Hannah Arendt used “banality of evil” to describe how atrocity does not require monsters.

It requires ordinary people who accept violent systems as reasonable, inevitable, or merely procedural. This post does exactly that. It reframes deportation, family separation, detention, exile, and death as acceptable state functions so long as they are carried out with decorum.

The moral logic is chillingly bureaucratic.

Deporting millions is fine.

Destroying families is fine.

Expanding the carceral border regime is fine.

The only objection offered is aesthetic. It was done more politely. With less visible blood.

That is the banality. Violence laundered through tone, civility, and nostalgia.

It also performs liberal moral insulation. By contrasting Obama with the more overtly brutal present, the post invites readers to absolve themselves of complicity. It suggests the problem is excess, not structure. Method, not mandate. Optics, not policy. That is how empire survives across administrations.

This is how people come to accept atrocity as governance.

This is how genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass death get framed as unfortunate but necessary.

This is how evil stops needing justification and starts needing only comparison.

Not shocking. Not dramatic. Just normalized.

This is exactly the danger Arendt was naming.