I feel like the preacher whose pews are suddenly full. The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has awakened people, at least for now, to the evil of demonization. But I have been preaching this sermon for many years. I suppose I ought to just welcome all the new congregants, but now that everyone is here, I thought I would help people understand what they’re signing up for.
Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit. If you want to reject demonization, you can’t describe anyone as a demon. It sounds easy, but it’s actually much harder than you think, at least judging by the ubiquity of the epitaph. To describe someone as a demon is to imbue them with sub-human or super-human qualities that condition us to view them, and therefore to treat them, as something other than a human being (and for those who think in these terms, I would add, a human being formed in God’s image). So, not only is the word demon off-limits, so too are monster and vermin; animal and scum; beast and snake. Anything that is meant to communicate that the person on the receiving end is other than one of us.
But a philosophy that wholly rejects demonization is about much more than minding your language. We demonize for a reason—it’s not just a slip of the tongue—and if we hope to rid ourselves of the practice, we have to understand its appeal. I have come to see demonization as a seduction. To demonize is to imagine ourselves as something we are not. It is to pretend that there are no circumstances that would lead us to become what we most despise and fear. A refugee, a migrant, a murderer, a zealot, an assassin. The label would never be attached to us, it would never be the title that follows our name. And because we believe ourselves to be human, those who bear the stamp must be something less, or at least, something other.
This is pure hubris, of course. It denies the long, uninterrupted lesson of history, which monotonously affirms the capacity of good people to do monstrous things. It denies too the lesson of science—of biology, neurology, psychology, and sociology—which has decoded the conditions that account for our behavior across the millennia. And it denies the lesson of common experience, what we see around us every day. Yet there is nothing I can say to convince the non-believer. It simply feels too good to believe otherwise; that’s what makes it a seduction. People want to believe they would never do anything truly horrible. They cling desperately to this fantasy until finally they or someone they love does something godawful, like climb with a rifle to the roof of a building and try to change the course of history. But Thomas Matthew Crooks is no monster; he is one of us. That’s what it means to reject demonization.
Demonization is seductive in another way as well. It not only deludes us into thinking we are incapable of evil, it assigns evil to an identifiable target. I have a friend who spent 25 years in prison for a ghastly murder. On the inside, he became a virulent white supremacist, an ideology he later rejected. I was talking to him about the arc of his beliefs and how he came to accept and then repudiate white supremacy. He said, “Being racist is like having a superpower in a way. It feels empowering, because you don’t have to like, take the blame for any of your problems. All of your problems are because of someone else. You were born absolutely awesome. You were born superior to everybody else. Everything that’s wrong is somebody else’s fault. I’m awesome. Fuck these guys. ‘Yeah, you’re fucking right. God damn, this is everybody else’s fault. Fuck these guys.’ That’s how it felt. It felt like absolution.”
Racism is not the same as demonization, but they often travel arm-in-arm. Both seduce us into believing that all our problems can be traced to some particular person or group. Our problems have nothing to do with anything we did or helped to create, and nothing to do with systemic forces beyond our control. Demonization loves a scapegoat. It is this aspect of demonization that accounts for so much of our current social and political misery. To an extraordinary degree, our culture is now built around identifying and vilifying The Other, whom we imagine as an existential threat to all we hold dear. To democracy. To liberty. To the planet. It is the essence of all political campaigning, reinforced by the entire business model of today’s media, and especially social media, which largely depends for its existence on the growth and diffusion of us-them thinking.
This way of thinking and speaking is what people have in mind when they call upon us to tone down our rhetoric. People may not think of this as demonization but it surely is. It imbues a person with super-human power—the power to change the world single-handedly—and supposes that when they are vanquished, all our problems will magically disappear. But what in our culture has super-human power? What can change the world with the swipe of its arm? A monster. A demon. The devil. Not a human being. At bottom, and as much as we wish it were otherwise, this way of thinking is no different from the delusion that seduced my friend into white supremacy.
All of this should give you some sense for how difficult it is to reject demonization in all its forms. It demands that you change the way you speak and think. It calls upon you to recognize your own capacity for evil, and therefore to link yourself to people who have done truly awful things. It compels you to relinquish magical thinking and give up the idea that the world will change when he is finally gone, whoever he is. And it forces you to reject a political and media culture that reinforces demonization at every turn.
But there’s one thing it does not do. It does not drive you into silence. It does not render you mute in the face of injustice. I have been a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer for decades. I have had three cases in the Supreme Court on behalf of detainees held in connection with the so-called war on terror. I have defended more people on death row than I can count. I have exceedingly strong political opinions, which I have expressed throughout my professional career.
But what of those who have been opposite me for so many years—the psychologists who tortured; the lawyers who dissembled; the executioners who killed? I oppose what they have done, not who they are. In fact, I am indifferent to who they are. They believe in the world they would create as I believe in mine. In the same way, I believe a Trump presidency will be bad for the country. I believe it will produce greater inequality and more suffering, and nothing in my philosophy prevents me from saying that. But I oppose what he has done and what I expect he will do, not who he is. He believes in the world he would create as I believe in mine. But he is a human being capable of evil—like me, like you, like all of us. He is not the devil and the world will not magically change if he were defeated. Like the man who tried to kill him, he is not a monster. He is one of us.
I rejoice in the newfound commitment to reject demonization. The task is urgent and vital. But understand what it means. In the end, when we strip away culture and politics, when we turn off the noise and shut down the machines, to reject demonization is to accept this truth: There is no them, there is only us.
