There’s always somebody willing to make lists
In The Dispossessed, Shevek tells a story about how he made it through the famine years on Anarres:
“The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them, I earned them by making lists of who should starve.” The man's light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. “Like you said, I was to count people.”
“You quit?”
“Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There's always somebody willing to make lists.”
I’ve always taken this passage as a bit of Arendt’s banality of evil thesis. Shevek felt himself sustaining a profound spiritual wound as he consigned his comrades to the crematorium with the stroke of a pen. But there’s something extraordinary in that sensitivity and his willingness to throw away his own comfort to save his soul. It’s a truth too horrible to dwell on that most people would not. Most people would make the lists.
There was nothing special about Adolf Eichmann. He ran the trains to the camps. But anyone could have run the trains. Had he quit, the Reich would have found someone else.
On election night in 2016 I found myself shotgunning beers on my buddy’s balcony. I was in a profound state of disbelief. I simply had not thought it possible that the American people would look at Donald Trump and say, “Yes, we want this.” That they would want The Wall, and the Muslim Ban, and every other cruel, dehumanizing thing he’d promised.
Last night was nothing of the sort. Instead I just felt the slow sinking feeling that I knew what this country is and that it was going to prove it to me again. The returns are appalling. He got 55% of the vote in Ohio, 56% in Florida. He’s set to win the popular vote by millions, something a Republican hasn’t done since 2004. Trump will be the second Republican in my lifetime to win the popular vote.
It’s too kind to say that this country is filled with people who if push came to shove would capitulate to fascism, would make the lists or run the trains. The fact is this country is full of people who dream of those lists being made. Millions of Americans hunger for the camps.
I cannot understand this impulse. I do not understand where this bloodlust has bubbled up from and infected so many many people. These Trump voters, with paid-off houses and $70,000 trucks in the driveway, living some of the most bloodless lives in the history of the world, sit around in their antiseptic suburbs and gin up fantasies of cruelty the likes of which would make the Marquis de Sade blanch. Their hatred and resentment is inchoate, omnidirectional. The world is an affront to them. Only blood can wash it clean.
Will they get any satisfaction from it? Certainly the hordes of cops who wake up every day hoping it’s the one where they get to let loose with their nightstick on the face of a black man? a “migrant”? a college student with a purple streak in her hair? will revel in getting blood on their hands. All the county sheriffs who already consider themselves the law of land are pricing razor wire right now. But what about all the rest? All the anhedonic couch sitters who turn on the local news and freak out about drugstore theft. Will they feel anything when the anchors instead start rolling footage of people being pulled from their homes and dragged to god knows where?
I think of what David Roth wrote in his last pre-election post at Defector:
It is the dream of this movement, of all the people on stage and the people looking up at them, of the rich grotesques funding it and the servile cadres of eggheads, meatheads, and buttheads eager to do their dirty work, to drop the annihilating weight of Trump on their neighbors and coworkers and families, to push a button with Trump's face on it and turn their own long rosters of enemies into mist. What binds all these people to Trump has always been the desire to hurt people and get away with it in the way that he always has; they believe that they'll be able to do that so long as they stay behind him. A whole vile worldview and way of life depends upon that being true.
This is not designed to persuade as a political appeal any more than a slur shouted from a passing limousine is an invitation to conversation. It is just the bloody subtext of the old conservative dream of stopping history and replacing the future with the past raging into the fore, a threat repeated over and over, by people you maybe sort of recognize or remember but who all seem very different now, lit up as they are by this new appetite. One after another, they vow revenge against everyone that is not them and everything that is not already theirs. It is not an argument, or an offer, or a joke. It's just what it sounds like.
There was a guy I went to college with. He was a senior when I was a freshman. It was beyond dispute that he was the smartest person in his class, and probably in the whole undergrad population. He read the classics just like I did. Studied virtue ethics and divine law, Kant and Hegel. He works for the Cato Institute now. I see his Linkedin posts about how he’s prepared another amicus brief for the Supreme Court, arguing for presidential immunity or defending labor law violations.
When Roth mentions the “servile cadres of eggheads” who will invent and deploy the policies of a second Trump administration, this is who he means. Someone just like me, who spent four years tracing the history of philosophy, watching as ideas like liberty and representative democracy came into being. He could have done anything with his life. But he’ll be making the lists.