Friend or enemy? Rising above the theories of Carl Schmitt

Well, the election is only a short time away. And lest you felt that political campaigning couldn’t get any more base, you were wrong. Over the last year, descriptors of opponents have ranged from“fascist” to “communist,” from “bigot” to “existential threat,” and from “Hitler” to “Jezebel.”

Ah, Democracy.

Clearly, in politics, we have a bright line separating “friends” from “enemies.” But this is nothing new. A political philosopher named Carl Schmitt unpacked these phenomena nearly one hundred years ago.

Carl Schmitt was a conservative German constitutional theorist who made his name penning his famous 1932 work The Concept of the Political. In it, Schmitt articulated a paradigm of “the political” that has been fervently debated ever since. Schmitt explained,

In contrast to the various relatively independent endeavors of human thought and action, particularly the moral, aesthetic, and economic, the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way. The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced. Let us assume that in the realm of morality, the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beauty and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. . . The specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

In his thesis (and in subsequent works), Schmitt spared no criticism of liberal democracy. He suggested that, in championing plurality and individualism, liberal democracy failed to recognize the foremost (and base) reality of human nature: we are broken, we are scared, and we make existential distinctions about who and what scares us. Liberal democracy, he argued, waters down the values and cultural bonds that unite a people and the sense of who is “friend” and “enemy.” In so doing, Schmitt warned, such a system allows in enemies (who themselves keenly and unapologetically recognize the friend-enemy distinction) who will destroy society. In other words, by white-washing the friend-enemy distinction, liberal democracy allows the clear-sighted, devious fox into the dreamy, befuddled hen house. The consequence, Schmitt warns, is catastrophic.

Furthermore, Schmitt contends, liberal democracy cannot ultimately avoid the friend-enemy distinction. It only obscures the reality and impairs the ability of a people to see clearly amidst feel-good processes and false safeguards, rhetorical flourishes, and cynical obfuscations. In the end, Schmitt contends, this blinkered approach leaves the people imperiled until it is too late.

Schmitt pulls no punches on just who the enemy is:

The political enemy need not be morally evil, or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specifically intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Schmitt worried that “If a people is no longer willing to decide between friend and enemy the most likely result will not be eternal peace but anarchy or subjection to another group that is still willing to assume the burdens of the political.”

If some of this seems hauntingly familiar, it may not surprise that the Nazis took a shine to Carl Schmitt. The nascent National Socialist Party brought Schmitt on, for a time, as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” offering legal justification for many horrible acts including Hitler’s bloody 1934 purge of scores of his enemies in “The Night of the Long Knives.” Within a few years, however, Schmitt would fall out of favor with Hitler’s regime due to a philosophical divergence and, quite simply, because he ceased to be useful to them. In 1985, Carl Schmitt died, an unrepentant National Socialist and legal scholar. And now, modern thinkers are reckoning with his work and asking themselves if he was, in fact, on to something.

Lest one dismisses Schmitt’s ideas as bigoted ideas from a bygone age, consider our harsh modern reality. Whether we like it or not, our world does, in fact, operate more or less on a “friend-enemy” distinction. Not unreasonably, everybody desires community and craves safety, security, and success within that community. As such, people are drawn to like-minded enclaves, whether they be physical communities or associations within civil society. Conservatives are drawn to conservatives and liberals to liberals. The religious commonly congregate with fellow religious. Friendships flourish between parents whose children play on the same team while childless adults may gather at the latest opera, museum, or nightclub. Enthusiasts for football or golf enjoy their fellow sports fans. The list of like-associates-with-like goes on and on. Not surprisingly, friendship and common interests (faith, family, and values) guide people to deep and somewhat protective relationships.

To be sure, Carl Schmitt put his finger on a human tendency to be “wary of the other,” but he goes too far. He fails to recognize that life, thankfully, isn’t that neat. There is immense intermixing of political persuasions, demographic groups, and value sets across the wide expanse of social engagements. And, pace Carl Schmitt, the world does not fall apart. To be so binary about human relations by dividing all relationships into “friend or enemy” is akin to the unthinking modern binary injunction to define all relationships between “oppressor or oppressed.” It just isn’t that simple.

Even more, contra Carl Schmitt, most people want to live in peace and not in conflict. Most people recognize that life, society, and the people we meet are complex. In encountering others, we are not confronted with either the monochromatic of bright benevolence or dark malevolence. Rather, we encounter Shakespearean figures of a deep variegation.

So, returning to our current election year malaise, the temptation to abide by Schmittian “friend-enemy” distinctions is mammoth. But I think many of us are tired of it all. I know I am. That is why I was so heartened by a story I read from 1973—a story that illustrated the facile nature of Schmitt’s ultimate conclusions.

At the time, George Shultz was President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury (Shultz would ultimately become Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan). With Cold War tensions nearly three decades old and the Vietnam War still raging, there was little debate whether the Soviets were America’s enemy. During this feverish time, Shultz found himself in Leningrad engaged in tedious meetings with a particularly crusty, old-school Soviet Communist counterpart named Nikolai Patolichev. As luck would have it, their schedule lightened giving them some time to tour. Asked what he might like to see, Shultz hoped to take in the art at The Hermitage or the architecture of Peter the Great’s Summer Palace. Instead, the dour Patolichev insisted that their first visit should be to the Leningrad cemetery. As George Shultz remembered it:

We entered and looked down upon a long path between huge mounds where tens of thousands of Soviet citizens who died in the [Nazis’] Siege of Leningrad were buried. I carried a wreath and we walked slowly down the path toward a memorial as funereal music played. As we walked, Patolichev described the fighting and the number of people who were killed. “Every Russian family has some member who fought, died, or suffered as a result of the Siege of Leningrad,” he told me. As he spoke, I noticed that the Soviet interpreter had dropped out and had been replaced; she had moved back with the rest of the party and was openly sobbing.

The tough old guy, Patolichev, had tears streaming down his cheeks. When we were about to leave the cemetery, I said to him, “I, too, fought in World War II and had friends killed beside me.” Then I went to the middle of the terrace above the cemetery, raised my hand in a long salute, dropped it smartly, as an old marine, turned about-face, and left. The Soviets were moved by this salute far more than the wreath.

Ostensibly, George Shultz and Nikolai Patolichev were not friends. For all intents and purposes, as men from profoundly divergent backgrounds, systems, and worldviews, they could, according to Schmitt’s clean construct, be deemed enemies. And yet, in a moment of deep poignancy and unexpected intimacy, Shultz and Patolichev were stripped of all but their common humanity—a humanity deeply rooted in the duty of steadfast soldiering and the pain of searing loss. Shultz and Patolichev were not friends, per se. But they were no longer enemies.

Perhaps Carl Schmitt was right—up to a point. Out of sheer survival, we can find some advantage in an almost unconscious tendency to identify our friends and enemies—to draw bright, if not bitter, lines—and arrange our lives accordingly. But is this how we want to live?

Not me.

This election season and beyond, let’s embrace the complexity of our neighbor (and ourselves). Let’s find those untravelled paths of poignancy and intimacy that wend their way, imperceptibly, through the Sturm und Drang of politics. Let’s be charitable. Vigorous in defense of principles, but resolved in defense of comity.

This season let’s prove Carl Schmitt wrong.

Catholic World Report