We've Seen This Schmitt Before

MAGA steals its method from a communist, its goal from a Nazi

My last installment here at Know Your Place was hyper-local and hyper-contemporary: a frothingly mad piece about our mayor and how his bigotry over Pride Month shone a light on city government’s aversion to the values and ethics of representative democracy.

I've spent the meantime delving in the opposite direction: going back in time and farther afield, but again, trying to find threads linking what we see today to those more distant eras and places, so I'd like to tell you about (quelle surprise!) a Nazi.

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was a Nazi jurist and legal justifier of the Third Reich, whose ideas intrigued folks on the right and the left.

Pull up a chair, and let me tell you about some political theory from a Nazi that may sound spookily familiar.

Liberalism Is Bullshit

Carl Schmitt is known mainly for his critique of liberalism, his concept of “the Political” as Friends vs. Enemies, and his justification of a Sovereign dictator acting in a state of “exception.” First, his critique of liberalism.

Schmitt was disgusted with the dithering incompetence of the Weimar Republic and generalized its inadequacy into a critique of liberalism overall. Sadly, we have to define "liberalism" as Schmitt and virtually everyone pre-Rush Limbaugh understood the term, as "a concept of government based on equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy" as Heather Cox Richardson recently put it.

Schmitt claimed liberalism was doomed: it was either too weak and namby-pamby, with its talk of tolerance and pluralism, neutrality and universal values, to ever take self-defensive action against forces that work to destroy it…or else it didn’t really believe in benevolent talk and just imposes its own power agendas on everyone with increasingly brutality in the name of “universal humanism.”

Sincere, good-faith liberalism is defeated by the forces of something other than liberalism. Hypocritical liberalism reveals itself as just another power-politics sham looking to dominate people, but now does so with totalizing zeal: “You must implement equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy (as we arbitrarily define these things—or we’ll kill you!”

Politics Is Basically War

To resolve his beef with liberalism, Schmitt pitched all the universalism and neutrality in the dumpster and replaced it with his own concept of the political: that the essence of politics is what he called Friend-Enemy distinction.

To Schmitt, human nature was aggressive and clannish. People adopt values, clot together with others who hold similar ones, and build up social groups to advance those views, inherently trying to convert the world to their cause. When they see other groups as endangering their precious values, they divide the world into Friends and Enemies.

Enemies are those who pose existential threats to their group and thus become potential targets for violence. You're willing to kill or die for your Friends to stop or defeat your Enemies: that is the essence of the Political. Anything that doesn't rise to, or admit, this reality is either not political at all or else lying about its true political aims, goals and nature—like Schmitt’s dark-side interpretation of liberalism's touchy-feely PR.

Dictators Can Save Us

Schmitt was a jurist, of course, into Constitutions, laws and rules, so another of his contributions addressed the role of the Sovereign and the extent to which such a person would, could, or should be bound by such strictures.

Think of the Sovereign as the leader, the president, the Reichsführer, whatever. To what extent should he (usually a He) be bound by the law? Well, for Schmitt, when the rubber hits the road, the Sovereign shouldn't be bound at all, not really.

Sure, in normal situations, the law can lay out checks and balances and arrange proper divisions of labor among branches of government and all that. But what matters is when things are not normal, when there's chaos, when society is hopelessly divided against itself, when Friends fight Enemies in the streets, when events are "exceptional." The law can lay down what constitutes a "state of emergency" and delegate special powers and authority in such situations, but even then, the law can't predict every possible scenario.

So a real Sovereign, a real leader, is the person who declares and decides when there is an exception to the normal state of affairs and takes decisive, basically arbitrary action outside and beyond the scope of normal law. Since this situation doesn't occur when societies are running amicably and peacefully, only when they are riven by Friend-Enemy division, the Sovereign who makes this call is going to be the representative of—the embodiment of the will of—only one of the various factions slugging it out in the Friend-Enemy struggle.

He'll step in, suspend the normal rules, and decide the contest, almost certainly by crushing Enemies through methods that would be illegal under "normal" constitutional and legal procedures—but see, that's okay, because he's the Sovereign, he gets to declare the "exception," and once declared, the old procedures no longer apply until a new normal is restored.

A true Sovereign is the one who represents a real people, and a real people is a group that is truly political—that sees the world clearly, in terms of Friends and Enemies (even if their Enemies remain cluelessly wedded to some notion of “can’t we all just get along?”). When a Sovereign embodies his people’s will and declares an exception to the normal state of things, he is “Constituting” a new regime, a new state for his people. He is a founder, kinda literally a statesman.

Why Schmitt, Why Now?

Maybe you can see where I'm going here. If not, maybe I can spell things out for you a little more clearly.

Schmitt’s entry into American political thought arguably traces back to Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the influential German-American political philosopher who, through his intellectual descendants and followers, sowed the seeds of both East Coast and West Coast schools of "Straussians" among the political right to this day. Strauss made it out of Germany in part thanks to Schmitt’s intervention, and while Strauss rejected Schmitt's ideas at many points, the fact that he took the Nazi's writings seriously enough to debate with him meant that Strauss' followers (who parse his works like The Da Vinci Code) would also engage with the jurist over time.

Strauss’ lineage leads directly to his student Harry Jaffa, the Lincoln scholar whose students founded The Claremont Institute, home of the West Coast Straussians and the earliest of the right-wing think tanks to go full Trumpist. After Claremont blazed the Trumpist path and Trump actually won, more influential think tanks and the conservative intelligentsia were caught unprepared: most still had a foot in the old GOP world that Trump and Claremont had left behind; they had to scramble to adjust to the new reality of an opportunistic, right-wing populist who had no coherent ideology beyond, well, nascent fascism.

Trump’s presidency was marked by a lot of fascist talk and a great deal of bumbling in terms of policy (apart from massive tax cuts for the rich, which did bupkis for regular folks or the health of the economy overall). Nerdy right-wing types gathered under the auspices of “National Conservativism” conferences (Nat-Cs, if it helps you remember) to try to hash out some order and meaning implied by what Trump’s appeal meant for the ideology they should try to fashion in the face of Dear Leader’s astonishing popularity and seizure of the GOP.

The intellectuals and activists of the right pivoted. A hundred or so of the think tanks, led by The Heritage Foundation, developed Project 2025, the blueprint for how a second Trump (or other future Trumpian) administration can overcome all Trump 1.0 deficiencies and weaknesses to transform America into an authoritarian state:

• Fire tens of thousands of merit-based civil servants and replace them with loyalists (literally vetted by the think tanks for their fashy credentials and ass-kissing opportunism as opposed to, say, belief in public service regardless of party) and make their jobs subject to the whims of the president. That’ll get rid of the “deep state” resistance and anyone who might whistleblow to the other branches about him violating the Constitution.

• Make the funds that Congress authorizes (power of the purse) subject to “impoundment” by the president, so he can unilaterally cut off money to cities, states, universities, grant recipients, programs, anything he doesn’t like—or anyone associated with that funding who says anything he doesn’t like.

• Lay out scads of executive orders for him to roll back protections and guidance that protect vulnerable populations and marginalized folks.

• Make the DOJ and FBI into the president’s personal cop squad.

• Get rid of the Department of Education.

…and so much more

What we have here is a political party that’s grown increasingly unpopular over the decades. Its “ideas” for the nation have proven both wrong and disastrous (trickle-down). It enjoys only minority appeal and does well in elections only because of undemocratic mechanics in how the US is structured (the US Senate, the electoral college, the size of the House, etc.). Every time it’s had the chance to reflect on its status and its future, it has chosen to double-down on its extremism, whiteness, xenophobia, and zombie claims rather than moderate and try to appeal to a wider and more ideologically diverse electorate. Clearly, it aims for permanent minority rule.

But you can’t get that in a democracy, so…fuck democracy.

Claremont—the child of Jaffa, who was a child of Strauss, who was a peer of Schmitt—was one of the earliest to figure that out. The rest of the think tanks just hopped on board after Trump became proof of concept.

How To Fuck Democracy

How on earth do you establish permanent minority rule? I mean, aren’t Americans pretty wedded to the idea that they’re entitled to choose their leaders? Didn’t they dump tea in Boston Harbor and all that? How are you going to flip that whole script?

Carl Schmitt really offers a lot of good advice if that’s your project. Especially if you combine him with the ideas of my favorite commie, Antonio Gramsci, about whom I wrote:

Gramsci argued that, instead of or before arming the cadres and comrades to violently overthrow the capitalistic state or just plain seizing power—what he called a war of movement or maneuver—you had to first wage a war of position: you had to counter the cultural hegemony that reigned supreme, fight a war of ideas to get people questioning the way things are, get them seeing that the complacent acceptance of the gruel it served up wasn’t the only thing that could be on the menu, get them dreaming of possibilities and writing and speaking and thinking about how they were in fact possible. Questioning and undermining the orthodoxy first, because if everybody’s under its spell, no revolution can get off the ground.

You had to prepare the soil. You had to win hearts and minds. You had to cultivate what he called a counter-hegemony among the people. The frontal attacks on the system, the war of maneuver or movement, couldn’t be successful unless and until you’ve done the cultural hearts-and-minds work, the war of position.

So let’s break it down.

Friends and Enemies

Spend decades founding, funding, promoting, repeating, spreading, emulating media outlets that demonize your opponents. There are loads of examples in right-wing history, but I keep coming back to Rush Limbaugh as the archetype, then Fox News as the key mainstreaming device.

None of this is new, exactly. Far-right loons used to do this all the time with newsletters and mailing lists and Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts and all sorts of lower-tech outreach, but—arguably—the GOP wasn’t entirely captured by these nutbags yet, there was still ideological diversity within each major party (with liberal Republicans and conservative Dems), partisan sorting hadn’t yet happened (nor had Jim Crow ended, for that matter), and there were Enemies elsewhere to draw fire and ire: the Commies during the Cold War, who served as a force to glue the factions of the GOP together somewhat under reputed gatekeepers like William F. Buckley.

After the end of the Cold War, the glue started to dissolve. The traditionalist Republicans looked around and saw that their treaty to support free markets and deregulation hadn’t defeated the queers and the feminists and the godless and kept everyone in their places. “Hey, we got the short end of the stick!”

The racist Republicans looked around and saw that the country was getting more diverse and more tolerant and didn’t like that at all. All the guys they’d elected, supposedly to fight the commies and then to extend the New World Order had basically surrendered territory to “people” they deemed lesser.

The neo-cons who seemed to believe in nation-building and spreading (their version of) Americanism across the globe led them into Iraq and Afghanistan and an economic collapse and de-industrialization and an opioid epidemic that decidedly did not just hurt the Black and Brown people for a change.

And the country elected a Black guy.

And news reports said that by 2045, the country would become “majority-minority.

I know I’m telescoping, flip-flipping, and screwing with the timelines here, but I do so for effect. The point here is to show how a long period of rhetoric demonizing the political opposition, combined with demographic, attitudinal, and political shifts can culminate in an environment in which one-third of the electorate sincerely believes that another third (or more) is literally a threat to their existence and way of life: Schmittian Enemies.

That’s Gramscian war of position: gradually shifting the cultural mood and attitude away from the hegemonic view (from “hey, we’re all Americans here, we all want what’s best for the country in the end, we just disagree about how to get there”) to a revolutionary one. Feeding the wolf inside us that tells us to hate. Hate who? The distant commies absorbed a lot of hate for a long time, and after they were gone, we had to pivot to “socialists” and “cultural Marxists” within our own borders who wanted to “destroy our way of life.”

Take a gander at Michael Anton’s 2016 “The Flight 93 Election,” (in The Claremont Review of Books, note) where he argued that conservatism was essentially all but dead, the country all but lost, that the Enemies (liberals) had long since seized the plane and were nosediving it into the Capitol: Conservatives needed to stop trying to “conserve” their comfy seats in first class and give their lives to stop these terrorists from destroying the nation.

That’s a call for desperate revolutionary action. Sure, right-wingers always insist that the sky is falling, that Obama will take their guns, that socialism and tyranny are one election away. They’ve been doing so for a hundred years or more. But a lot depends on how the Gramscian war of position is going.

Jump next to 2021 for Claremonster Glenn Elmers’ “‘Conservatism’ is no longer enough,” (in The American Mind, “A Publication of The Claremont Institute”) where pretty much everything about Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy dichotomy and declare-an-exception-suspend-all-the-“normal”-rules is laid out in the bluntest terms. Some low-lights:

The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.

…I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.

…Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.

…The great majority of establishment conservatives who were alarmed and repelled by Trump’s rough manner and disregard for “norms” are almost totally clueless about a basic fact: Our norms are now hopelessly corrupt and need to be destroyed. It has been like this for a while—and the MAGA voters knew it, while most of the policy wonks and magazine scribblers did not… and still don’t. In almost every case, the political practices, institutions, and even rhetoric governing the United States have become hostile to both liberty and virtue. On top of that, the mainline churches, universities, popular culture, and the corporate world are rotten to the core. What exactly are we trying to conserve?

…the conservative establishment, or much of it, has been unwilling to recognize that our body politic is dying from these noxious “norms.” Keep taking the poison! it advises. A cynic might suppose that many elements on the right have made their peace with (and found a way to profit from) the progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves.

What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.

…If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman

…The U.S. Constitution no longer works.

…a majority of people living in the United States today can no longer be considered fellow citizens…

You may have never heard of Claremont. You may never have heard of Anton or Elmers or the essays above.

But, sweet jumping Jehosaphat, people in DC sure have. People running political campaigns sure have. People crafting strategy in think tanks have. Media people have. When these pieces came out, a part of that world was stunned, and another part was thrilled that yet more norms had been shattered.

Trump hired Anton to work in national security. He tapped Claremont people to staff the 1776 Commission. John Eastman, AKA, Co-conspirator Number 2 in the grand jury’s indictment for Jan. 6, is faculty and a board member at Claremont.

The list of folks who’ve churned through Claremont’s programs and fellowships is a Who’s Who of right-wing villainy, going back decades. Google any high profile right-wing name and odds are good you’ll find a tie to Claremont or its affiliates, its magazines or journals. (It’s not that big of a deal, as conservative-world and the far right are an incestuous vanguard that pipelines its true believers into scholarships, fellowships, clerkships, endowed chairs, appointments, and so on every chance it gets, and has done so for 70 years or more.)

They have the money to do it well. Besides the dark money that flows through the gaping hole in democracy blown open by the 2010 Citizens United decision, individual, obscenely wealthy and demented benefactors support the general trend of the coalition Claremont spearheaded. Twenty years ago, venture capitalist billionaire Peter Thiel (with fingers in Facebook, PayPal, Palantir) was writing his own lengthy and influential essay about Friends and Enemies, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt. Since then, he’s bankrolled Blake Masters and J. D. Vance, Vance being my odds-on favorite as the next Trump.

Just last week Vance sat down with Ross Douthat of The New York Times and casually threw out Carl Schmitt’s name in an attempt to smear the left as being Schmitt’s disciples. Because projectors gotta project.

American Carnage

In the Claremonster essays above, you can clearly see the Schmittian Friend-Enemy distinction at work here—on steroids. You can also see the rejection of any “conserving” vision of conservatism, replaced by a radical, revolutionary, overthrow program, headed by a strongman whose qualities of character, erudition, religious faith, prudence, or statesmanship do not matter.

All that matters is his political will to crush Enemies and return the nation to a glorified mythical past before The Fall, which Claremont dates around the time of Progressivism and Woodrow Wilson, turbocharged by FDR, then dosed with LSD in the 1960s. They hold a big and longstanding grudge that just absorbs each new social change into their rolling Blob of grievance and shapeshifting betrayal.

The “everything’s gone to hell” rhetoric meshes nicely with judicial “originalism,” the bullshit doctrine of jurisprudence that liberals initially took as a good faith attempt by conservative legal theorists to articulate a sincere way of interpreting the Constitution, when it was actually assembled in a lab as a pretext to cobble together rulings that would give conservatives the policy results they wanted.

Robert Bork was sort-of the proto-originalist, but he was far too open about the implications of originalism to make it onto the Supreme Court. Still, Reagan and his Attorney General Ed Meese made originalism the reigning doctrine for the DOJ during the former’s second term, incubating a cadre of lawyers who’d one day be judges and justices in its advantages for their preferred policy outcomes and for their careers.

Antonin Scalia, may he burn in hell, was the first “out” SCOTUS originalist, but the rest of the Subversive Six pretty much buys—or will go along with—the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its “original public meaning,” that is, how the document would have been understood by the average yokel on the street in 1780, if he could read and wasn’t too distracted by dying of dysentery or whatever. Apart from tax cuts for the obscenely rich, that Supreme Court supermajority is Trump’s other signature achievement in office.

The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision, infamously, cherry picked history to arrive at the idea that bodily autonomy for women isn’t “deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition” according to Sam Alito, who happily cited a 17th century judge who condemned witches and thought it was impossible for men to rape their wives. Arizona, of course, followed suit for a short time, reverting to a territorial rule from 1864 as controlling law.

Only in science fiction, and, I guess, conservative jurisprudence, is time travel to the past real.

Dobbs is, of course, causing electoral problems for Republicans, though not for SCOTUS, whose members serve until they die or step down. It’s really the less notorious cases that help explain how SCOTUS plays its part in fucking democracy for the GOP.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act with sleight of hand. Jurisdictions with a history of racially discriminating at the ballot box, under the VRA, had to obtain pre-clearance before enacting new voting restrictions. But the court ruled that the criteria for establishing which jurisdictions had such a history of discrimination were unconstitutional.

So without criteria, we can’t say who has to get pre-clearance, which means no one does. Without pre-clearance, racist counties and states can screw minority voters willy-nilly. The only way to proceed is to sue them—not under the Voting Rights Act anymore, but under the Reconstruction Amendments.

In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), SCOTUS said that partisan gerrymandering—redrawing voter districts to screw the opposing party’s voters (AKA, politicians choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians)—was perfectly okay. In fact, complaints about it were henceforth “nonjusticiable,” a command to all lower courts that they could no longer hear any cases about partisan gerrymandering. That means if you get enough Republicans in the statehouse to redraw the maps to prevent the Dems from getting elected beyond, say, a third of a state legislature, the only recourse you have is…to vote in more Dems to draw the maps differently. But how exactly is that supposed to work? Chief Justice John Roberts declined to explain.

Given that Black voters overwhelmingly support Dems at this moment in history, it was just a matter of time before the other shoe dropped, which it did with Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024). Here, Flagger Sam Alito wrote that state legislatures who gerrymander Black voters into irrelevance must be presumed to do so for partisan reasons, that is, because they’re Democrats (which is fine, according to Rucho), not because they’re Black (which would be very naughty).

You can’t really call what SCOTUS does “behind the scenes,” because it’s all out in public, but because it concerns allegedly abstruse matters of law and legalese, it isn’t titillating like Stormy Daniels, so it doesn’t break through in the attention economy. But if you pay attention to the Court, you should have been freaking the hell out since Shelby County dropped 11 years ago. (Alright, really, since Bush v. Gore dropped 24 years ago, but…ah, never mind.)

(And that’s just voting rights. The Court’s been gutting the Fourth Amendment all my life, and the present court is revising the Establishment Clause such that Louisiana’s Ten Commandments in schools mandate may well get a smile and a nod in the name of states’ rights. Even if it’s shot down [in 1-3 years], you have to see it as a tactical move: red meat for the Friends, distract and dispirit and enrage the Enemies…own the libs.)

Bavaria, Kansas, 2/13/10, photo by me

So while Trump drones on about how American has gone to shit, SCOTUS, for years under the sway of the conservative legal movement has been rolling back rights while only political nerds paid attention. Trump’s “American carnage” rhetoric was absolutely perverse coming from a US President’s inaugural speech.

Unless you think of it in terms of conditioning his supporters to hate the present and glorify the past, to fetishize a return to the womb of nostalgic simplicity so much that they will endorse brutal amputations of anything that complicates “solutions” to today’s “problems.”

Like equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, bodily autonomy, and the people who believe in these things.

The Dictator for Thee, the Founder for Me

One of Schmitt’s earliest works was aptly titled The Dictator. To Schmitt, a Sovereign who imposes a new constitutional order does so on behalf of an existing people, a sufficiently unified and dedicated body of Friends opposed to an existentially threatening group of Enemies. In Schmitt’s mind, this makes a figure like Trump 2 overturning what we think of as the Constitution and instituting a Mirror Universe version of it to (seemingly) protect only his True Believers, his supporters, his constituents…the essence of “democracy.”

If this begins to resemble the constant refrain of elections allegedly rigged because they reflect the preferences of people “not like us” because they live in Blue states or in cities, or because such folks are coded as unAmerican due to religion, ideology, consumer tastes, or skin color…then you’re catching on.

The way Schmitt understood Friends and Enemies is key here. For Schmitt, literally anything can be the basis of that divide, initially. It can be which end of the egg one cracks at breakfast. It can be whether one has stars upon one’s belly, like the Sneetches. It can be whether you like pineapple on pizza. It absolutely does not matter. What matters is whether or not a collective identity forms around the difference, whether the difference serves as a marker for that identity, and whether the members of at least one of those groups views the others as existential threats and is willing to resort to violence to defeat them. To kill or die.

As for dying, we have a lot of evidence that whiteness kills its adherents. Ditto for those who subscribe to the atomizing individualism that fuels acquisitive capitalism sorting us into Haves and Have Nots and teaches the latter to aspire to and root and vote for the former, even at the expense of policies and programs that would materially improve their lives. The Trumpists were anti-vaccine for Christ’s sake. At a Nevada rally just this week, Trump “joked” to his supporters in the crushing heat that he didn’t care if they died, he just wanted their votes. They ate it up.

As for killing, we’ve seen not only the incidence of political violence increase during the Trumpocene, but the rhetoric and reported openness to such violence increase as well. For God’s sake, there was a violent insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, the first time in American history. Threats to election officials and judges are up.

This is not a bug in a Schmittian worldview; it’s a feature. The more people (even though just a minority of the population) willing to embrace or tolerate violent rhetoric or violent acts against perceived Others/Enemies, the more solidified and discrete the group of Friends becomes.

The tighter and more cohesive that group of Friends becomes, the stronger the case their Sovereign has to declare himself the embodiment of their Will and claim a mandate from the (only) people (who matter) to declare that “normal” is behind us and desperate times demand “exceptional” measures.

Ever find yourself confused by the rapid-fire pace of Trumpist trends? How they go from one slogan or cause or talking point to the next? The red Maga hats, the Lock Her Up and Drain the Swamp chants, the QAnon code phrases (“Where We Go One, We Go All”) during that whole period, Soros-funded caravans at the Southern border, Antifa mobs, BLM burning down entire cities, the “groomer” nonsense, the anti-CRT rabies, Stop the Steal, “Rigged!” “Witch Hunt,” rolling coal, Budweiser boycotts, Harrison Butker, the endless antics of Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green and other surrogates, diaper wearing while Trump stood trial, now the embrace of felony as a badge of honor?

Each makes sense if you think of them as the Starship Enterprise cleverly rotating the shield frequencies of its shibboleths for signaling distinctions between Friends and Enemies, in its brave battle against the Borg’s attempt to assimilate them into the nightmare conformity of…liberalism.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums up a portion of Schmitt’s thought:

Whether a particular distinction will come to play this role is not determined by its own intrinsic significance but by whether a group of people relies on it to define its own collective identity and comes to think of that identity, as based on that distinction, as something that might have to be defended against other groups by going to war. Since the political is not tied to any particular substantive distinction, Schmitt argues, it is naïve to assume that the political will disappear once conflicts arising from a particular distinction no longer motivate opposing groups to fight. Political identification is likely to latch on to another distinction that will inherit the lethal intensity of political conflict

So pseudo-issues du jour rise and fade away, replaced by whatever the next cultural signifier will be to serve as a marker distinguishing Friends from Enemies.

After all, the GOP didn’t bother drafting a platform in 2020, preferring to avoid the real risk of advocating for something the erratic Trump might oppose, or opposing something the arbitrary would-be dictator embraced. Instead, the party effectively said, “Our platform is whatever Dear Leader’s agenda turns out to be,” a complete capitulation to the authoritarian Sovereign and an utter surrender of any claim that Republicans stand for anything in this day and age.

Let it all be, instead, the daily confabulation and Two Minutes Hate. Trump’s base (which now drives the GOP) hops opportunistically on whatever happening that promises to serve as a new identity flag setting Trumpists apart from fake Americans, traitors, sheeple, or whatever they think we are.

34 Counts

What’s funny, and depressing, about Trump’s recent New York felony conviction is how neatly it parallels Carl Schmitt’s own experience. Thanks to his refusal to repudiate Naziism, Schmitt was marginalized in post-War Germany, never allowed to teach again. He continued to write, correspond, and hold small salons with admirers, but his exclusion from the mainstream rankled.

The irony was thick. His original claim, according to Blake Smith, had been that liberalism was too procedurally neutral:

Schmitt, however, had been one of the chief proponents of the idea that the German constitution ought to protect “values.” In his 1932 Legality and Legitimacy, Schmitt attacked the Weimar regime for its lack of reference to values, and argued that its defenders’ attachment to a supposedly “value-neutral” liberalism would be their downfall. The Weimar state, like liberal states in general, was only a formal, legalistic shell of empty principles, Schmitt claimed. The constitution offered “the equal chance for achieving political power” to any party that could win elections, even if those parties, like the Nazis and Communists, promised to install an antidemocratic regime once in power. Weimar’s defenders needed to recognize that the only way to save the substance of the constitution was to suspend certain of its principles, such as open elections, and abrogate the rights of those who opposed democracy.

Yet after Germany adopted a No-Nazis constitution that bit Schmitt in the ass, his views of liberalism’s neutrality suddenly flipped.

In [his 1960 essay] “Tyranny of Values,” as well as in texts such as “Amnesty, or the Force of Forgetting” (1950), Schmitt argued that former Nazis were being persecuted by the postwar West German state, which was using the concept of “value” to keep its former enemies out of the political process. Leading Nazi-era thinkers and officials like Schmitt himself were banned from teaching and their writings censored. This sup­posedly unjust treatment was done in the name of West Germany’s official “values” of protecting democracy from antidemocratic points of view, values which were enshrined in its constitution, the 1949 Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany.

So when German liberalism learned the hard lesson that you cannot tolerate Nazis even in an otherwise tolerant, pluralistic, and neutral regime, Schmitt cried foul and advocated pure neutrality, precisely what he railed against in the Weimar Republic.¹

Now that Trump has been convicted, his supporters and loyalists cry, “Oh, where’s your supposed due process and fair trails? I thought the system was supposed to be neutral?”

The admirers of the guy who campaigned on “Lock Her Up”—who pledges to weaponize federal law enforcement to go after the press, the political opposition, student protestors, just about anyone he views as his “Enemy” on the basis of what he calls real American values—are now insisting that his trial should have either never occurred or should have resulted in acquittal because it wasn’t value-free enough.

As Sam Adler-Bell put it in a recent episode of the indispensable Know Your Enemy podcast:

All these people who couldn't give a shit about our institutions, our heralded institutions, the Constitution, the rule of law, when Trump was President and like, more or less explicitly expressing contempt for those institutions and those norms, like they were the people making fun of liberals for like, being "Oh, the norms! The norms!" you know? And now suddenly they're like, "This goes too far!" I mean, it just goes to show that, like, hardly anybody principally and passionately is motivated by concern for the stability and state of our liberal political institutions because they were perfectly fine, obviously, with Trump trampling on them when he was president and now they're oh, so concerned for the soiling of our neutral institutions by partisan concerns.

Or take a look at Newsweek columnist Josh Hammer’s take on the convictions, complete with the Schmittian Friends-Enemies reference:

…it has never been more incumbent upon the Right to finally wake up and realize what is going on right now in this once-great nation. Many conservatives and Republicans like to wax nostalgic about blindfolded Lady Justice—about neutral enforcement of the law, and about general norms of liberal neutrality. Will those on the Right finally wake up and realize where, exactly, our attempt to seize an unsustainable faux-moral high ground has gotten us? The imperative of this late hour of the American republic, in order to even attempt to rebalance our wildly off-balance pendulum, is to respond to the Left as it has acted toward us: by wielding political and prosecutorial power to reward friends and punish enemies—to reward our side's forces of civilizational sanity and punish their side's forces of civilizational arson—within the broad confines of the rule of law.

If we want to get back to "neutrality," at this perilous point, it's going to first take bloodying up some noses. That is unfortunate for those Americans who actually do value and cherish neutral enforcement of the rule of law. But yet again, here we are.

Above all, it is imperative that the Right not bat an eyelash. Do not be intimidated by this blatant show of crass thuggery masquerading as a legal proceeding. It's now full steam ahead through November. We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done.

Forget for a second that New York is not the DOJ, that Biden is not weaponizing anything in this case. Forget that Trump broke black letter laws here, got convicted by a jury of regular citizens in a fair trial where he was shown infinitely more deference than millions of poor and non-white defendants across this country.

Forget all that. Using the law to beat the shit out of your enemies just as much as they allegedly beat the shit out of you is not how the rule of law works. Hammer should know this, almost certainly does, and simply doesn’t care, since this is war propaganda, polemics (Schmitt believed all writing was polemical, that is polemikos, war-like, fit for war, as opposed to any concept of accuracy or truth-seeking).

Hammer’s a past fellow of the Claremont Institute, by the way.

Echoes of Eco

So let’s put the Schmittian-Gramscian analysis next to one of the most famous treatises on fascism.

Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism,” or "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” is a classic, and I’ll recap it’s basic points here with my own annotations. As I’ve noted, the F-word debate has certainly progressed (and digressed and regressed) a lot since 1995, but Eco’s listicle is worth revisiting. See if it lines up with Schmitt and the present moment.

1. The cult of tradition (a “tradition” that mixes and matches whatever it wants or needs to allude to its core “truthiness” or message)

2. The rejection of modernism (despite embracing technology, which fascists often love, they reject the Enlightenment, the idea that Reason has anything to offer civilized people, substituting irrationalism, passion, emotion, instincts, Blood and Soil atavism for that more rigorous and democratically transparent guide)

3. The cult of action for action’s sake (anything to “own the libs”…associated with attacks on or contempt for reason, established process, checks and balances, reflection, deliberation, anti-intellectualism, and decisionism—a term wedded to Schmitt…“I’m the decider” to quote George W. Bush)

4. Disagreement is treason (to disagree is to dither and reflect and apply critical thought to the jumble of contradictory sources of the hodge-podge that makes up the cult of tradition behind fascism, exposing it as a grift or a lie or a hypocrisy, thus indulging in modern Enlightenment thinking and betraying the cult of action, breaking or slowing its momentum)

5. Fear of difference (racism, nativism, xenophobia, religious hatred…all used to stoke irrational instinctual emotivist loathing, to create an Us of legitimate citizens or Friends to war against the illegitimate Them of Enemies blotting out any rational, critical considerations that might caution tolerance or solidarity)

6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class (the January 6 rioters were not homeless folks living in cardboard boxes, but middle class entitleds sick of the difficult work of thinking and tolerating difference in a pluralistic society, afraid of losing a modicum of their own status as the default deciders of what is “normal,” “accepted,” “proper,” “legitimate”)

7. Obsession with plot (everything is a plot, everything is rigged; the Deep State controls all; Biden heads a Crime Family; Pride is a “groomer” conspiracy; the liberal woke elites harvest the adenochrome of children; our way of life is under threat; half of the country can no longer be called Americans; the election was stolen)

8. Our enemies are both strong and weak (liberalism sure is, in Schmitt’s mind—either so strong that it’s tendrils are even in college DEI programs suffocating real American values or else too wussy to recognize and combat real threats against it; all the Real Men are on the Trump Train, but they’re in danger of losing thanks to the nefarious conspiracy of Soros-funded sneaky conspirators, woke capital, and evil lawfare and plots, plots everywhere, like stealing the election with Black and Brown illegitimate votes and migrant caravans; it doesn’t matter that New York convicted Trump, not the DOJ, since They are all in it together)

9. Life is permanent war (if the essence of the Political is the existential conflict between Friends and Enemies, then war is a constant threat, if not a present reality; even if the righteous remnant wins in one nation, they must worry about attack from without; it’s why we must go armed to the hilt to the grocery store; paranoia is eternal, nothing ever satisfies, conspiracies abound)

10. Contempt for the weak (hierarchy teaches us to worship those above us, for they are stronger, while holding those below us in contempt, for they are weaker; more, those outside our hierarchy altogether, the Enemies/Them are utterly contemptible by definition, and they are contemptible for their weakness, but strong in their threat because they cheat and deceive and are so numerous and insidious)

11. Education for heroism in the cult of death (inculcate selective, heroic narratives of brave, honorable death in the service of the Friends against the Enemies; welcome the brush with death for it proves we are not afraid or weak; callous the heart against mass death as the price one must pay to be a true patriot in the service of the Leader)

12. Machismo (or patriarchy, with retrenchment of strict gender roles and open war on any deviations from same; pro-natalism; war and heroism and hierarchical command structure projected into the sexual realm; a huge reason the anti-trans button is pounded mercilessly regardless of fact, reason, decency or principle, then used as a wedge to relitigate gay and lesbian rights)

13. Selective populism (the leader speaks for the people, embodies their will, but only some of the people, because the others have become Enemies; it doesn’t matter how numerous the Enemies are; what matters is their strength and will and commitment to the Leader; if he triumphs, he will vindicate them and this “representation” will be true democracy)

14. Newspeak (use of impoverished language to undermine critical thought, so up is down, black is white, fascism is freedom, Nazis are good guys)

Fitting Myself for the Tinfoil Hat

Which raises the question: to what extent am I conspiracizing here? Do I believe, am I claiming, that all these politicos like Marjorie Taylor Green, J. D. Vance, and Donald Trump himself are down to clown with the Gestapo? Do they have pristine SS uniforms in their closets, maybe authentic collector’s item gifts from Harlan Crow, hermetically sealed against the ravages of time, just waiting to be opened up, that New Jackboot Smell on them, even after all these years?

No, I don’t give them that much credit.

The reality, I think, is much more paltry and simpler.

Take a look at Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism list of characteristics again. Most of them are…pretty binary.

That is, when the world changes and adapts, when the culture grows to become more welcoming of things like inquiry and critical reason, teasing out complexities and nuance and heretofore unacknowledged complications in stories we thought we understood, we kinda face two basic paths. We can be brave and keep walking along toward these discoveries, or we can freak the fuck out and try to go backward, refusing to abide what’s being unearthed.

Just about every bit of clickbaity, “Intellectual Dark Web,” edgelord content the warriors of the Right use to gull the young and the old into participating in their virality is relitigating things that we thought we’d settled.

We thought this because we enjoyed a long period when the worst people kept pretty quiet and to the fringes of discourse, plotting and planning in their delusions.

We thought this because the mainstream hadn’t stewed in decades of grievance messaging and the dismantling of institutional capacity and thus, the dismantling of institutional faith.

We thought this because the right-wing’s effort for decades was to slowly chip, chip away at boring and abstruse pieces of legal bulwarks as they amassed sufficient power to be more open about their project and more daring in their rhetoric.

Relitigating allegedly settled things means that we grew complacent about how settled they were. We didn’t codify them. We took them for granted so we stopped teaching about them, teaching the reasons for them and why they were still relevant and important. We assumed that they had passed into social consensus so strongly that people would be horrified if they were ever attacked or even questioned. We thought there were so many “third rails” in American politics that politicians would never dare touch.

Meanwhile, politicians played that childhood game you did with your little siblings where you got infinitesimally close to them yet continued to insist that technically, you weren’t touching them. The right-wing funded hordes of spokespeople in less-glamorous or even fringey media whose job was to touch third rails again and again.

After all, what’s the real penalty for violating social consensus? Lose votes? These people weren’t running for office, and as long as they couched their heresies as jokes, politicians and parties were under no obligation to repudiate them. On the contrary, alarmism about such heretics was turned against us as we were called humorless scolds who couldn’t take a joke, then PC Police, then cancel culture warriors.

We couldn’t even get these spokespeople to hemorrhage advertisers. Too many companies cared more about the bottom line than any long-term erosion to social consensus on the pillars of democracy and egalitarian pluralism. Or else actively opposed all that with the force of their billionaire pocketbooks. It’s practically a truism that capitalism, in search of ever broader returns and more stable returns, will ally itself with authoritarians. Democracy, equality, rights, dignity—these things at least suggest potential threats to unlimited profits and unrestrained property rights. And regulations on capital undercut at least short-term profits.

Start-up costs for the technology to become a right-wing influencer have plummeted. You can now make a reasonably decent living if you get in on that grift and have the talent. More so if you can plug into the pipeline of larger outfits and key figures who can rocket you to mass audiences. Remember that the GOP is an ideological party, while the Democrats are a coalition of interest groups. It’s much, much harder to rise to stardom and influence by peddling an ideological message to progressives who may care deeply about one issue, but otherwise go out and live their lives.

It’s all just the story of the frogs in the pot of water, ultimately. But apparently it only applies if the frogs are, well, brainless.

So, am I arguing that the folks who’ve been slowly turning up the knob on the burner had visions of the Third Reich, of Carl Schmitt, dancing through their heads this entire time? No, not really.

I think Schmitt is in there somewhere, far more appealing and well-known on the right than on the left, but he’s floating in their mental soup alongside so many other authoritarians, monarchists, fascists, Caesarists, unitary executivists, Originalists, racists, nativists, incels, patriarchs, heterosexists, fundamentalists, tradwives, Neo-Confederates, and on and on, that it just adds up to that melange of syncretic cultism Umberto Eco puts at the top of his list of fascist characteristics. It’s like the slow accumulation of heavy metal poisoning, imbibed from a thousand sources.

Some of these folks read Schmitt and are influenced by him. Schmitt resonates with them and with others because of his similar responses to the challenges of adapting to the new, the difficulties of adapting to change, of parsing the true from the false, the good from the bad when we’re confronted with the challenges of coping with new information or analysis.

It’s challenging because it never ends. We never graduate. We just get older and think we have attained some wisdom, and we get tired and we settle down and hope to enjoy a peaceful retirement, but then, holy shit, the 1619 Project reveals a smidgeon of how racist our country has always been.

We can sigh and learn something that, perhaps sadly, revises a lot of what we thought we knew. We can blow it all off and say, hey, I’m retired—just going to enjoy watching the grandkids on the backyard swing. Or we can erupt in reactionary insistence that the world must never change, must never learn, must stay frozen in the understandings I gained in grade school half a century ago, goddamnit, because otherwise, my entire identity is a sham and somebody is trying to erase my way of life.

Ah, but isn’t stuff like The 1619 Project also “relitigating the social consensus?” Only if you squint. The difference is that this is new information coming to light to challenge what we thought we knew, not the same old, tired arguments being endlessly repeated again and again to dismiss or bury the new information. The new information is going through the standard, once-acceptable (now demonized) vetting processes that our social institutions pioneered for that purpose. So, science and academe and peer review and scholarly debate and fact checking and all that jazz.

Or we can listen to Thomas Sowell or Ben Shapiro or the mayor of Salina, Kansas, trot out the same bullshit that was heard and used in 1956 or whenever and shot down at that time. But you have to know about 1956 to recognize the bullshit when it shows up in today’s clothing, and too often we don’t.

Why does Carl Schmitt seem relevant? Is it because all these whack-jobs have copies of his 50+ books in their home libraries? No, it’s because Schmitt worshipped and provided legal cover for power.

Conservatives generally believe some categories of people are suited for power, to rule, while others are suited only to be ruled. Racists just apply skin tone or blood quanta to that scheme. Sexists divide ruler and ruled by body parts or gametes or whatever they’re into now. All these folks give the side-eye to the LGBTQ+ community because they inherently blur all sorts of lines, especially when you include the Bs and the Ts—oh, gawd, the Ts!

And thanks to decades upon decades of preaching cruelty and distrust to millions of Americans, all the various power-worshippers have been taught to hate some amorphous blob of their fellows they call “liberals,” or “the woke,” or whatever term they’ll settle on next week.

Fascist impulses resurge in part because, as we age, we tend to decline in power. We see the world moving on, we understand less and less of it. We might like to disengage from it, revel in the JOMO, but incessant media bad-actors rope us in and insist that “They” are coming for all that we hold dear, our way of life, our children and grandchildren. “They” hate our values. “They” want to see us enslaved or destroyed or put in camps or silenced or re-educated. When it’s all about the fear and paranoia, anything and everything is up for grabs, and we’re all ready-made conspiracists looking for that powerful savior, that Sovereign strongman who embodies our will who will punish “Them” and restore what we have nearly lost forever. Or at least punish “Them.” That’s good enough.

As for the young, the daring cadres of ambitious (that is, those seeking to grow in power) twits who fall for this crap and hope to climb the ladder of influence in the new Reich?

Speaking of this Brat-pack set right-wingers (specifically Nate Hochman) who tend to keep getting busted for passing along Nazi shit, writer John Ganz writes:

What I can say with a lot of confidence, is just about everybody in the vanguard of the right-wing, among its intellectuals, its staffer class, its journalists, etc. is in daily close proximity to some form or another of fascist or white supremacist propaganda. And I don’t mean this in the “woke,” everything-is-kinda-white-supremacy way, I mean this in it literally bubbled up from Nazi message boards and the like. At the very least, they do not react in horror at coming into close contact with someone or something from the real extreme. It’s titillating for them. Perhaps it might be worrisome for their career prospects, but not for their sense of themselves. They barely bother to really hide it anymore! It’s in their feeds. It’s in their DMs. It’s their real life social networks. It’s just the air they breathe. Even if they are afraid to hold or evince extreme views, they will admire those who do as the cooler ones and heroes. For the brainier of the set, even as they mock those who talk about fascism as hysterics, they eat up the works of Jünger, Evola, or Schmitt. This is what you have to realize about these people: It’s all lies, all the way down; to themselves and to others. The other thing: there is a reason why people don’t say “alt-right” anymore, there is no more “alternative”, this is just the Right. This is who they are.

For as much as they might have actually read Carl Schmitt, they are still just trying to be cool and edgy, and their peer groups are filled with idiots who revel in it, and they’re hired by fascist-adjacent and fascist-friendly outlets and campaigns, so all the incentives line up. They’re sad fools, but no less dangerous for all that.

The sociology of how the young and the old fall into this isn’t all that complicated, because the underlying options aren’t that complicated: it’s more or less a binary, as I said.

You either believe people are people, a mix of good and bad, impossible to categorize in broad brushes based entirely on religion, sex, gender identity, skin color, etc. ad infinitum, or you insist that there’s something deep down in those categories that makes some people better or worse than the other groups.

Conservatism has always had the latter tendency, and now it’s letting that freak flag fly in the form of Trump, whose movement is, unsurprisingly, echoing Carl Schmitt and the characteristics of fascism.

It’s all unsurprising because it’s the fruits of the same poisonous tree, the same consequences of the wrong fundamental choice about how you view people.

1. This song-and-dance parallels the recent pogrom against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices at Kansas (and other) universities. Programs designed to evaluate job applicants (who are by no means entitled to entry, note) want to know about their cultural “fit” in a community that tries to value DEI, pluralism and tolerance. These are tarred as insidious stealth “value regimes” inculcating noxious “ideological litmus tests,” like, “No Nazis, white supremacists, or violent incels.” Why? Because “liberalism” is supposed to be scrupulously neutral, dammit! Because we have a First Amendment, dammit! Meanwhile, the University of Kansas calls the cops from multiple jurisdictions to arrest entirely peaceful ceasefire and divestment demonstrators simply because…the administration didn’t want anything on campus to seem less than pastoral at graduation. Screening out Nazis is bad. Screening out those who object to the policies and practices of Israel and our country’s and institutions’ complicity in those policies and practices is called “antisemitic” and deemed good.