The Argument from Evil in the Rhetoric of Reaction

In his provocative book The Rhetoric of Reaction, economist A. O. Hirschman identified three recurring themes in conservative argument since the French Revolution: (1) the perversity argument: well-intentioned efforts to change the world always backfire; (2) the jeopardy argument: radical reforms always jeopardize hard-won liberties; (3) the futility argument: the acquisitiveness and selfishness of human nature doom all efforts for social improvement. ¹ After spending some years studying the rhetoric of the Right, I want to add a fourth argument to Hirschman's list: The argument from radical evil. The argument from radical evil uses the Christian concepts of sin and Satan both to argue against equality and to condemn liberals and socialists for their naïveté. In this brief paper, my goal is to explain why rational people should reject use of the term "evil" in public discourse, first, by examining the uses of the argument from evil in American political rhetoric, and, second, by contending that the Christian view of evil is inherently corrosive of democratic politics.

The argument from radical evil has been used in two different ways since the events of September 11, 2001. The first use is George W. Bush's phrase "the axis of evil," denoting the regimes of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. ² It appears that this phrase may have backfired on Mr. Bush, since it was read by the notoriously paranoid leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, as signaling a possible attack by the United States. The news that North Korea had secretly abandoned its treaty commitments created a momentary fear that the United States might need to fight a two-front war against the axis of evil. ³

The second use proliferates in centrist and neoconservative journals of opinion such as the New Republic and the Weekly Standard. Christopher Hitchens resigned from Nation magazine over its criticism of the U.S. war on terrorism, contending that the Left had become like liberal parents who, finding a nest of snakes in their child's bed, decide to call People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals before dealing with the snakes. ⁴ More generally, the charge was that the Left is somehow morally inconsistent by blaming U.S. actions as evil, while typically justifying what is now called "Islamo-fascism" as a kind of misguided antiglobalization movement. ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, whose founders include distinguished liberal hawks such as Joseph Lieberman, Martin Peretz, and the late David Riesman, collected such comments by college professors in their now-notorious report in October 2001. ⁵ Michael Novak, former New Left radical, and now a neoconservative activist, contends that Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War by using the term "Evil Empire" to describe the Soviet Union in his famous 1983 speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, and thus ending the "liberal" emphasis on moral ambiguity. ⁶

The attack on left-liberal academics or professionals for lacking a sense of radical evil is not new. The current arguments parallel the attack on progressivism that began in the early days of World War II. In the late 1930s, a group of Jesuit law professors began a campaign against the influence of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s jurisprudence, contending that his form of liberalism could not defeat nazism or communism. ⁷ The godfather of neoconservatism, the German émigré Leo Strauss, argued in a series of influential works that the Western democracies lacked the will necessary to combat totalitarianism. ⁸ Reinhold Niebuhr, the patron saint of Cold War liberalism, used Calvinist notions of original sin to promote a greater sense of "realism" in the Christian churches' response to World War II and communism. ⁹

Gene Wise, in his great work American Historical Explanations, demonstrates persuasively how the counter-progressive paradigm of the 1950s, in the work of Hofstadter, Niebuhr, Miller, and others, came to displace the progressive paradigm of Charles Beard, V. L. Parrington, and Carl...