Why Do the Virtue Signalers Hate Carl Schmitt?

www.americanthinker.com

For someone like Matthew Omolesky at The American Spectator the current interest in Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt among the unwashed Right is, to quote President Eisenhower, “gravely to be regarded.” He quotes a couple of guys from the libertarian Reason:

“America’s ‘radical defense of classical liberalism’ has made the United States exceptional. With Schmittian philosophy resurgent on the New Right, it’s time for conservatives to defend our founding principles from a vicious ideology that seeks to arrogate supreme power to the state and abrogate the natural rights of the individual.”

No! The whole point of unwashed interest in Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, for me, is that he helps us understand how not to “arrogate supreme power to the state.” Then Omolesky shows that he really understands nothing, encapsulating Schmitt’s philosophy as “Friend good, enemy bad.”

Matthew Omolesky! You have completely missed the point! For Schmitt, the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. The moral is the distinction between good and evil. And ne’er the twain shall meet, except in what experts have come to call “totalitarianism.”

I like to illustrate the difference between politics and morality in my understanding of the distinction between men and women. Men aren’t that concerned about morality, but they are really concerned about the need to kill the enemy in the drug gang a couple of blocks away before he kills one of our guys. Women aren’t that concerned with enemies, but they are always making moral judgements about the people of their acquaintance, and whether things have got to the point where “I am never talking to her again.”

We hard-right armed insurrectionists cannot understand the present moment without understanding that, for our liberal friends, Trump is the Enemy. Why is that? Curtis Yarvin: “there is no politics without an enemy.”

Omolesky doesn’t like Yarvin because he called our Founders liars. Okay, fine. But Trump has to be the liberal Enemy because “there is no politics without an enemy.”

Notice how I am always writing about “our liberal friends” or “our Democratic friends.” There is a reason for that. I do not think that liberals are The Enemy. I believe that our liberal friends are fools and knaves that believe in politics as the solution to social problems -- and race problems and patriarchy problems and climate problems. Earth to liberals: politics makes most things worse.

I repeat: Doesn’t Yarvin’s maxim exactly explain the minds and the acts of our liberal friends, from intellectuals to politicians to activists? They are devoted to politics: therefore there must be an enemy.

Now, to me, Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt is important because he teaches me why politics is really dangerous to humans and other living things. I Have a Dream that one day our liberal friends will finally understand that politics is radioactive and that politics should be shut down like nuclear plants before we melt down all the way to China. My understanding of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt is that politics should be confined to dealing with the problem of real external enemies, and real internal thugs and criminals.

Schmitt explains why Communism has been such a disaster, why Nazism led the Germans into Hell, why the Iranian regime is blowing up the ancient land of Zarathustra until the rubble bounces. Using politics as a guide to running society at large is a disaster, because humans are social animals. Nearly all the time we interact with each other with the give and take of community and work and play and a shared moral framework. Politics is only useful in an emergency, as “in emergency, break glass.”

Yes, but whatabout morality, about good and evil? I direct your attention to our Democratic friends in Minnesota, and the apparent large-scale corruption featuring the Somali community. If you look at Minnesota politics through a Schmittian lens you see that, to Democratic politicians, it doesn’t matter that the Somalis have been ripping off all kinds of federal social programs. The Somalis help get the Somali vote out in elections and harvest the ballots to defeat the Republican Enemy. The Somalis are the Friends of the Democratic politicians in their fight against the Enemy, and in politics you reward your supporters and friends.

In other words, despite all the talk about morality and helpless victims, our Democratic friends just fight the enemy and gift the friends that help them get elected. Morality, good and evil, has nothing to do with the case. In politics the only rule is: just win, baby. Morality, good and evil, only applies outside of politics.

Was Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt a Nazi monster? Let’s say he was: the worst of the worst. Okay, virtue-signaler, you are on the right side of history, you and all the Good People.

But my question is whether Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt was right, that politics is about friend vs. enemy, and nothing else.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Public Domain