Ever since I read Nazi jurist’s The Concept of the Political two years ago my experience of the political world is merely noticing how his idea, that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, makes complete and absolute sense of the world of politics.
Because as Curtis Yarvin wrote to make things “real simple,”
There is no politics without an enemy.
That means, to quote the world’s most political politician ever, Mao Zedong, that politics reduces to:
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?
Yep, Mao old chap, you said it. Who but the most political politician ever would have come up with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that created enemies out of thin air? Maybe because, if you are the world’s most political politician ever, you can’t have enough enemies.
And by the way, old chap, nobody since Attila the Hun has demonstrated the utter folly of politics-with-everything as you did in your monstrous rule over the Han people for 35 odd nightmare years.
Because, old chap, the first thing that your inheritors did after you died was to stop the madness of “struggling” perfectly loyal supporters of the regime, and to switch the Chinese economy to ca-pit-al-is-am (as I pronounce it in my fake Russian).
So, I understand our lefty friends and their crazy woke madness. If you believe in politics as the royal road to justice, then there must be an enemy. Squared.
The question always is, as Mao recognized, who are our enemies? Obviously they cannot be the educated elite; they are the good guys. It cannot be blacks, women (TERFs excepted), gays, transgenders, illegal immigrants: they are the helpless victims, the oppressed peoples, the dearly beloved “mascots” of the ruling class. It cannot be activists, NGO employees, educators, DEI administrators, lefty billionaires: they are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples.
No, the only enemy on offer is the white middle class and the white working class, because all the good ones are taken. Not really because they are the worst people ever, but because There Must be an Enemy. Otherwise there is no politics, and if you are a political elite, No Enemies is the one thing that cannot be. Gotta have an enemy; gotta have a war.
The interesting thing to me about the modern era is the way that the educated ruling class has invented a war-making culture to replace the war-making culture of the feudal era and the absolute monarch era.
Of course, back in the day, with Attila and the Huns and the Mongols, there was no limit to the driving before you of your enemies and the lamentation of their women.
But look at dear old Frederick the Great. All he wanted to do was annex Silesia and its good rich acres to Prussia — and play the flute of an evening. How does that compare to Napoleon and his World War Europe, and our beloved Democratic presidents Wilson and Roosevelt and their glorious victorious World Wars fought by the WWI doughboys and WWII GIs? Not to mention World War Commies, and world War Muslims, and now World War Climate.
Really, it takes an educated ruling class to come up with so many wars. The old royal chappies could never have invented so many wars.
But I will tell you a mystery. The appetite for war in a ruling class is not exhausted by World War, at least, not in our modern educated ruling class. Not a bit of it. Our modern ruling classes are also devoted to the identification and elimination of domestic enemies.
Didn’t I tell you? There is no politics without an enemy. Maybe I should have been more explicit. Let’s set it out all formal like.
There can be no political issue without an identified enemy.
And, so it is that the warlike creativity of our educated rulers is not just limited by World Wars but domestic wars as well, like the century long class war of the working class against the bourgeoisie, so excellently executed by our liberal friends, and now the race and gender war politics of our wokey friends.
Pity about those TERFs, of course.
But we, you and I, we soar above this primitive political enemies culture of our educated class rulers that seems more appropriate to the instinctive culture of our great ape forebears. For our liberal friends and our wokey friends are not our enemies. Because we conservatives and Christians and libertarians and Schmittians Do Not Believe in Politics, at least not as a saving faith. And not believing in politics we do not need enemies. Isn’t that nice.
Of course, the lefty everyone-an-enemy age does not come to an end with an amicable chat between former enemies over a couple of brewskies. It comes when ordinary people rebel against the economic failure of the politics addicts. As when the French people sneered at Robespierre as the dirty maximum — referring to his brilliant maximum-prices scheme to blunt the money-printing inflation of the revolution. As when, mirabile dictu, the Soviet and Maoist regimes ended not with a bang but with a whimper.
Is that how our wokey regime will end? Who knows. But end it will, because humans cannot live in the frenzy of revolutionary wars and culture wars and purges forever. Why? Oh, I don’t now. Maybe because God has decreed that the glorious wars of the politicos must be interrupted, from time to time, with an interval of wiving and thriving and childing. And I know just the place to do it: Padua. If Padua is good enough for those two gentlemen from Verona, it’s good enough for me.