After attending the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Nazis’ Final Solution and thus the Holocaust, she published a book based on her reporting. The title featured four words that have endured in historical memory.
The banality of evil.
By that, Arendt meant that evil could be done by the most ordinary and limited of human beings. Contrary to a popular perception fostered in movies and television, those who performed monstrous deeds weren’t grand masterminds, but rather little men and women who operated out of constrained and perverse impulses.
What they did might be appalling, but it didn’t mean they were extraordinary—much as they might wish themselves to be.
If Arendt were alive today, I’d run another phrase by her as a complement to hers.
The pettiness of power.
Particularly when it is exercised only to demonstrate that one has power.
President Donald Trump and his minions have waged all-out culture war on Harvard University. The Trump administration has suspended all federal grants to the university, tried to block it from enrolling international students and threatened to tax the school’s endowment out of existence.
The source of the Trump animus toward Harvard is obscure.
The president and his camp followers say that they’re attacking America’s oldest institution of higher learning because it is a hotbed of far-left ideology and “woke-ism,” whatever that is.
There’s reason to doubt these justifications.
If Harvard has been so successful at turning its students into Che Guevara-like revolutionaries, why have so many of its graduates become vulture capitalists and, for that matter, turned into Trump allies like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York?
No, as is the case with most vendettas, this one feels personal, as if the president or someone close to him has an intimate reason to hate Harvard. The resentment expressed by the Trump team is too visceral and the response to the university’s reasonable demands that its autonomy be respected has been too disproportionate to be explained by policy disagreements alone.
Some of it I understand.
Harvard is, by definition, an elite institution, one designed to serve those human beings privileged by wealth, by an abundance of natural ability or by circumstance.
The kid looking at the candy store from the sidewalk outside often is inclined to harbor harsh sentiments toward those feasting inside.
Was there a Trump friend or family member who wanted to enter into Harvard’s glimmering circle and was denied? Trump himself, perhaps?
If so, it’s easy to grasp why they might feel aggrieved.
Most of us have been denied something we really wanted at one time or another—and know how such rejection stings, particularly when we feel it might have been unjust.
But most of us also rise above such feelings and refuse to do things that are both destructive and self-destructive in response.
It’s hard to discern what Trump and his cohorts think they will gain from this culture war even if they win it.
Harvard is the most famous and perhaps the most respected university on the planet.
From the middle of the 20th century onward, it has been a beacon for bright and talented immigrants and foreign students, many of whom have stayed in the United States and made immense contributions to our standard of living and our national security.
They pursued their version of the same American dream that lured both Trump’s ancestors and mine—and likely those of many reading this—to these shores once upon a time.
Now, those students, terrified of the repressive measures imposed by this administration, are flocking to colleges and universities in western Europe, depriving us of not just the money they would spend here but their talent, as well.
We will pay for this foolish pettiness.
The dearest commodity in the world right now is human talent.
In attacking Harvard—and, by implication, all higher education—Trump is working to cripple our chances of importing fresh talent and developing our own.
All those years ago, Hannah Arendt was right.
One doesn’t need great intelligence to do lasting damage to a nation, the world or the people living in it.
All one requires in order to do great harm is a grudge.
