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I was reading Sean Hannity’s book “Deliver Us From Evil” when I first heard the idea that liberals refuse to recognize pure evil. He argues that history has shown that liberals are naive when facing evil right in front of them.

Dividing people into good and evil is a heresy and people get closest to evil when they are convinced that they are good (Lenin and Hitler were convinced of their goodness). The truth in this matter was well expressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Gulag Archipelago :

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

Lenin and Hitler were convinced of their goodness

Somehow that sounds unlikely. Greatness, perhaps. Superiority, perhaps. I doubt either of them considered themselves "good", and if they had, it would be irrelevant.

I'm just quibbling, perhaps, but bear with me. If a profoundly evil man considered himself good, it would not mean that anyone who considers himself good must therefore be profoundly evil.

Solzhenitsyn's line "... the line separating good and evil passes... right through every human heart, and through all human hearts " is profound and true. The struggle is never finished, the fight is waiting for us every morning when we get up. And the enemy is not only outside of us, he sometimes occupies territory within our own hearts.

Despite this, and perhaps because of this, it is not only possible to discern good and evil, it is incumbent upon us that we do.

God made us, and by his spirit and by right reason we are capable of recognizing evil, and rejecting it, and working against it, just as we are capable of recognizing the good, and working toward it. If we weren't, Solzhenitsyn's own insight would have been itself impossible.