What with the “red speech” of President Biden declaring half of America as enemies, because he needs to gin up the Democratic vote for the midterms, it seems to me it is time to return to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and The Concept of the Political and his notion that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Or, to make it real simple, “there is no politics without an enemy.”
The point is that politics is seldom about a frank and fair discussion of the issues. Rather it is about insisting which issues are off the table, non-negotiable, and therefore subject to enforcement by the government in power.
This is what the liberal Politics of Pejorative is all about. When you call someone a racist-sexist-homophobe — or any of the others in the armory of insults — you are putting them beyond the pale. Their opinions are not acceptable in polite society.
I am not saying that our liberal friends are evil monsters for implementing their Politics of Pejorative. I am just saying that, once you make an issue political, you have started on the road of making people that disagree with you into enemies. And ultimately what you do with enemies is arrest them, imprison them, execute them.
The problem is, as Schmitt points out, we moderns have mixed up “state” and “society” so much that it is almost inevitable that political issues turn people into enemies. Years ago I read Andrew J. Coulson’s Market Education in which he makes the argument that government schools pit parents against each other. Any government program tends to one-size-fits-all and thus any child that doesn’t fit the government-approved size is going to be short-changed. He quotes British Prime Minister Tony Blair:
If we want to get [education policy] right, it has to be driven from the top, no holds barred.
Thus, if you are a parent that disagrees with the government’s policy then you are drawn into a fight against the one-size-fits-all policy, and there is no suggestion that, unless you can create a large political movement, that your ideas will ever be considered by the government.
In Schmitt’s view the pre-modern state was usually a regime that stood above society. I would say that the old feudal regime and even the regimes of the absolute monarchs concerned themselves overwhelmingly with power relationships with other states and the possibility of rebellion — usually by a cabal of noble lords — within the state. The doings of merchants and commoners and peasants were almost beneath their dignity, except of course in respect of taxes and the financing of the state.
But once the lower classes were admitted into the political realm then the “state” and “society” got mixed up. Says Schmitt:
[A]ll affairs hitherto of the state become social, and conversely all affairs hitherto “only” social become state affairs, as is necessarily the case in a democratically organized polity. Then the hithero “neutral” areas — religion, culture, education, economy — cease to be “neutral” in the sense of non-state and non-political.
He notes that some 19th century thinkers realized this. He quotes Jacob Burkhardt:
Only in one respect was [democracy] consistent, namely, in the insatiability of its demand for State control of the individual. Thus it effaces the boundaries between State and Society, and looks to the State for the things that Society will most likely refuse to do[.]
Let us address the questions directly. We talk about the “separation of church and state” as a good thing, meaning that people should be allowed to worship their chosen gods without the state barging in and making one preferred religion into a state religion with the head of state also the head of the church as is the case today in Britain where the monarch is the head of the Church of England.
But whatabout
The separation of culture and state
The separation of economy and state
The separation of law and state
The separation of science and state
You can see that in each case our liberal friends identify themselves with: the right to direct culture, particularly with respect to LGBT; direct the economy with respect to regulation of industry; establish the law by one-upping the evolution of law through the accumulation of legal decisions; and dominate science by suborning scientists with government grants.
I say that this is not good, because I don’t think that politicians and activists should be directing culture; I think that the government’s involvement in the economy always results in some form of pay-to-play corruption and 10 percent for the “big guy;” the domination of law by government and activist agendas turns law into predatory injustice; and government financing of science turns science into government’s attack dog, as in the late COVID crisis.
OK, fine. So what do we do to fix this?
Honestly, I don’t know, starting with my belief that it is impossible to undo any government program, however harmful, because every government program is basically a handout to the ruling-class’s supporters.
I just think that, for almost everything in human society, we should use persuasion rather than compulsion.
And as I look around I find that our liberal friends have got it upside down, as they demand persuasion for criminal justice and compulsion for everything else.