Trying the Unextraordinary

I said I'd limit the Trump series to two posts- who wants any more than that? This post isn't breaking that promise, but in it I will take up some of the themes played and overplayed since his election.

With varying degrees of self-seriousness, people are talking about normalizing Trump, assessing what it means, and how not to fall into it.

Masha Gessen has provided considerable insight in this. As she says, when we talk about normalization, about letting the extraordinary become routine, we are referring to Arendt and her canonical critique of the banality of evil. 

Gessen isn't saying Trump- or Putin, etc- are genocidal, however, I would suggest another disjunction of Arendt's thought from the present moment.

In this post, I'm asking: what should we think about the banality of evil when the evil is not limited to participating in the extraordinary, when it is, in a historical sense, normal?

Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem from her report on a trial for war crimes. The first ingredient in such a trial is a war with a loser. The rest came together with the energy of prosecuting aberration. By even troubled colonial consciences of the war victors, Nazi Germany had done extraordinary evil. Its genocide lacked the complex legal and sovereign-rights discourses others' had had. 

Its crimes also existed within a kind of extraordinary political status: fascism's short, aberrant course could be said to be confined to a single generation, a stain on a history of enlightenment and nonaggression- I mean here Germany never had a proper European overseas empire- that even nationals could unite in condemning.

Here I want to think about discourses of collaboration and the banality of evil that evade the conventional scope of a trial or inquiry. So often the examples of banality or humanity of evil are shaped by the neat boundaries that can be affected.

The chaotic mass violence of imperial Japan, Stalin's purges, and Mao's Cultural Revolution existed within such a defined timeframe that the regimes that positively evoke the legacies of the great leaders can clarify that it is not this part they mean to make legacy.

In the West, the scandal of the Belgian king's private colony in the Congo was a sufficient fig leaf of international condemnation, and being so brief and destructive, it made the past century of imperialism in Africa seem moderated. 

These extraordinary acts of violence did build on intellectual frameworks and political catastrophes, but accounting for them, in war-crimes trials, parliaments, or civic erasures, have kept a sense of temporary deviation from the normal.

What would a trial of what is normal look like? How could collaboration or normalization be reckoned over expanses of history that include Atlantic slavery, Native dispossession, segregation, and mass incarceration?

These histories involve violent actors: traders, overseers, treaty-falsifiers, sheriffs, and politicians, but also claimants to moderation and neutrality, and countless failed progressivisms, good faith and not.

Trying to apply Europe-centered discourses of the problem of evil to the racism that shaped the New World is not a novel prospect, though Arendt didn't get at it productively.

Perhaps what's lacking in trial format that would assess guilt, accessory, or complicity is the concrete idea of order being restored. Trials are about such restorations, and they have many different meanings, from the narratives of Socrates and Christ.

While Eichmann's trial typified retributive justice, South Africa's post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission was meant to model restorative justice, binding a community together in a different way.

But both models evoke not just a sense of "back" to normal, but also forward, in a way that the future can be meaningfully informed by the past. There must be order of both ends of the trial, within which, comprehensive accounts of the disruption of order can be made and judged.

That is to say that our frameworks for understanding the problems out of which Trump arises requires those problems to be over and crimes indicted. We are demanding a sense of the trial's boundedness, out of which enlightened norms can be restored after a trying experience, by whatever understanding.

But in reality, our vision of the normal future is obscure. Our enlightened norms aren't being so neatly torn by Trump, the National Front, or UKIP; they're bound together with them, and hoping they'll go away in the future is imagining this future will be dramatically different than anything we have reason to expect given what is already normalized.