Hannah Arendt’s stock rises with Trumpism’s ‘banal’ hideousness

Hannah Arendt’s relevance surges amid comparisons to Donald Trump’s actions, echoing her analysis of Eichmann’s banality of evil. Trump’s chaotic manoeuvres suggest a disturbingly normalised atmosphere of crisis.

H annah Arendt is in fashion. If she were a company, we’d be saying her stock price is rising.

Every time Donald Trump says or does something sinister, grotesque or neo-Hitlerian, Arendt quotes start to circulate on social media and “lessons” are sought to be learnt from Arendt’s philosophical writings on totalitarianism.

It’s like early 2017, when Mr Trump had just entered the White House. Then, Arendt’s first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, began flying off bookshelves in the US, with Amazon even briefly running out of copies.

In 2024, Arendt is back. Bigly, to use a Trumpist expression.

The German-American philosopher’s current stock seems to be so finely tuned to the scale of Trumpism’s hideous words and threatened actions, one might almost wonder if Mr Trump were invested in some Arendt quote and meme factory. Does Mr Trump personally gain with every Trumpist excess and consequent uptick in Arendt stock?

An excellent new Financial Times piece by Ed Luce (paywall) is a case in point of the attention paid to Arendt on account of Mr Trump. Mr Luce, a fine writer and insightful thinker, starts by channelling that famous Arendt phrase “banality of evil”.

He writes about the “banality of chaos” introduced by Mr Trump into the American political system.

Arendt used this phrase (incidentally, the idea that informed it came from her mentor) to describe the shocking normality of those who served the Nazi killing machine.

Reporting on the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, who played a key role in the ‘Final Solution’, the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps to be gassed, Arendt noticed the insipid nature of the man, his clichéd defenses, his mundane desire to succeed professionally and the fact he didn’t seem driven by ideology. He might have had anti-Semitic leanings, along with many of his countrymen and others in Europe, but Arendt argued in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, that he showed “no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical antisemitism or indoctrination of any kind. He personally never had anything whatever against Jews”.

Whatever he did in the cause of the Nazi state, she suggested, he did for banal reasons.

In many ways, Eichmann’s attitude to the killing machine of which he was a part was akin to a senior manager trying to boost turnover, productivity and profits.

Arendt’s observation went on to be described as “one of the most memorable phrases of 20th-century intellectual life”.

Now, in the age of Trumpism, it has taken on another life. As a touchstone of the terrible times in which we live; a measure of how bad things have become and where they might be going.

So, to Mr Trump and what Mr Luce describes as “the banality of chaos”. He offers “a checklist” of the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee’s recent activity:

“He promised on day one of his presidency to let January 6 convicts out of jail, close the US-Mexico border and ‘drill baby drill’ for gas and oil. He feted Viktor Orbán in Mar-a-Lago as the best leader in the world and assured Hungary’s strongman that he would not ‘give a penny’ to Ukraine. He took out a $91.6mn surety bond to pay defamation damages to his sexual assault victim, E Jean Carroll. He purged the Republican National Committee with 60 staff firings — the opening move by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who he handpicked as RNC co-chair. He did a U-turn on TikTok, now saying its Chinese parent company should retain ownership. He mimicked Joe Biden’s stutter, insisted that America’s true inflation rate was 50 per cent and attacked Jimmy Kimmel as the worst ever Oscars host. It seems almost trivial to add that new detail emerged about Trump’s apparent soft spot for Adolf Hitler.”

The idea, Mr Luce suggested, was to flood the zone of people’s attention with untruths and gibberish, so much so that it becomes banal: “The more bizarreness Trump generates, the less people notice. Economists would call this hyperinflation, except that the item being devalued is our capacity to be shocked.”

It’s a valid argument. That even though Mr Trump’s stated agenda for a second presidential term remains both dangerous and frightening, the “banality of chaos” seems to blanket everything.

Arendt could hardly have done better in noting the mundane drive to succeed — scorched earth policy and all — that seems to inform the Trump re-election bid.

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Medium and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 17 March 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Unsplash/Annie Spratt. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)