Why “Evil” Is the Right Word for What We’re Seeing

More than twenty years ago, I started trying to get the liberal world to recognize that the words “Good” and “Evil” are pretty indispensable to properly understanding what’s going on in the human world. I knew even then that this was a claim many would resist, because in our secular worldview the idea of a “force of Evil” is often regarded as atavistic—something belonging to an earlier, more primitive way of thinking, and not to anything real in the world.

As a result, the liberal side of the political divide did not recognize WHAT WE WERE UP AGAINST (LINK)– and therefore failed to fight it effectively.

Starting in 2004, I could see a “Force” arising on the political right that had dark qualities that I’d never seen so threatening in the America I’d known. What had become visible was that the political right in America had become a coherent force whose impact on the world was remarkably consistent: in virtually every word and deed, its effect was to damage the human world.

Such a force, operating with such consistent destructiveness, pretty well captures what our civilization has traditionally given the name “Evil.” (Call it by some other name if you prefer; the important thing is to recognize that there is an “It” here—a force at work that can be seen in the consistency of its effects.)

And here we are now, with Trump who is the most reliably destructive person we’ve ever seen, and he consistently chooses to deal with things in a way that makes them worse. And we’ve got a “conservative” party that allows itself to be intimidated into doing everything this world-breaker wants. One evil will commanding a political force that endorses what that will decrees. Even at the breaking of their oath of office. Even confirming grotesque cabinet appointees. Obedience to Evil.

One could readily cast all this as a fairy tale—the kind of story in which Good and Evil are plainly depicted—presumably not how things happen in real-world struggles. For decades, the battles in American politics were not at the level of Good versus Evil; they were about issues, ideologies, and interests. But what we have been witnessing in recent years is something different: a shift to a deeper, more fundamental level, where the pattern we have long recognized in our culture’s epic tales is now playing out in real life.

Over the past generation, one side of our politics came to be animated by a dark force that would eventually give us Trump. The consistency of that force in choosing what makes things worse required the other side—Liberal America—to rally to the defense of everything Good. This is politics at a deeper level: it is a different kind of battle when a Liz Cheney becomes ONE OF US, because she chooses to act with integrity and uphold the oath she swore to defend the Constitution.

Trump has brought the nature of the battle right out into the open: he can be seen as championing Evil wherever there’s a choice between making the world more whole or more broken.
• He sides with the tyrant who invaded Ukraine.
• He uses the law not to serve justice but to punish opponents and protect allies.
• He usurps powers and seeks to subordinate the democratic system to himself rather than use it to serve the people.

The examples could be multiplied across domain after domain; the pattern of choosing what makes things worse does not change.

The reality of such a “Force of Evil” is visible in the way the same force operates across very different domains. The people who get rid of pictures of slavery in the national museums are joined in the same force as the Spirit of the Inquisition expressed by Justice Alito imposing his religious beliefs about abortion on others who believe differently. The same force that wars upon renewable energy, keeping us burning fossil fuels at the expense of generations to come, also gives us Christian Nationalists like Hegseth, with his bloodthirsty eagerness to get “lethal” with his foes.

One coherent force that consistently works to make the human world more broken brings together several components:
• The money power that secures its unneeded advantages.
• The religious zealotry that seeks to impose its will on others.
• The political movement that purges those with integrity.
• The leader driven by a need for dominance and revenge.

And if there is some “It” there that can be discerned in all that consistency of destructiveness, it needs a name so that we can see “It” when we’re dealing with “It.”

And what better name could there be than “Evil,” because we all know from our membership in this culture how we’re supposed to deal with Evil.

The culture showed us in countless Westerns where guys in white hats fought guys in black hats. It was shown again in STAR WARS, LORD OF THE RINGS, and AVATAR. With or without the word “Evil,” all those stories teach us to make the distinction between the two sides of the battle, and to experience it in those terms. The Death Star and our heroes are in a battle between Good and Evil. Our hobbits and their band of friends represent the Best who must carry the day in battle with the Worst, who cannot be allowed to overrun the world. And in AVALON, there is no question that the world of nature and the blue people is beautiful and good and the world of the military-industrial complex — willing to destroy the sacred to enrich themselves — is a representation of the Destruction that is Evil’s “intention.”

Evil not as a supernatural thing, as in the religious tradition, but as something that can be understood in terms that extend rather than contradict the secular worldview—a force that arises naturally out of the dynamics of civilization itself.

(For an explanation of how such a force emerges, see “Why Civilization Inevitably Gives Rise to a Battle Between Good and Evil.”)