Analyzing DSA Through a Schmittian Lens

If you read the issues page of DSA grad student Darializa Avila Chevalier’s campaign for Congress in New York’s District 13 you see it is all about the fight.

We’re fighting to stay here and live full, dignified lives in the city we call home.

She has a Day One Agenda:

Darializa will sign onto these bills to secure housing as a human right, universal healthcare, union protections, a $15 minimum wage and more.

I say that this understanding of politics and human life profoundly misunderstands the nature of human life and human society. Let us use the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach to illustrate the point. Feuerbach experienced religion with: “God is a projection of idealized human qualities.” I am using a Grok inquiry “summary of feuerbach’s philosophy.”

Feuerbach grounds philosophy in sensuous, material human existence—the real, embodied individual in community with others.

Day to day, hour after hour, moment by moment.

But Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, didn’t like the passivity of “community with others.”

[He argued] that Feuerbach’s materialism was too contemplative and passive. Marx extended it into historical materialism, focusing on social practice, class struggle, and changing the world rather than just interpreting it.

What Marx and Chevalier and all people with a political agenda believe is that the answer to our problems is government force. That’s what “We’re fighting” means.

If “housing is a human right” enforced by government, it means that politicians and administrators will spend other people’s money to create housing for poor people. What happens down the road, as politicians set up contracts for their contributors and the bureaucrats mismanage the whole business?

We already know that “universal healthcare” doesn’t work. The Brits tried it; the Canadians are doing it. It ends up as an expensive rationing system with poor service that eats the government’s budget. And the rich set up a parallel system, even if it means traveling to another country to get surgery.

We already know that “union protections” don’t work. They didn’t work for US auto workers that priced US auto manufacturers out of the market, and they don’t work for government employees that demand tax increases to pay for their pensions. The best way to protect workers is to help them know the market rate for their skills and make it hard for powerful special interests to game the system.

We already know that “minimum wage” doesn’t work. The City of Seattle has a $21/hr minimum wage and its Uber rates are the highest in the country. Thomas Sowell said: “The real minimum wage is zero.” The point is that if you offer a wage under the legal minimum and someone is willing to work for that wage, then the minimum wage is just a political fraud.

I get it. With politics, from Marx onward, we are going to go about “changing the world.” But that means with force. We already had a century of experiments in “changing the world” with politics. It always changes the world for the worse.

If I ruled the world I would force all the little kiddies at Freshman Orientation to recite the Schmittian Creed:

I believe there is no politics without an enemy.

I believe morality is the distinction between good and evil.

I believe the economic is the distinction between useful and harmful.

And I would add to that:

I believe that culture is the distinction between our way and not our way.

The point of reciting these distinctions is to drum sense into the bear of very little brain and raise the question: when you say this or that is a human right and society must provide it with government, you are saying that it can be provided by force.

Clausewitz: “war is the mere continuation of politics by other means.”

When you decide to do something with a government program you are declaring that the only solution is war — or more politely, like Candidate Chevalier, a fight.

Get it? Politics, rights, fight, war. All the same game. But only appropriate for demolishing an enemy. And most of life is lived in the moral world of good and evil, in the cultural world of doing things our way instead of their way, and the economic world of doing things that are useful and profitable rather than wasteful or harmful.

It’s really not that hard. But why do so many people insist on doing things by force?