A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics

[chat_noir]

To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.

snip

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics.

"The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis. "Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam," she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire." (Coulter recently displayed her vituperative talents by calling former Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee, politically "lucky" for having dropped a grenade on his foot while serving in Vietnam.) Liberals, by contrast, even in their newly discovered aggressively anti-Bush frame of mind, stop well short of Coulter's violent language. Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe.

Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil." Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt's ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.

http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i30/30b01601.htm

[DBoon]

1. You understand the left counterpart of this is Lenin

centralized vanguard party upon achieving power eliminates any traceof the "class enemY"

[eviltwin2525]

4. a remedy

Purporting Leninist-Stalinist Communism as a form of "leftist" politics is to be seduced by the Big Lie. The ONLY difference between Hitler and Stalin is that Hitler chose specific groups as the targets of his hate, while Stalin spread it indiscriminately but better organized. The difference between Hitler and Bush is Hitler was convincing enough to get away with it, for a while; it remains to be determined if Bush will.
As for Herr Schmitt, the remedy for his disease is to steal his books (don't buy them!), dig a deep hole, drop in the offensive tome, shit on it profusely, and bury the lot.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

2. Powerful article, thanks for the post.

If memory serves me correctly Hitler was introduced to Carl Schmidt while in prison as Carl came regularly to visit another inmate who later became one of Hitler's henchmen.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

3. It's all in the context.

"If one person kills another person, it's murder, but if the government kills 100,000 people, that's patriotism." - Howard Zinn"

[rwenos]

5. Borderline Syndrome

Thanks for a provocative post -- one sees little really good reference to political theory on DU, and it's always a pleasure when one find it.

I've read Hitler, but now I will read Schmitt. As a lifelong student of extremist thought, I'm particularly interested in the similarity between Schmitt, as you summarize him, and the psychological disorder known commonly as "Borderline Syndrome." Borderline Syndrome, as I understand it, is characterized by impulsivity, extreme anger, a tendency toward substance abuse. "People who suffer with this disorder have extreme and long standing instability in their emotional lives, as well as in their behavior and their self-image."

Thus, from what I've read, sufferers tend toward social structures governed by strict rules, black-white thinking, and a sort of cultish "otherness," as if they KNOW they don't belong, so they have to adopt a rigid system of social control to govern THEMSELVES.

If that doesn't sound like Bushie Boy, and most RW evangelicals, I don't know what does.

Fascinating. . . .

[lvx35]

6. Fascinating. Thanks. nt