As political chaos descends, it's because we've lost our "theological" moorings as a nation
Maybe it's time we brushed up on the writings of Carl Schmitt
“Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.”
So wrote the celebrated German jurist Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, a book that has not only become a twentieth century classic, but also functions as a benchmark of twenty-first century political philosophy.
Schmitt’s fundamental - and most radical - thesis was that the very idea of the “political” implies enmity, intense enmity. He described such enmity, as indicated in the citation above, as the “friend-enemy” distinction.
In his analysis, which arose historically as an attempt on his part to make sense of the abject failure of parliamentary politics during the fledgling Weimar Republic of the 1920s, Schmitt challenged the conventional assumption of modern pundits that the end-all and be-all of liberal democracy is to attain some style of consensus that will draw the res publica together, reflecting what we might term a refulgent “rainbow” of sundry cabals and caucuses.
Such a naïve construct, Schmitt argued, was the main reason democracies falter. “The political world”, he insisted, “is a pluriverse, not a universe”. What makes politics political in the first place is a clash of multiple “convictions”. And such convictions, especially religious ones, “can easily determine the politics of an allegedly neutral state.”
In promoting the so-called “friend-enemy distinction” as the driveshaft of all politics Schmitt drew upon the ancient Roman legal distinction between and inimicus and hostis, both of which can be translated as “enemy”.
An inimicus is someone who has wronged or slighted you, but he or she is not an “enemy” in the political sense. That is where the word hostis (as in “hostile”) comes into use. The hostis defines the political, because in its very connotations it designates the frontiers of our collective identity. It lays out clear boundary markers between “us” and “them”.
“The political”, Schmitt wrote, therefore, “is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”
Schmitt’s axioms regarding the “political” grate against our most cherished sensibilities. Especially in a democracy we balk at the idea that having “enemies” is vital to the political process.
Furthermore, we know that toxic polarization can have destructive social consequences for which every single one of us pays a price. Just this previous weekend such polarization impelled us – once again – to the brink of another U.S. government shutdown that could have wreaked financial havoc on the entire economy.
A poll last week by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the general public, despite its professed distaste for hyperpartisanship, is actually of two distinct minds about it. Even though studies show that people are sick and tired of the dysfunction of Congress and the incivility of our elected leaders toward each other, “large shares within each party,” according to the Journal, “also want their lawmakers to fight for their core values, even if that makes it harder to address critical problems.”
Such findings, of course, confirm what Schmitt theorized about politics a century ago in an historical milieu quite different from ours.
But there are other critical factors at work as well.
The nub of Schmitt’s argument does not rest so much on the obvious insight that the motive force for political actors is a certain degree of passionate commitment, but the fact that the magnitude of such a commitment derives from a sense that one is unconditionally obliged to carry out some sort of unqualified moral imperative.
As Schmitt makes clear in The Theory of the Partisan, a collection of essays published toward the end of his life, such an imperative can be summed up in the simple word “justice.” The call of uncompromising justice outstrips the demands of upholding and obeying the laws, however they might be constituted or enforced.
The more a given social or cultural order with its web of reciprocal values and loyalties has unraveled and fallen into disrepair, the more likely the power of hyperpartisanship, even in its most extreme guise of the terrorist or guerilla fighter, is apt to consume the body politic.
In short, it is in the absence of any prevailing intuition of the “common good” that the divisive internal logic of the political itself runs amok. Under healthy political conditions, according to Schmitt, such a logic binds otherwise refractory masses of peoples into a “nation” for whom the “enemy” is the outsider.
But when the outsider is now regarded as an insider, and vice-versa, everything from anarchy to civil war is bound to ensue.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s noticed this trend and called it the problem of “autoimmunity”. Autoimmunity is a medical term describing a condition when certain proteins, or antibodies, which make up an organism’s defense system against external pathogens, turn instead against the body’s own tissues and cells.
In the political context toxic polarization can be considered a form of autoimmunity. The inherent “animus” that characterize the political, so far as Schmitt is concerned, redraws the lines separating “friend” from “enemy” at the micropolitical level. One becomes obsessed with finding the “enemy within,” whether it be the “communist”, the “fascist”, the “racist”, or the “groomer”.
Furthermore, the triumph in most Western democracies, at least among the elites, of what has come to be called “identity politics” has exacerbated such a process. As Yascha Mounk in The Identity Trap stresses, a political discourse that both privileges the positions of multiple minoritized subgroups, while portraying them not as complex moral agents but as corporate casualities of generalized “oppression” will inevitably engender social distrust and political chaos.
“By portraying society as being full of bigots who pose a constant threat to members of every conceivable minority group”, he writes, “they encourage more and more people to feel adrift in a relentlessly hostile world”. If the only “common enemy” is one’s next door neighbor, the personal becomes political and the personal political in the most perverse fashion.
Which brings us to the question of religion. Schmitt understood that the unity of the state was reliant on a shared experience and avowal of certain transcendent or “religious” norms that underwrote the diversity of political incentives and aims. It is the unequivocal force of religious adherence that enables the political apparatus to function in the first place, which is why all political theory, according to Schmitt, is a veiled form of “theology”.
Hence, his famous and routinely quoted statement:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure.
One overarching reason Schmitt was quite suspicious of the now highly fashionable stance that the “pluralism” of a secular democracy can sustain itself without collapsing into chaos is that political propensities are inherently religious ones. Without any kind of “metaphysical” anchor that holds the ship of state steady, the latter drifts off into a sea of storms that ultimately sink it.
The famous early modern theorist of democracy Jean-Jacques Rousseau recognized this reality when at the conclusion of his most important treatise The Social Contract he called for the necessity of a certain “civil religion” serving as a broader template for political loyalty, while ensuring a heterogeneity of specific beliefs and practices.
What has happened with the accession of what Mounk calls the “identity trap” in contemporary politics is that such a broader template has been trampled and trashed by our cultural elites, who are only concerned with preserving the conflictual drama of countless aggrieved factions vying for our attention.
These same elites regularly dismiss nowadays our own country’s historic “civil religion”, what the noted sociologist Robert Bellah construed as “an institutionalized collection of sacred beliefs about the American nation”, simply as “Christian nationalism”.
The outcome is the kind of apocalyptic tribulation the Irish bard William Butler Yeats envisaged in the aftermath of World War I in his memorable poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
We were given a foretaste of that sort of political hellscape today when cynical Democrats in league with a tiny, rogue faction of Republicans ousted the Speaker of the House for the first time in history, signaling legislative upheavals still to come that may prove even more unprecedented.
“The worst” indeed are now “full of passionate intensity”, and Schmitt’s dicta are poised to play out with a heinous fury that few have truly anticipated.