Living With a Murderer

On personal responsibility under the second Trump administration

Author

Ned Resnikoff
March 28, 2025

One of the most disorienting things about the past couple of months has been the speed with which so many non-governmental institutions have bent the knee to a resurgent and newly unconstrained Trump administration. Columbia University has essentially surrendered any claim to academic independence; the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have announced their intention to convert the opinion pages of both into regime organs; ABC settled an obviously frivolous lawsuit from Trump, in effect paying him a $16 million bribe; numerous corporations have abandoned their half-hearted DEI efforts; and white shoe law firms, most recently Skadden Arps, are cutting side deals to avoid getting frozen out of government contracts.

Even some prominent Democrats are stumbling over themselves to prove they are not part of the “resistance.” Gavin Newsom seemed to be running for Resistance President during parts of the first Trump administration; now, bafflingly, he is hosting clubby little tête-à-têtes on his new podcast with open fascists like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. Ruben Gallego has made clear he’s not totally opposed to the administration’s policy of renditioning immigrants off to Salvadoran prisons. John Fetterman is, well, doing god knows what.

The confusion produced by these wild swerves would feel familiar to Hannah Arendt. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Arendt would later spend much of her career reflecting on the profound transformation in German society that forced her to flee. What unsettled her most about this transformation, “was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about,” she would later say. “They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazis success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it.”

That line is taken from “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” a lecture that Arendt delivered in 1964. She was one of our great theorists of personal responsibility and the human faculty for judgment, and I have found myself repeatedly coming back to this lecture in particular in the months since Trump’s second inauguration. Along with Dorothy Thompson’s immortal “Who Goes Nazi?”, I believe “Personal Responsibility” is one of the great prophetic essays that everyone should read to understand this moment.

In part, I recommend this essay because of how it helps us understand the politics of respectability. Part of what makes it so disturbing when institutions like Columbia University or The Washington Post capitulate to Trump is that these places are the traditional strongholds of mainstream respectability. And while Trump may be powerful, he is not respectable; even as he crashes through the political and legal norms that hold the republic together, one might expect a bit more resistance from the longtime guardians of those norms.

But maybe respectability is the mortal vice leading some of these institutions astray. Because where the first Trump administration broke the rules of the old order, the second Trump administration is working to create a new one before our very eyes. What “respectability” means under this new order is very different from what it meant under the previous one. Arendt tells us “it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values for another.”

Respectability is, in fact, why they were so fluidly able to swap out the old system of values. To be respectable is to be known for your adherence to the prevailing rules; any attempt to exercise independent judgment in evaluating those rules is only to risk your respectability, and much more besides. And if that is the cost, then who can do otherwise than collaborate?

In “Personal Responsibility,” Arendt denigrates the “widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, the none of us could be trusted or even expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same.” But that is the precisely the conviction that Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, appealed to in his defense of the firm’s deal with the Trump administration. “It is very easy for commentators to judge our actions from the sidelines,” he wrote in an email to “the PW community.” “But no one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.”

Perhaps so, but the wider world still knows there are worse things than the stress of losing one’s government contracts. In the most moving section of “Personal Responsibility,” Arendt turns to consider the rare Germans who refused to participate in the Nazi war machine. Here is how she describes them:

I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way—as though we dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command "Thou shalt not kill," but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves.

The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.

What we now see laid bare is what ensues when the higher echelons of our elite professional castes—the most sophisticated and most respectable among us—avoid that kind of thinking, and are in fact discouraged from it. I’ve occupied some halls of privilege in my time, and I’ve seen this thoughtlessness up close. But it’s only now—when, as Arendt said, the chips are down—that we get to see how just how deep it goes.