I write about nothing but evil. I make a point of writing about lots of other things. So those are two of 10 books. But, yes, to answer your question, first of all, I think it is always good to look at American politics from outside of America. It's enormously important to get some perspective and some distance on it and also to see, what kinds of assumptions other people take for granted that are very different from American assumptions. Okay? And we can talk about some of those later. I talk about them in the book. Berlin, I think, makes it extremely hard not to think about evil. And, the history is all over the place. It's in your face or at your feet, in the form of these stumbling stones, which mark places where people who were deported and murdered used to live. So it's very much a part of daily life in Berlin. And it lends itself to reflection in a way that I think, Americans have a and not only Americans, people from other countries have a habit of sweeping certain things under the carpet. But I should say here publicly that book Learning from the Germans, which I wrote, in '20— oh, I published in 2019 and, was translated into a number of languages and, very well taken up in the States. I have partly repudiated it in a couple of essays in the New York Review, should anyone be interested in looking at my website, because I used to think that Berlin had done or Germany had done a much better job than it now appears that they have.

00:04:07 Andrew Keen: Well, we'll come back to that later. So maybe you're not in the Lesser camp when Berlin can be a cautionary mirror for our times. You noted earlier that you're not only associated with the E-word evil, but perhaps your best known book, you know, I need to tell you this, Susan, is Evil in Modern Thought. So you spent a great deal of thought a great deal of time thinking about evil. In the new book, which I very much enjoyed, you write evil is the most explosive word we have, and I think that's why it's such an important word. I know it's a hard word to define. Everyone asks you to define it, but can you help us? What does evil mean? What does that word tell us?

00:04:57 Susan Neiman: Let me first tell you what it isn't. Okay? It's not a theological concept. That's the first, response that I always get, that it's a theological or demonizing concept. And one of the places to understand that it's not a theological concept at all is the Bible itself. That is moral concepts are prior to theological concepts. Religion is one way of dealing with the evil we experience, even as children in a small portion. I don't think definitions are particularly helpful in philosophy in any interesting concept at all. You either read a book about something, whether it's justice or beauty or evil, where you stay away from definitions.

00:05:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But then why have it in the title? If you— I mean, if you can tell us what it isn't, but if you don't know what it is, then, then, then is that—

00:05:56 Susan Neiman: Because I think we all know what it is. No. I think we all know what it is. And, I think we've become afraid of using moral concepts because we can't give necessary and sufficient, conditions for them. I mean, can you define beauty in a sentence or justice?

00:06:17 Andrew Keen: Well, I haven't written books on beauty or justice.

00:06:19 Susan Neiman: Yeah. Well, but many people have without giving, the kind of definition that sometimes people expect philosophers to give. So I'm not gonna do that. The evil is the point at which the gap between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be becomes so large that we don't know how to live in a world where that abyss opens up. But it's a gap that children notice. Now they may not always be right about their judgment, and one of the things you do in raising children is to, help them make moral distinctions. But, if we leave words like evil for people who are polemical, people who are fanatical, people who are demonizing, if we leave that in the hands of those people, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have, in the hands of people who don't know how to use them. So instead of spending a lot of time on definitions, what I have done in this book and in other books is to present some analysis that I think anybody can follow, of particular cases. And I find that much more useful, not just in the case of evil.

00:07:48 Andrew Keen: And speaking of children, you've written a number of books also. You've written books on all sorts of things. You wrote one book on Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, and you've also written a book on Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. So you're all too familiar with growing up and childhood. So what do we say then? Let me revise the question, Susan. I take I accept the fact that you're gonna not define this word. What do we do with a child who, for example, if you take away their lunch or not allow them to watch television or take away their iPhone, they say to you, you're evil. What would you say?

00:08:27 Susan Neiman: I think they wouldn't say they're evil. What they say is that's not fair. Okay? And that is actually the point at which the child first realizes that there is a gap between what is and what ought to be. Okay? And let's take a case not you take away their iPhone because, you know, it's not a good idea for them to spend much time on their iPhone. But let's take a case where a real bully, takes away a child's toy, in the sandbox. Happens all the time. I raised three children, so, I know something about it.

00:09:03 Andrew Keen: And I know you did it single-handedly as well, which was even more of an achievement.

00:09:07 Susan Neiman: I did indeed. Not to be highly recommended, but sometimes it can't be avoided. But, what is the hardest thing? One of the hardest things about raising children is, on the one hand, you want to sympathize with their feeling of indignation. No. It wasn't fair that the bigger child kicks sand in your face and, you know, took away your shovel. Okay? You wanna sympathize with that while also saying, helping them to be prepared for the fact that, boy, this is, maybe the first time they're ever gonna be faced with a bully who's bigger than them, but it's not going to be the last time. So you try and find a way of saying, yes. That was awful. That wasn't fair. Obviously, you try and remedy the situation as soon as you can. But you know, and you try and prepare them for the fact that this is you're going to live in a world that has some unfairness in it. And if you're lucky, it won't be gigantic. Okay? But I think, what's particularly hard right now is preparing children for a world in which, there's an awful lot of frightening disaster going on. I should say well, no. I don't know. Why don't we move to your next question? Because the book is less about defining evil. I'm not sure that the, New York Times, very nice New York Times review of that this week made that clear. It's about—

00:11:00 Andrew Keen: Your title, by the way, Susan? Call It Evil, or is it the publisher?

00:11:04 Susan Neiman: It was in conversation with, my editors.

00:11:08 Andrew Keen: So you're comfortable with the title?

00:11:11 Susan Neiman: Oh, yeah. I wouldn't have accepted it if I weren't. Sure.

00:11:14 Andrew Keen: You mentioned, the child and learning about morality, distinguishing between fairness and unfairness. You've written extensively on the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. You had a piece a few years ago in the Times about why the world still needs Immanuel Kant. You had a book, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. I'm certainly not much of an expert, even I don't think I quite understand Kant. But would it be fair to say that Kant argued that we are innately moral and that the child then, I wouldn't say learns morality, that somehow the world brings out that morality and that you yourself are Kantian in your understanding of the world and of the human condition?

00:12:07 Susan Neiman: I'm definitely a Kantian in the sense of understanding the human condition as a struggle between seeing the world as it is and seeing the world as it ought to be, which is, I think, is a fundamental metaphysical distinction that Kant makes. Now Kant thinks we are born with a capacity, for morality. He does not in any sense think that it's something that we obviously, always have. Okay? On the contrary, he knows that we're capable of doing quite a lot of evil. But he thinks in a way that I would hope we could learn from more today that we do all have an innate sense of justice and injustice.

00:13:02 Andrew Keen: And is there a—

00:13:04 Susan Neiman: I don't agree with everything that Kant wrote.

00:13:06 Andrew Keen: Right. Is there a philosopher who is the opposite of Kant? I mean, Nietzsche, of course, comes to mind, or the English tradition of empiricism. How would you what other bookend would you establish in philosophical terms between Kant and other ways of thinking about morality?

00:13:25 Susan Neiman: Yeah. I think two, at least two. One is Hume, who's he is reacting against. Hume thinks that there's nothing more immoral about killing your father than there would is about a, an acorn over, overgrowing its oak tree. Okay? He does not think that there's, he thinks that moral imperatives are simply, you know, expressions of custom and habit and emotion. And there's a sense in which that's okay for a while. In sort of ordinary cases, I think most people don't actually want to kill their fathers, say. You know? So in individual morality, I think custom and habit and emotion are pretty good guides. The problem is what happens, when a society is built on certain customs and habits like slavery or colonialism. And suddenly somebody wants to challenge them. In Hume's work, you have absolutely no possibility of challenging a custom or a habit. And Kant and the other great Enlightenment philosophers gives us that possibility through reason, through asking whether our customs and habits are actually as reasonable, or as good as we've come to accept them. So that's a very, very strong difference. I think most people in this day and age, if they're not Nietzscheans or Humeans, there's certainly more Humeans around than Kantians for all kinds of reasons.

00:15:12 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure you mentioned Hume that much in the book, but one person who is important in—

00:15:12 Susan Neiman: I have in other books.

00:15:20 Andrew Keen: —is David Hume's great friend, another Scottish Enlightenment figure, supposedly the father of economics, but the moral philosopher of the age. Adam Smith. Why do you make Adam Smith, Susan, important in Call It Evil? What does he bring? You know that you're Kantian, but you seem to embrace Smith. Maybe Smith wasn't quite as Humean as some people might think.

00:15:48 Susan Neiman: He certainly wasn't. It's interesting to think about what their friendship consisted. And, I mean, he was certainly extremely smart. Yeah. I've written about Hume in other books. I don't like to, repeat myself too much. And this is the first time that I've written about economics and written about, Adam Smith because I do think that, a major source of evil, if not the major source of evil, is the ideology that's derived from a very bad and very simplistic reading of Adam Smith, which basically says, we are all simply driven by self-interest and nothing else matters. Now, you don't actually have to read much of Smith to see that this is, it's not just a simplification of him. It's a falsification of his work as a whole. But this is the view of Adam Smith that was touted by, Milton Friedman and the who are, you know, still calling that with the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute [ed.: Hoover Institution] and all of that and telling us every day that this is just human nature. This is how the world is. Smith got it right. Moreover, the other person I talk about in this book is, Charles Darwin. Again, less Darwin himself than misreadings of him by evolutionary psychologists who reinforced this very, false picture of Adam Smith by also saying, you know, this is just human nature, not human nature. We know that this is how our hunter-gatherer ancestors two hundred years ago were motivated and, saw the world. And I sometimes wonder, does anybody have to think for a second? What do we know about our hunter-gatherer ancestors two hundred thousand years ago? What is left of them? Not very much. I mean, our—

00:18:09 Andrew Keen: Well, a lot of people have written— David Graeber, of course, has written— You— The book is very challenging. I don't mean intellectually challenging, but your arguments are very intriguing. Not everyone, I think, will agree. You note that you're not much a follower of Friedman, nor of Friedrich Hayek, nor of, Mrs. Thatcher. She comes up quite a lot of famous quote, there's no alternative to capitalism. Are you arguing, Susan, in your book, Call It Evil, that capitalism is evil? I sometimes got the sense you were, but you never quite say it.

00:18:56 Susan Neiman: Oh, I do, actually. In fact, I quote Albert Einstein as saying it. Okay? Certainly, the capitalism as we understand it today, is evil, and that's, something that Einstein, who was a never communist, but a very committed socialist, wrote and talked about most of his life. Look. The problem is, as, Einstein and other people put it, is that capitalism as we know it is based on a view of human nature, which is fundamentally rapacious, fundamentally egoistic, and fundamentally self-interested to a point that, altruism is considered a problem by evolutionary psychologists. The other quote of Mrs. Thatcher's, which I really love, more than more famous one, the that we have no alternative is her quote that, economics is just the method. The object is to change the soul. And one of the things that most interested me in this book was to talk about how our souls have been changing, especially since the end of the Cold War, but for a good hundred years. And I think it's through the influences of these ideologies that, are so ever present that we don't even notice that they contain philosophical assumptions. Okay? When somebody says to me at a, you know, at a dinner, but human nature is just that way. They don't think something I heard recently. I mean, one hears it all the time. They don't think they're making a philosophical claim, but they are.

00:20:49 Andrew Keen: So let's get to the subtitle. So the book is, as you say, you know what or we all know you say what evil is, and it's tricky thing to define. The subtitle of the book is understanding the Trump era. But would it be fair to say, Susan, that the book isn't really about Trump? I mean, you mentioned him from time to time, but he's certainly, for better or worse, I mean, for the best, not central in the book. I mean, would it be fair to say that everyone in the modern age is evil in the sense that they're capitalists? I mean, they may not necessarily be Thatcherite, but even the left of the Democratic Party is capitalist. Even Bernie Sanders sometimes acknowledges the need for a market system. I mean, are we all evil? Is that the argument in the world?

00:21:41 Susan Neiman: No. I really think you're twisting my arguments in the book, frankly. No. I don't say that we're all evil nor do I think so, nor do I try and make any claims about, whether a market system could be used in a democratic socialist way so as to create a just society. I think that's possible. Okay? I'm not an economist. What interests me are the philosophical assumptions behind the kind of rampant, rampant capitalism that we see. The point of the book was not to count up all the sins of Donald Trump, but to think about how in the world did even half of the American people accept him for a second term knowing everything we did about him. It was all on good display. In [his] first term. Okay? What has changed in our ways of thinking that allow things that you know, even twenty-five years ago, as everybody is now saying on the anniversary of 9/11, even twenty-five years ago would have been, unimaginable for a public figure. What has changed that allows us to accept, his, him as normal. And as far as everybody being evil, one of the point that I make in the book is, we really know that not everybody is evil because all of us have, moments. I think all of us, most of us anyway. Moments in which we are quite certain that we are behaving not in order to maximize our power or our wealth, but for other kinds of reasons, be it in such a simple thing as, you know, stop being in a rush, getting out of a subway, and stopping to help someone carry a baby carriage up a staircase. Okay? Let's take a simple everyday example. Or, of course, to take a much more, you know, devastating example, Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, wanting to protect his neighbor's rights was actually, just a recent American example of somebody who's prepared to die, in order to stand up against injustice. So we know these cases, and anybody in the world can think of—

00:24:17 Andrew Keen: It begs— coming back to—

00:24:17 Susan Neiman: —the cases.

00:24:18 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I take your point. I'm— [unclear].

00:24:19 Susan Neiman: Can I, can I—

00:24:19 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Go on.

00:24:23 Susan Neiman: No. I think if I can just finish the thought, I think the interesting thing about Donald Trump and what keeps us fascinated, even if we, you know, for those of us who find him loathsome, is that he behaves very differently from other people. Okay. His, you know, almost incomprehensible and unabashed and unashamed, focused on himself and his own advantage is what distinguishes him from many other people. Now, of course, if you have someone like that, in the most powerful job in the world, it's a way of giving permission for increasing numbers of other people to act that way. Okay?

00:25:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. So the his shamelessness is almost absurd. I mean, it could be an invention of a moral philosopher like you or absurdist, novelist. Let me just go back to one thing you said about the person helping the helping with the baby carriage. I mean, I'm guessing that Trump, even if he saw a baby carriage careering down some stairs, wouldn't do anything. And in fact, I think you bring up the point about 9/11 in the book in which when he heard about the Twin Towers, he said, well, my building now is the tallest in New York, which I didn't know that quote, but it isn't. It is the most astonishingly revealing quote about him. But coming back to—

00:25:57 Susan Neiman: People have brought it up this week, actually.

00:25:59 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So, right, given it's 9/11, twenty-fifth anniversary. But coming back to that person who helps the lady or the man with the baby carriage on the steps, I mean, isn't it conceivable? I mean, Trump is absurd and exceptional, but that person could also be a rapacious capitalist, and they still do that, if they see someone needing a little bit of help, an old lady carrying her shopping. So how do we explain those two sides to ourselves in maybe in Kantian's terms?

00:26:39 Susan Neiman: That's very difficult. I mean, for Kant but, actually, frankly, for, any, philosopher I can think of, or any great novelist, take George Eliot, there's no one who thinks we're all one thing or another morally. Okay? It's just you just have to be slightly observant or self-reflective to see that we have all kinds of impulses in us, and often many that compete with each other at the same time. What I'm trying to get out of the book is the way that the ideologies that are present in our culture reinforce certain assumptions about what's normal behavior and what's not. And the reductio ad absurdum of those assumptions is Donald Trump because, yes, as you say, there's something absurd about, the exaggerated way in which he represents those claims. But, it's those ideas that interested me in this book rather than his many crimes and misdeeds. Anybody wants to see them can read the excellent book, that just came out by Maggie Haberman and, Jonathan Swan. I mean, it's a kind of sickening. I just finished it. I read all of those things in real time, but reading that book again is an excellently resourced and, analyzed reminder of given that the flooding the zone with shit has been the method of the day of just how much we've had to put up with. So it's all out there. There's nothing that I can contribute in terms of naming particular actions. The thrust of this book is to talk about the philosophical ideas that allowed us to accept those actions.

00:28:56 Andrew Keen: Right. So coming back to those philosophical ideas, Mrs. Thatcher famously said, as you note in the book, there is no alternative. You, of course, note there is. You the best known, most controversial alternative, I guess, to Mrs. Thatcher is Karl Marx. You make it clear in the book that you're not a Marxist, but you bring up another less well-known German nineteenth century political thinker, Eduard Bernstein. Would it be fair to say in the book, Susan, that for you, Bernstein is the alternative. He offers maybe a Kantian version of maybe not economics, but politics of how to live in the modern age?

00:29:44 Susan Neiman: Absolutely. And in fact, one of the very controversial things that he said at the time, that's how I discovered him, many years ago, is, socialism needs more Kant. Okay? He was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He was also a very early supporter both of women's rights and of gay rights. He was in exile in, London during the trial of Oscar Wilde. So he had, you know, experienced extreme homophobia at first hand. But so all of those are good things. He also voted against, joining the First World War when, everybody, even socialists, were preparing to go to war. But what most interested me about Bernstein is the way that he criticizes what for me is the real sticking point in Marx. Okay? I learned a lot from Marx and, anybody who thinks at all, not just about economics, but about political culture in the last, hundred and fifty years, has learned something from Marx, including the real, real heavy-duty neoliberals, okay, are also very Marxist in a certain sense. But the idea that we are determined by economic forces in the end and that ideas are at best superstructure or the sort of foam on the beer, if you like, is one analogy I sometimes use.

00:31:25 Andrew Keen: That's, that's a very German analogy.

00:31:29 Susan Neiman: Yeah. It's true. I'm not much of a beer drinker, actually, but, Guinness I like. But, it's, you know, the just putting the idea of basis and superstructure in common sense terms. You drink a beer. You gotta kinda drink through the foam. The foam is the stuff on top. But what really gets your thirst is the stuff underneath. And I see that as a metaphor that works for explaining what I don't like about Marxist theory, which is that in the end, what really, determines us and makes all of our decisions is the stuff at the bottom, the economic issues. Let me bring that into a very contemporary discussion right now with the Democratic Socialists of America who are scaring a lot of people at the polls. And let me, in particular, talk about Zohran Mamdani, who I've been following now from abroad with great interest and enthusiasm. Now everybody has said that his success, which nobody could have predicted, was based on his talking about affordability and the video about cheaper halal sandwiches and, affordable daycare. And all those things are important. I certainly don't want to say that they're trivial. But Mamdani always framed them as an issue of justice, not simply of more, money in your pocket and particularly of injustice and the fact that it is deeply unjust that the people who keep New York City running, the teachers and the nurses and the taxi drivers and the sanitary— sanitation workers, all of those people cannot afford to live in New York. And yet without them, New York would simply stop. Okay? As was discovered, people finally realized that at least for a moment in the pandemic. Okay? So Mamdani presents this not as, you know I mean, we have Trump saying I'll give everybody $5,000 if the Republicans win, but it's really appealing to our sense of justice. The other thing that I think was tremendously important for Mamdani's success is his position on Gaza and seemed so improbable a year ago, or less than a year ago. There was an enormous amount of, money and media spent against him for a position that's actually fairly moderate at this point in time in the rest of the world, namely that, Palestinians are human beings, and they ought to have human rights. Any country that claims to defend human rights needs to condemn the situation in Israel-Palestine.

00:34:52 Andrew Keen: And you have a whole chapter on a very interesting chapter on Gaza in the book. By the way, we did a show recently with the anthropologist, Dana Mashoian Walrath, who believes that Gaza is or was a genocide. Do you think it was?

00:35:14 Susan Neiman: I do. I'm not a genocide scholar, but I follow closely the work of genocide scholars like Omer Bartov. I particularly, took him seriously because at the very beginning after October 7, he said, I don't think it's a genocide yet, but it has all the conditions that could become a genocide. So you have somebody who's really historically, scientifically very careful, very cautious, very unpolemical, concluding that, yeah, unfortunately, it now has the characteristics of a genocide. And so many human rights organizations, including the two leading Israeli, human organizations, have concluded that. But once again, I don't think that, you know, the difference between a genocide and a crime against humanity isn't gigantic. I mean, there's a technical definition of genocide, and it looks to me that the, war on Gaza needs that.

00:36:23 Andrew Keen: Just— Susan. But what's— Sorry. Go on.

00:36:27 Susan Neiman: Well, what I think is really important and why I think that Gaza has captured so much international outrage when people ask, you know, there are worse things going on in, South Sudan or maybe in China. And, why is everybody upset about Gaza? Maybe it's antisemitism. I don't think it's antisemitism since millions of Jews are, myself included, are outraged about it. What people are outraged about is the use of a moral consensus, one of the very few moral consensuses to emerge from the twentieth century, namely the Holocaust was evil, the use of the Holocaust to justify another crime against humanity, okay, which if people are upset about the world the word genocide, I won't insist on it, although I do use it. The use of one evil to justify another is something that's morally obscene. And I think whether people articulate that or not, that's behind the intensity of emotion, on this issue. But I just to conclude the first thought, I think that it's that Mamdani's insistence on remaining true to his views about Gaza and about Israel-Palestine was a sign for voters that this is somebody who doesn't sell out even if it costs him an election. This is somebody who stays true to his principles, and I can therefore trust him to stay true to others. And that was enormously important.

00:38:13 Andrew Keen: Susan, it's interesting. Couple of days ago, we had the Democratic activist, Adam Jentleson, on the show. He has a new book out called Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power. He still sees a more centrist consensus in terms of Democrats seizing back power from the Republicans in America. We also had recently a book by the historian, William Hitchcock on FDR and fascism, a book about how FDR cobbled together an alliance, an unholy alliance, of southern racists and African Americans and northern liberals in terms of building a democratic consensus. I take your point that you're not a keen economist, and you're not an economist, and you're against many of the maybe conventional theories of economics. But also you also, are you against politics? Do you accept political compromise? I mean, would you accept that somebody like Jentleson arguing that the only way Democrats can build lasting power is by cobbling together alliances, and they can learn from somebody like, FDR who held his nose in terms of building alliances? What's the role of politics? I mean, it's a it's an age old issue, of course, the conflict between the idea of politics and philosophy stemming back maybe back to, Plato's Republic. But is there a role for politics in all this? Can we accept compromise, or are you quite uncompromising?

00:40:00 Susan Neiman: We can accept compromise. So let me just say a word about, economists. I'm not an economist, and I don't offer concrete, economic proposals. But I quote an awful lot of economists who I read very carefully, and Joe Stiglitz was somebody who actually blurbed the book, but both Stiglitz and, Amartya Sen, both of them were Nobel, laureates in economists and quite a number of others absolutely reject the view of capitalism, indeed, of Adam Smith that are promoted by people like Milton Friedman, Hayek, or, Margaret Thatcher. So I'm not just a philosopher coming along and thinking this is not a good idea. I'm basing my understanding of what economic realities are on the work of some very, very serious economists. What surprises me is the degree to which these people have been writing, in the case of Sen and Stiglitz and, some others, Polanyi, for more than fifty years. And somehow the view of Adam Smith and of what he allegedly said was necessarily true about capitalism, somehow that view is impervious in the popular understanding to the very serious critiques that have been made by economists. So that's point. And point two is, of course, I accept politics. I've been politically active most recently for the last twenty-six years in Germany, and I perfectly understand the need for compromise. Let me say, without having read Jentleson's book, I think we live in an era of, yeah, rising fascism. And I think that a popular front is the thing that we most in my last book, Left Is Not Woke, I tried to define what I think left is and what the overlap between left and liberal is. Okay? So number one, if you're left or liberal, you are universalist rather than tribalist. You believe that tribal relationships and tribal obligations are not the only one. We can obviously see who's making those claims in the United States today. Hello, Stephen Miller and, JD Vance and, those kinds of ideologues. Number two, if you're a liberal or a leftist, you believe there's a real difference between justice and power, although they often get confused. Your goal in politics, if you're liberal or leftist, is to try and separate them as much as possible and to aim for justice rather than simple power. And number three, you believe that progress is possible. It's not necessary, but it's possible. Okay? So those are the things that link liberals and leftists. And I am absolutely in favor of there being popular fronts among all people that accept those ideas. Where liberals and leftists differ is leftist, and I count myself as a leftist, although not a Marxist, leftists believe that social rights are genuine rights. For liberals, the only genuine rights are the right to vote, the right to speak, the right to travel, the right to worship. For socialists or leftists, the right to health, education, culture, fair labor laws, housing, all those things, by the way, that FDR proposed in his Second Bill of Rights, unfortunately, at the beginning of his last term, and he didn't live to see any of those put into practice. But that those rights are genuine rights. So FDR was really a social democrat in most ways. And, yes, he made compromises. And, you know, whether I would have made exactly the same compromises as he did is really hard to say. I wish his vice president had been, you know, remained his vice presidents, and we would have had a quite different world. But, no. I mean, not Harry Truman. But, you know, I think we've we had in the thirties and the early forties in the United States plenty of examples of a genuine popular social democratic spirit that was massively suppressed as the Cold War began.

00:45:28 Andrew Keen: Very briefly, a yes or no answer. Was using this the E-word again. I know you're a bit dodgy on it. Was Harry Truman's decision to drop a couple of nuclear bombs on Japan, was that evil?

00:45:45 Susan Neiman: Oh, absolutely. And I'm not dodgy. I just I prefer examples to, you know, one sentence definitions as did Immanuel Kant, by the way, for whatever that was. Yes. That was an evil decision and not only because it opened the atomic age and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But because it was the opening salvo in the Cold War, and I think we're still coming to terms with the damage that the Cold War did, to our world.

00:46:21 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Bernstein as a Kantian socialist in the nineteenth century. You studied with John Rawls, at Harvard. Are there more modern examples, maybe American examples of, I don't know, democratic Kantian socialism? Was Rawls a Kantian socialist?

00:46:43 Susan Neiman: Very interesting question. When he, before he had his strokes in the mid nineties well, in the eighties, he talked a lot about rewriting his major work, A Theory of Justice in response to Marxist criticism. And then, of course, the Cold War ended and Marxist criticism was seen by many people in that moment as irrelevant and a thing of the past. But he took it extremely seriously. I think it was moving towards, a Kantian democratic socialism. And unfortunately, he got had a number of strokes and got quite ill before he died. But he was moving in that direction, and I, yeah.

00:47:34 Andrew Keen: Are there but beyond Rawls, are there examples of philosophers or political thinkers who have maybe modernized Bernstein's Kantianism that come to mind apart from maybe yourself?

00:47:51 Susan Neiman: Oh, it's a good question. Look. I mean, it seems to me that Mamdani is living out that kind of I don't understand, But he's living out that kind of ethical socialism that, you know, I think is the right direction for us to go in. But off the top of my head, it's difficult to think of philosophers really working in the public eye. I can think of some who are more academic, but, thank you for the question. I'm going to think about whether I can come up with some more examples.

00:48:40 Andrew Keen: Your book has got lots of nice blurbs. One from Daniel Kehlmann, who's got a wonderful new book out, The Director, about the behavior of a it's a novel, but it's very much based on true story. A German movie director, perhaps, and his behavior under the Nazis, which reflects, I think, as you noted earlier, how hard it is to live under evil. It's a tricky thing, isn't it? I mean, it's all very well to theorize and philosophize. But when you actually have to live and I really enjoyed that book, too. I know you're an admirer. What that book reveals is just how difficult it is for a relatively good person to live under evil, and I think we can all agree that the Nazis were evil.

00:49:32 Susan Neiman: I loved that book. I reviewed it for the New York Review, and I've been recommending it to everyone.

00:49:38 Andrew Keen: It's a great book.

00:49:41 Susan Neiman: Yeah. But who wants to understand, I think, what's going on with, you know, in the Trump era. I have been shocked. The reason I wrote this book, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do it or not, and was quite torn about whether it made sense. But the ways in which so many people with so much power and so much money have capitulated in large things and small strikes me as, you know, illuminated at its very best by Kehlmann's book, The Director. I mean, Google and Lake America, really? Isn't the point I would seems to be that the point of, you know, running a gigantic corporation and having that sort of money is being able to say no to people. Right? So I was quite shocked a week ago or so when Google and Amazon [ed.: Google and Apple] went along with the idiotic idea that Lake Ontario should be renamed, Lake America. But I think Kehlmann's book shows better than any, work of philosophy that I know, just how people who are fundamentally good and certainly not evil, can make a decision. They're not gonna they're gonna go this far but no further. They're not going to give in. They're not going to bow down. And step by step, they actually do. So I really think, it came out it was written, and I first read in German when it came out in '23 and terrific book then, but it came out last year in the US at exactly the right time, for Trump's, second administration. And I think it serves as a superb one.

00:51:46 Andrew Keen: Yes. A superb one. It's also a highly cinematic book, if there's such a thing. So how are ordinary people supposed to behave in our age of Trump? We did a show last week with Skye Perryman. She has a new book out, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times, in which she writes about the resistance of ordinary people to, I don't know if she uses the E-word, evil of Trumpism, the immorality, the badness of Trump. How when we've got jobs and kids and rent to pay and all the rest of it, when we're not professional philosophers or filmmakers or economists or politicians, Susan, how are we supposed to behave?

00:52:31 Susan Neiman: Look. You know, I've had jobs and kids and, all of them. I mean, being a philosopher doesn't insulate you from having jobs and kids, you know, quite often quite to the contrary. I think simply telling the truth in ordinary life, and I have seen people say, I can't afford to do it. But I have whatever the it is, either the Trump administration or in Germany, which has gone after anybody who opposes the war on Gaza with, you know, a kind of fury that it's not quite the case here. And in fact, when people stand up and say no, in whatever capacity they have, whether it's I mean, I think almost particularly private capacity, I think strengthening other people's will to resistance by speaking the truth in private situations can be just as important as anything else because it then helps people to speak them in other situations. You know what I did last night? I watched because I saw a reference to a very old movie, 12 Angry Men, which, is actually quite brilliant. It's, you know, it's got all kinds of things that date it, in particular, the fact that there are no women. The jury consists of men. But, it's extraordinary. [unclear] work. And I have a person in this case, Henry Fonda saying, no. I'm not gonna convict somebody, of murder in the first degree if I have a reasonable doubt. How what comes out and how many people get influenced simply by one person's unwillingness to go along with the group consensus. And I really recommend—

00:54:59 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's a good lesson perhaps as you say to the Googles and the other corporations that haven't stood up to Trump. You've been very generous with your time. Two more questions. It's not possible, of course, to have a conversation about evil, particularly with a philosopher, a female philosopher, a half-German or a little bit German female philosopher without talking about the great Hannah Arendt, who, of course, wrote about the banality of evil. Was she right, Susan? Is evil I know you're a bit you don't really want to define it. Maybe it's not a word we can define, but is Arendt's work on Eichmann and his her theories which were very controversial, particularly within the Jewish community, is it a helpful way of thinking about evil? I mean, is Trump seems to me to epitomize banality. I mean, making it almost über-banal. He is the definition of it. You seem to have frozen. Did I bring up, are you still there? Susan? We might have died or something. Did—

00:59:41 Susan Neiman: [unclear]

00:59:42 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, you know, when I mentioned Arendt, the whole thing collapsed. Maybe there's some something going on here. So did you hear that question on Arendt?

00:59:52 Susan Neiman: No. Only the beginning.

00:59:55 Andrew Keen: Okay. So I'll repeat the question. Okay? You've been very generous with your time, Susan, so I'm not gonna keep you too much longer. But I had a two more questions. Firstly, it's not possible, I think, to talk about the idea of evil without mentioning another great, female philosopher, Hannah Arendt, of course, who reversed your commute, born in Germany, lived in America. She wrote about the banality of evil, in her study of Eichmann, a very controversial book, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and the Jewish community. Is Arendt, Susan, is she helpful in terms of making sense of the Trump age? It strikes me that there's nobody more banal than Donald Trump.

01:00:45 Susan Neiman: That's for sure. I am a great admirer of Arendt, and I've written about, Eichmann in Jerusalem a number of times. I mentioned it quite briefly in the first chapter of this book because I do think that her basic thesis is correct, that we're far more, endangered by a certain kind of thoughtless banality than we are by the fairly small percent of people who are genuine sadists or revel in cruelty. It's a little difficult to tell with Trump because he does seem to revel in cruelty. But what's—

01:01:28 Andrew Keen: Or pretends to. He's almost convincing us that he's more substantial than he is, but I somehow doubt him.

01:01:36 Susan Neiman: Yeah. No. I get the point. I mean, I think what's much more dangerous is this rather thoughtless, I've got my job, I've got my family, I'm not gonna stick my neck out, I'm not going to take any chances. If the majority is gonna go along, you know, I will do it too. Who am I to judge as one might say? Now it turns out that historical work has called Arendt's discussion of the man Adolf Eichmann very much into question. In fact, there were, about a thousand hours of taped interviews with him that she couldn't have known about in Argentina, which showed that contrary to her claim that he was simply being thoughtless, he really very much knew what he was doing. And his only regret was that he didn't kill all the Jews in Europe. So he doesn't actually qualify for her analysis, but without millions of people who simply just went along, he never could have wreaked the damage that he did on millions of people. So yeah. I think Arendt is very helpful. It's and I've certainly learned a great deal from her. What I guess I've tried to do in this book is to build on that analysis by talking again about these philosophical ideas that are so much in the water stream that we don't even acknowledge them as ideas, but as simple empirical truths about human nature. And it's and they're very banal idea. They're not Nietzschean. They're not grand in that Nietzschean sort of way. They're very banal. And it's those ideas that I think we're most endangered by.

01:03:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder whether in the future, an Arendtian interpretation of maybe the ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis. I'm sure people will borrow from Arendt to make sense of some of the and I'm using this word. You may not be willing to use it. The evil behavior of some of the ICE agents is certainly different than what they do.

01:04:03 Susan Neiman: I you know, this has been an interesting conversation, but I'm pushing back a bit because I don't know why you think I'm unwilling to use the word evil. I use it, as you pointed out in three different books. Okay? I'm simply more interested in analyzing it than I am in defining it. Let me give you a, you know, perfectly topical example on this, September 11. In my book, Evil in Modern Thought, I called both the, attacks on the World Trade Center, but also the Bush's— Bush administration's response to those attacks. Both of them are evil. Now they're completely different kinds of evil. Okay? And I think one can analyze and talk about the differences relative you know, in ways that are fruitful politically as well as morally. But if you try and find a single definition of evil that includes both of them, you're much more likely to leave out one thing and simply focus on the evil that's committed by the other people rather than focusing on the evil that's committed by the people who are part of your tribe. Okay? Is that clear?

01:05:22 Andrew Keen: That's an interesting yeah. The and that's, yeah. No. I think I as you suggest, I've been a little unfair on that front. You're more than happy to define what evil is. And if Bush and the terrorists of 9/11 are evil, that will certainly be controversial. Finally, this week, of course, the AfD won, widely reported, an election in Saxony-Anhalt. Speaking of contemporary evil, is I know you've had your problem sometimes with some of the things that's happening in Germany, maybe on the left rather than on the right. But is evil in your view? I mean, you're in New York now, but you've spent many years living in Germany. Is evil returning to Germany? If it's gonna return to Germany, then we're never gonna be able to get rid of it, are we?

01:06:16 Susan Neiman: Look. I don't single out the Germans for anything except a particular history and particular, attempts to deal with that history that haven't always been successful. But, I don't think evil is the property of any one tribe or nation. I, like most people I know, am very concerned about the AfD. I left just a day after the election where everybody was still in shock, which they shouldn't have been because the polls were going in that direction. I don't I think it's way too early to say something definite, about what that means besides the fact that all of the other parties in Germany have been abysmal. They've just been incompetent in every possible way, and I think there was a very, very strong wish for a radical change. Yes. It has certain similarities with, you know, the wave that produced the election of Donald Trump. But let's also remember that the people who voted for the AfD are actually slightly more than 2% of the entire German population [ed.: the AfD's roughly 573,000 votes are under 1% of Germany's population], and the thousands of people turned out to demonstrate. I don't want to minimize the danger that I think they do reproduce because a lot of them are pretty close to neo-Nazis. There's no question about that, but not everybody voted for the AfD. So things are still shaking out there, including, most importantly, the question of when whether any of the other parties, will be willing to go into a coalition government and allow them to actually govern. Some of the things that they're proposing are appalling, putting children of immigrants in separate classes from German, you know, bio-German, children. I mean, that might be that's a sorry. That's a German. That's a straight translation. Instead of calling themselves Aryans, which, of course, nobody wants to do in Germany, they will refer to themselves as bio-Germans. But that's one of the more appalling things that they proposed. But, I think it's too soon to tell whether this is going in an evil direction, and I don't wanna contribute to a certain kind of hysteria that, is easy to stir up. But it's definitely, something to be concerned with. And the fact that Trump and his people are cheering the election in, Saxony-Anhalt is just a sign of who whose bedfellows these people are.

01:09:22 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. It's out this week. I think if there's any conclusion we could make, words really matter. We have no more powerful word according to Susan Neiman, than evil, so it needs to be used carefully, responsibly, and I don't think there's anyone who knows more about the word and uses it with more care and responsibility than her. The book, is a very, very important, I think, contribution to how to understand and deal with the Trump era. Susan, it's a real honor. You've, I'm sorry to take so much of your time, but there was so much to cover. And I'd love to get you back on the show. So much more to talk about. Thank you so much.

01:10:06 Susan Neiman: It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Andrew. Bye. Let's see.