Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.

Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.

This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.

Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.

This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.

The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.

It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.

This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.

It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?

It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.

Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.

It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.

It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.

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A topic that comes up regularly is why the Southern states produced so many terrible Republican politicians. Many of the most perfidious elected officials in Washington come from states that are solidly Republican. The most obvious is South Carolina, which seems to have a political class as corrupt as Massachusetts. Lindsey Graham might be the slimiest politician in America. Now Thom Tillis of North Carolina is making a run at Graham’s crown.

The voters in the South are some of the most conservative in the country, but they elect most of the unreliable pols in the GOP. If elections worked as people insist, a guy like Graham would not exist. Instead, the state’s senators would reflect the majority of the state’s voters, which are very conservative. The South Carolina delegation would be the fire-eaters of the Republican Party. Alabama and Mississippi would be working hard to set the edge in Republican edginess.

Last week, Thom Tillis finked on the President by pulling his support for Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney in DC. Maybe Tillis took a bribe, which happens so often in Washington now that it is the new normal. More likely, he simply agrees with his friends in the Democratic Party. He agreed to be the Republican who finked on the base this time, taking one for the team so to speak. Next time, another Southern Senator will suddenly decide his principles require him to be a fink.

In states dominated by the left-wing crazies, the pols tend to be even more fanatical than the typical voter in the state. Oregon politicians, for example, are reliable spear catchers for the far-left. One of their Representatives is now living in El Salvador to protest Trump’s deportation of MS-13 gang members. Ocasio-Cortez is now calling for violence against federal immigration officials. In progressive states, the elected officials are always to the left of their voters.

In so-called conservative states and districts, the opposite is true. The defining feature of Republican pols from the most conservative states is their willingness to bend their knee to the people they claim to oppose. They live in fear of being called one of the scary words the crazies use to control their conservative pets. Thom Tillis would urinate himself in public if he were ever called a mean word, so he makes sure to be ahead of all of these things, which means surrendering on every issue.

The main reason for this is the local elites in the South live in shame of their heritage and of the white people they represent. Like booshie people everywhere, they want nothing more than to be invited to the cool kid’s table. Since Gettysburg, the cool kid’s table has been where the progressives sit. The winners get to define what is and what is not cool and that remains true to this day. The United States is a Yankee imperium, and the South is a conquered land.

It is a good example of how control of the centers of cultural production can alter the behavior of the people. The managerial elite is not going to gaslight people into thinking a man in a dress is normal or trick people into embracing black sociopathy, but they can set the cultural tone for the elites. If you want to be popular in the centers of power, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, or Silcom Valley, you better conform to the cultural norms of the trend setters who control those power centers.

It is why Patrick Buchanan once quipped that when Southerners send one of their own to Washington, he quickly goes native. He goes from being his district’s representative to Washington to being Washington’s representative to his district. If you look around at the biggest finks of the Republican Party, they fit that role perfectly. Lindsey Graham hates the people he represents. They are not his people. It is his burden that he was born in such a backward state as South Carolina.

The question is why the voters tolerate it. People like to blame the voters, but when your choice is Graham and a guy with a bone in his nose, you cannot be blamed for voting for Graham. That is the other side of this master – slave relationship. For his loyal service to his friends in Washington, they make sure he never has a serious primary challenger or a serious general election opponent. The loyal colonial official, like Graham, gets the protection of his lord.

It is not just the machinations of the parties that account for this. There are enough white people in the South who are ashamed of themselves to make forming a majority of the proud impossible. The same cultural pressures that make a Thom Tillis ashamed his people work on the locals. Fashionable people in the provinces always ape the ways of those in the big city. Many booshie South Carolinians are as revolted by Southern culture as the typical Manhattanite.

William Faulkner described a South undergoing a transition, where the old elite with roots in the antebellum South, the Compsons, was giving way to a new class, the rapacious, vermin-like Snopes clan. The old elite had a natural superiority about them, but they were ill-suited for the new South. The new elite, on the other hand, was without virtue, so perfectly suited for the new age. They were willing to say anything and sell anything to get an advantage.

Faulkner’s description of the Snopes clan is exactly what you would expect from the ruling elite of a conquered people. They exist not as a genuine elite but as way to prevent the formulation of a genuine elite. The conqueror always wants the conquered to remain conquered and the most efficient way to do that is to make sure their leaders are loyal to the conquerors. Just as the house slaves keep the field slaves from revolting, Southern elites keep the South pacified.

In a democracy, this process is subtle and natural. No one in Washington worries about a revolt against the Yankee imperium. They only have to make sure that the politicians in the provinces are their sort of people. The same sorts of selection pressures that exist in the high school cafeteria exist in official Washington. The social pressures are all one way and as a result, the compliant representing Southern states have long careers, while the difficult drop out of politics.

It is why remedying this at the ballot box is impossible. Efforts to depose Lindsey Graham always fail, because he is the product of a system that is designed to not just defend his kind but produce them from the raw material of popular resistance that might get lucky and beat him in a primary. A populist who beats Graham will go to Washington, and before long he will go native. He will sound just like the other house slaves who serve their masters in the Yankee imperium.

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