"Jacobin" on Carl Schmitt

for lefties, there has to be a politics

I was going a Google search of “carl schmitt distinction political "yarvin"” on Carl Schmitt and didn’t get to Curtis Yarvin, the far-right conspiracy theorist that introduced me to Schmitt, until result #6. The previous results were all about how Yarvin is a far-right blogger.

Result #1, of course, was an article by Angus Brown from far-left on-line magazine Jacobin, entitled “The Left Should Have Nothing to do with Carl Schmitt.”

Bless your heart, Google.

Jacobin notes that

Noted reactionaries like Richard Spencer, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and Adrian Vermeule have embraced [Schmitt], and so, too, have figures on the Left, including Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben.

So what does Jacobin have to say about Schmitt? It is interesting to me because, in my view, Schmitt blows up the conceit at the heart of the left’s Narrative that the way for humans to achieve equality and justice is with politics. I interpret Schmitt to say that politics is always about friend and enemy, so it will always reduce to bashing your enemy and gifting your friend.

First of all, Brown says, Schmitt has a “revulsion” towards liberalism because of the contradiction between political tolerance and liberalism’s “need to defeat its enemies.”

The two faces of liberalism — impotent pluralism and authoritarian universalism — were therefore, Schmitt argued, inherently contradictory.

To Brown, Schmitt argued that liberalism either dithered before its enemies or it “pursued its challengers with dogmatic zeal, forcing them to accept its universal and humanizing worldview or face annihilation.” What’s more, the narrative of “rights” and the fact of technocracy meant that liberalism practiced a hidden form of domination.

And lefties like this attack on liberalism because Schmitt echoes their own dislike of technocracy, as the Left “recognizes that democracy and emancipation are two sides of the same coin”.

Angus Brown concedes that the state has a need “in extraordinary circumstances to vanquish its external and internal enemies in order to maintain its unity.”

This fundamental fact did not, however, mean that politics could simply be reduced to the struggle for domination between friends and enemies, or that political unity was simply based on the victory of one group of friends over another.

Brown pulls in Schmitt contemporary Hermann Heller to argue that

true democracy could be founded only upon acceptance of the tension between pluralism and democratic unity. Politics could not be put to an end through political struggle. For Heller, the key to democracy was the establishment of a basic unity that provided the framework within which contestation, confrontation, and dispute could nonetheless take place.

Right, pal. But what I interpret Schmitt to be saying is that if “contestation, confrontation, and dispute” take place within the context of politics then it will resolve into friend vs. enemy and the use of force. If you want to live under “pluralism” then you have to take it outside of politics, outside a context where force is possible. That is the gist of Francis Fukuyama’s dictum in his Political Order books that egalitarianism is only possible in a non-state society, where the tribal chief has to negotiate with the other men and does not have the option to sicc the FBI on them.

Says Brown:

Through the demonization of enemies at home and abroad, Schmittian reactionary politics seeks to create a unified nation in which authentic politics gives way to a politics of authoritarian seizure of power in the name of democracy.

Odd isn’t it. I think the opposite is true. I think that the left’s faith in politics as the royal road to justice means that anyone opposed to the rules of the royal road to justice is an enemy — a racist-sexist-homophobe in current parlance.

And in current lefty world, if you speak publicly — at a university or a public forum —outside the lefty Overton Window you must be silenced because you are creating “harm.” In other words you are hurting people and you are an enemy of peace and harmony.

The great challenge for human society is how to create a space free of politics, free of the friend vs. enemy distinction. The whole point of Carl Schmitt is to recognize that as soon as you start talking about a possible enemy you are creating a politics, and as soon as you want a politics you will need to create an enemy.

In my view, starting probably with Rousseau and certainly no later than Marx, our educated class has been creating occasions for some people in society to think of others as enemies. The whole point of Marx was to say, from an analysis of classical economics, that the workers were being robbed of the “use value” of their labor. And that in the market economy they were going to be “immiserated” as the market squeezed the profit out of their labor So the capitalists were the Enemy.

Thus the capitalists are the enemy of the workers. The patriarchs are the enemy of women. The white racists are the enemy of the Negro. Guess what. People won’t think of Other People as the enemy unless some activist goes out and teaches them to hate.

Today we have the Allyism construct that makes the educated class the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors, with the White Oppressors as the Enemy.

Our great challenge is to walk away from this culture in our educated class, which seems designed to create enemies.

Why do they do this? Because “there is no politics without an enemy.” If you want power, you want to swing your weight in the corridors of power, then you need be imagine an enemy and teach your friends to hate the enemy.

In my view you can make a good case that all the violent events of our history were gussied up by guys looking for a fight.

Did the American Revolutionaries really need to fight the Brits? Probably not, if they had cooled their jets. The French Revolution? Hardly, the Assembly of Notables in 1787 showed that the French nobility was already internalizing the ideas of the Enlightenment. The US Civil War? Hey, given another 20 years and slavery would have become scandalous.

The workers? The Industrial Revolution brought the poor up from starvation to respectability. Women? Modern medicine and appliances were bringing women into the public square with or without “women’s rights.” Gays? Everyone knew that Oscar Wilde was gay; but he insisted upon making an issue about it and getting into a legal fight with his gay lover’s noble father, the Marquess of Queensberry.

In other words, there are always people in the upper class, whether landowning nobles or educated brats, looking for a fight. The great human challenge is to get them to cool their jets before there’s a butcher’s bill to pay.

But our lefty friends and our Jacobin friends live in another universe.