Susan Neiman

And these things don't take sides based on how you vote.

And the article is based on this book by Susan Neiman, who's a moral philosopher.

And the book's called Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump Era.

And the writer of the article goes on to talk about how Well, I'll read what he says.

The idea of an ultimate badness seems impossible to extract from ideology.

Susan Neiman, moral philosopher, titled her book, Call It Evil.

She says on the second page, this is not a book about Donald Trump.

What she means about that is someone who could proudly says he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without any repercussions.

Then we'll look into how the left has surrendered the moral vocabulary to the fundamentalist right and should rediscover the word evil and apply it to Trump and MAGA.

Joining us is Susan Neiman, the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist.

She has written extensively on the juncture between enlightenment, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics.

Her books include Slow Fire, Jewish Notes from Berlin, Learning from the Germans, Race and the Memory of Evil, and Left is Not Woke.

No, no, no, no. We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

I'm Ian Masters, and this is Background Briefing, available 24-7 at backgroundbriefing.org. And joining us now is Susan Neiman, who is the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist.

She's written extensively on the juncture between enlightenment, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics.

Do you think there's actually any such thing as the devil?

devil?Well, I was just listening to Susan Neiman, the philosopher, who just has put out a book on evil, and I think that the root of evil means to reach beyond what you need, like greed.

So I definitely think there's evil.

I'm not so concerned about looking at it from the perspective of is there a devil.

Although I read a lot of different things.

In philosophy, for those, I'm teaching a book right now in philosophy of religion called Evil and Modern Thought by Susan Neiman, and it's really accessible.

You have to pay close attention.

It's definitely, it requires focus, but it's not, it's history of philosophy that I think most people who are willing to stick with it can get the themes, and it's a really important book, I think.

[intro music] The philosopher Susan Neiman in her new book, Call It Evil: Understand the Trump Era-- Understanding the Trump Era, examines the ideas that Donald Trump embodies and reinforces.

Ideas, she writes, that are destructive enough to warrant the word evil.

Evil, she writes, is a word that marks a limit.

It is not malice, she writes, but vacancy that marks the worst form of evil once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as a common sense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naive but suspect.

Sadists exist and cause no end of pain, but the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.

Joining me to discuss her book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, is Susan Neiman, Director Emerita of the Einstein Forum and former philosophy professor at Yale University and Tel Aviv University.

She is the author of nine previous books, including Evil in Modern Thought and Left Is Not Woke.

She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Guardian, and other publications.