Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Beltway and the Banality of Evil

By all, but a very few, it is taken for granted that politicians, pundits, wonks, the Fed - pretty much everyone in DC - will cede to political pressure and will ultimately place career above the good of the country.  As Matt Yglesias revealingly notes, it's not even seen as a "particularly cynical way of behaving."

In what world is putting career over the good of the country not cynical?  The answer, of course, is the Beltway.

In the Beltway, immoral actions are never challenged as immoral - questioning whether someone should act from self-interest is naive.  And among pundits, naivete is the worst possible sin.  The entire Beltway will look down their noses and chuckle in unison at the wide-eyed simpleton who believes anyone would put moral or political principal above even the smallest prospective advantage to their own career.  They believe only in a Machiavellian world of political calculation, where self-interest is not only understandable, it is the only conceivable guide for human action.  Blatant careerism - even at great cost to country - is not seen as being "particularly cynical," but rather, as a fact of life that only someone who just fell off a turnip truck could question.

But in the right historical circumstance, this presumed careerism and unquestioned pursuit of self-interest results in evil on the most horrific scale imaginable.  Eichman wasn't a committed anti-semite; he was a career bureaucrat, who was just following orders.  It was Eichman's banality - it was the fact that he wasn't a monster - that horrified Hannah Arendt.

We are, it can be argued, in a rare historical circumstance now.  We're not in Nazi German to be sure, but we are in a time - one of the rare times - where political action or inaction can have dire consequences for decades to come.  That the entire Beltway accepts self-interest as the unquestioned and ultimate guide to human action is disconcerting, especially when we're pursuing the kinds of economic policies that could lead to unrest.
Posted by Saphron at 7/28/2011 11:01:00 AM

6 comments:

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