Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil captures very well how a multitude of people, socialized into executing orders in ways that prioritize efficient execution, provide a strong causal mechanism transforming deadly racist ideas from above into deadly realities; for European Jews, for other dehumanized persons, and for political opponents of Nazi fascism. Can it also help us understand current European and global developments and realities of the turn to the extreme right in politics and governance? I argue here that it can, partially. Its relevance in showing how deadly visions become deadly realities is ongoing and timely. Yet we also need to understand how such deadly visions come about and gain political and governmental power.
For this, we need a different focus. In this blog, I am zooming in on the process through which currently unfolding and enacted deadly visions gain the power to become reality, using the following three steps in my argument. First, we need to understand the shift towards the actual power of the extreme right as a top down, not a bottom-up process. Second, we need to integrate other logics and other actual monetary powers (such as from the disruptive and digital economy, or from organized crime) into our understanding of current political disruptions and power grabs. And third, we need to integrate the concept of evil into our analysis.
Democracy rots from the top down: how fragile we the people are
Democracy and freedom are inherently fragile. Prominent scholars such as Bermeo have shown that political elite culprits are behind dozens of democratic breakdowns in the past. Here I join Bartels in disagreeing with observations that attribute the crisis of democracy to the challenge of migration, the Euro crisis or other economic problems, or to a loss of faith in the EU, because public opinion data on these phenomena diverge. Focusing mostly on Hungary and Poland, Bartels’ hypothesis is that the current explosion of democratic breakdowns depends more on the supply side of populist mobilization, and on facilitation of that mobilization. Showing how Hungarian and Polish leaders Orban and Kaczynski engineered the dismantling of democratic checks and balances, he concludes that voters did not choose authoritarians at the ballot box. “Rather, they chose the only readily available alternatives to unsatisfactory incumbent governments, only to have their votes rather transparently trumped up by the winners into a ‘voting booth revolution’ justifying a ‘new social contract’ expanding the power of the ruling party at the expense of the courts, the media and other political actors”. If the results of voter choices to prioritize (promises of) prosperity, order or validation of their national identities resulted in a crisis of democracy, he states, this is first and foremost a crisis of political leadership, not a crisis of public opinion. What he does not mention but is crucial to his conclusion – because there is support for these positions in public opinion, just not enough to justify their supposed role in causing the current democracy crisis – is that all this presupposes that extreme right leaders actually to some degree (intend to) deliver on their populist promises. It might be that some do, selectively, for their preferred citizens, but this is problematic enough in a democracy.
The above is important in trying to understand the current political extreme right and their illiberal leadership. Enough studies by now have shown that there is a coherent negative, as well as a fully intersectional vision on justice, equality and human dignity underpinning the far-right parties that have grown in power across Europe. Their vision has been practiced and perfected in recent decades through many transnational exchanges of actors linked with various strands of this political project. By now, in destroying the checks and balances in various ways in different countries, they have also shown repeatedly that they are not playing by any democratic rule book. And certainly current mechanisms in place in EU law or cases brought before the European Court of Justice have not been able to undo their destructions. Those who act to defend democracy are playing by its rules, those who are destroying it are not. Nowhere is that clearer at the time of writing this blog than in the USA, where a very brutal sadopopulist playbook is becoming brutal reality.
Brutal capitalism and brutal neoliberalism enable brutal politics, governance and crime
My second argument is that, to understand the current politics of the destruction of democracy, we need to integrate the history, logic and actual monetary power of the disruptive and digital economy into our understanding of current political disruptions and power grabs.
First up is the concept of capitalism as a means of extracting value from workers, so that wealth accumulation becomes possible. Welfare state formats have mitigated to various extents how this process of extraction impacts on the lives and capabilities of workers, and on the potential for the profits of entrepreneurs. In the last decades such formats have increasingly been abandoned or shrunk, leading to extremely high levels of inequalities between citizens, and the creation of a new financial elite. Finance capitalism has introduced new forms of value extraction that are not or are barely mitigated at all presently. Meanwhile, neoliberalism succeeded in introducing the logic of the capitalist market into the polity, ever since the wide embrace of the famous Third Way. In neoliberalist visions, the market is presented as a free space, where economic exchanges produce efficient outcomes that state governance cannot. This vision obscures the degree to which ‘free markets’ need and use state regulation to make markets free. By not taking into account the resources involved in state regulation, neoliberalism seems to be able to magically produce a higher efficiency than governmental bureaucracies ever can.
What we are witnessing now, is how a particular small top of the financial elite has smuggled itself into the polity using a similar justification as neoliberalism did; namely the illusion of efficiency. Let’s call this oligo-liberalism for now, signifying free market-polity formats where the ‘free’ relates to an extremely small group who is ‘free’, in contrast to almost anyone else. And like the free market was understood in neoliberalism, this ‘free’ group refuses to be contained in any way (surely not any democratic way), threatening any opponents. They argue that they need their ‘freedom’ (from state interference, not from state resources) to deliver a very vague supposedly efficient government. Now that we can observe this oligarch elite capturing the US government, and engineering the dismantling of democratic checks and balances, we are witnessing a very new type of top-down power grab, once again “justifying a ‘new social contract’ expanding the power of the ruling party at the expense of the courts, the media and other political actors” (to quote Bartels). Quite logically, their need to not have legal restraints on their plans leads not just to a ‘move fast and break things’ approach but opens up a space for criminal behavior, mimicking mafia strategies such as embezzlement, extortion and blackmail. The strategy is to break things so fast that the system to punish them for this destruction is simultaneously destroyed. The strategy is to discipline everyone except themselves – but first of all opponents – through blatant and brutal coercion, and then to escape punishment for that.
A major difference from the neoliberalism we previously got used to, is that these actors – often seen as populists – do not even create the illusion that they will fulfill their campaign promises of caring for the prosperity of their voters, or their need for order or for a national identity or values. The historian Timothy Snyder’s concept of sadopopulism is a better way of understanding their political objectives, as discussed in his book On Freedom. Sadopopulism never intends to fulfill its promises and instead starts, in true totalitarian fashion (linking back to Arendt), to target vulnerable minority groups that they say ‘deserve’ punishment and pain, and groups already depicted as ‘enemies to the nation’; thus the ones still escaping that fate can feel they are on the ‘better’ side. The cruelty is the purpose, instilling the fear of resisting or of becoming visible to the ones in power instilling the pain. Arguing that ‘free consent is as much an obstacle to total domination as free opposition is’, Arendt highlights the essential role of arbitrariness in decisions about who gets hurt. Arbitrariness in decisions about who gets hurt ‘destroys the civil rights of the whole population, who ultimately become just as outlawed in their own country as the stateless and the homeless’ (or the genderless, one might add). Such actions make humans superfluous, satisfying the illusion of omnipotence that those in power have. And this in turn produces actual brutal dehumanizing omnipotence, aided no doubt by the dehumanizing impact on the small elite itself because of the brutally cruel behavior they enact. Evil also destroys who practices evil.
We can all see how in the US this process is in full swing. In my country, the Netherlands, we see a similar brutality towards migrants and citizens with migrant background from the current far-right government, a coalition of four parties dominated by Geert Wilders’ one-person PVV party.
Questioning Evil, creating space for futures
For Hannah Arendt, evil is ‘to eliminate all traces of solidarity, individuality, natality and freedom’. In other words, Evil is when humans are made superfluous as human beings. This happens as soon as all unpredictability, which in human beings is the equivalent of spontaneity, is eliminated, so that the plurality of human beings is erased. Thus the omnipotence of the radical or absolute evil is consolidated, and any conventionally human future is made impossible. While she sees three steps towards Evil: to kill the judicial person in humans, to kill the moral person in humans, and to destroy individuality, she does not aim for one definition, inviting readers instead to do what she does, to return over and over again to questioning Evil. Repeating a point made above, I would add that, in the process of all this killing, the one doing the destruction destroys the humanity in themselves too, creating a positive feedback loop that furthers more evil.
If Evil brutally dehumanizes essentially everyone, including the powerholder(s) themselves, and if for this goal they destroy any rule of law or morality and any space for individuality, it follows that it is absolutely crucial to create space for solidarity; for individuality and unpredictability, for dreaming about futures. It might seem that resistance and resilience resides only in political and public institutions but, above and beyond this, it is crucial to carve out space for any degree of freedom, individuality and care for others. Yes, institutions need to be defended as much as possible, and temptations to join the banal evil of the destroyers should be resisted but, most importantly and more forward looking, as long as we do not join them in de-humanizing, there is always a solid base from which to dream and build better futures together with others.
What then can support us in dreaming? What alternatives are there to counter the obstruction of solidarity, to expose the top down sadopopulist actions playing people against each other, creating the illusion that one person can be safer when another one is harmed? How can harms be experienced from a sense of collectivity, to recognize what has gone wrong and try to mend the tears of our social fabric and heal the harms and injuries, to think and act like a human trying to heal with care, to create and sustain hope in the midst of wounds and disasters? Many of the institutional mechanisms that support such processes of cultivating solidarity are in the crosshairs of the evildoers too, but we can use those that still exist and be inspired by organisms like fungi that have their strong and vast networks underground, while being capable of growing and thriving through these connections. The processes of countering this fast-moving brutal evil will be slow and hard, but any actions supporting these can infuse societies with the care and solidarity that can make us well again, one day.
Author: Mieke Verloo, Radboud University. 25th March 2025
Acknowledgements: While I am the sole person responsible for this piece, I want to thank the whole CCINDLE team for their efforts in making sense of the brutal world we live in today. Those interested in learning more should especially see two of the project reports hosted on this website, the D1.1 report on the theoretical state-of-the art for understanding challenges to democracy in Europe and the D.2.5 report on anti-gender mobilizations’ interventions in knowledge production. I have benefitted enormously from participating in the Inaugural Feminist Writing Retreat in Kylemore Abbey (16-21 February 2025), organized by the incredible Arpita Chakraborty. Special thanks go to Myra Marx Ferree, to Conny Roggeband, and to all participants at the inspiring FLAX Foundation and IWM organized workshop Imagine Feminist Futures in Vienna at the WUK on 14 March 2025.