Third Way: When America Turned To Authoritarianism
AP Photo, Drew Angerer
Last week, President-elect Joe Biden victory was affirmed when the electoral college awarded him the 306 votes he earned in November. Yet, at the time of writing, over three-fourths of Republican still believe that Biden's victory is illegitimate. Members of the right have even threatened violence to prevent the electoral votes from going to Biden. A Republican state representative in Michigan was removed from his committee assignments for inciting violence, and the state's capitol building, where the electoral voting took place, was closed because of "credible security threats."
The threat of violence from far-right, and specifically alt-right, figures has increased in the past four years. In September testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray singled out racially motivated violence as being the leading domestic threat to the United States. This tendency towards violence among alt-right groups is not something that exists purely at the fringe, but is instead a driving ideological aspect of alt-right theory, which finds its roots in Carl Schmitt. Although originally a critic of the Nazi regime, the legal scholar Carl Schmitt switched sides in the early 1930s when he began supporting the party. He was the "Crown Jurist" for the Nazis during that time, and most notably defended Hitler's extralegal killings and his totalitarian rule. Now, his ideas have found an audience in the United States.
What differentiates the current far-right from older style racists is the veneer of intellectualism, which stems from sources such as Schmitt and poor interpretations of Nietzsche. The danger of this intellectualism is its trickle-down effect, as it reaches less educated, poor, white nationalists and inspires them to violence against the state and ethnic minorities. Schmitt's view of politics, while a framework for the alt-right, provides an incisive look at what American politics is heading towards at its fringes, both left and right, and why a resurgence of pluralism is needed to counteract it. This should come from an increased political education of citizens as well as a stronger theoretical tradition in both parties, allowing for complex nuances and political beliefs to survive.
Schmitt's politics revolves around a fundamental distinction between "friend and enemy." In this regard, Schmitt understands politics almost entirely as two identity groups battling for supremacy and stability, as the elimination of one group is paramount to the other's survival. Schmitt, like the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, proposes an antagonistic view of human psychology, arguing that tribalism and the distinction between friend and enemy are necessary as it gives existential meaning to politics. Liberal pluralism, Schmitt argues, leads to a de-politicization of the commonwealth. The division between us and them, then, is an immutable part of human psychology and a necessary part of the political process. Here, Schmitt's critique of liberalism seems frightfully backed by data; according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's democracy index, participation in democracy has increased in the previous decade while every other democratic institution has been weakened. Increased polarization has led voters on the left and right to see the possibility of defeat as an existential one, increasing politicization.
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Schmitt's philosophy is similar to that of Hobbes in other ways too. Both Hobbes and Schmitt argued that a sovereign or leviathan should have an immense amount of power over a political body. Schmitt establishes this through his understanding of emergency powers, which gives the sovereign the power to declare a time of "exception," therefore allowing for a suspension of standard constitutional law and giving the sovereign total extralegal authority. Schmitt goes on to say that while the political body is in a state of exception, the sovereign can restore normality in any shape or form. Because Schmitt understands politics to be based in the division of two opposing camps, the sovereign ultimately enforces one side's political identity. the sovereign can use violent or other means to suppress a view of normality that differs from their own in the name of stability, the key factor that drives the authoritarianism of Hobbs and Schmitt.
It is not challenging to see how easily Schmitt's views lend themselves to the American alt-right. Richard Spencer, the most prominent intellectual leader of the movement, identified the alt-right as "identitarianist," giving identity the chief role in politics. Therefore, the preservation of white culture is paramount. Like Schmitt, the alt-right has a virulence for democracy and detests pluralism for its perceived weakness, couching their desire for segregation by claiming it is for greater political stability. Above all, however, Schmitt's influence on the alt-right represents one of the first times that authoritarianism has found substantial an ideological home in the United States. American authoritarianism, while not defining the current right, has been evoked by Trump's leadership. The small-government conservatism that once characterized the Republicans have given way to an expanded executive authority and a figure who tarnishes democratic norms.
The threat of this kind of thinking does not come exclusively from the far-right. The far-left engages in a similar type of "us versus them" mentality, although without the looming threat of violence. Both find their base on social media. Public ostracizing and shaming of those who do not agree with leftist ideas are strikingly similar to the division Schmitt bases politics on. The far-left continually demands that its politicians become more progressive than the last, and those who fail their purity test are publicly condemned. Criticism of their ideology is considered racist and any ideological deviation is immoral. Their actions evoke Schmitt's relativism, which claims “only members of a group are in a position to decide, from the perspective of an existentially affected participant, whether the otherness of another group amounts to a threat to their own form of life and thus potentially requires to be fought.” The claim that ideas are threatening, although credible in some cases, is reminiscent of condemning of non-communist ideas in the Soviet Union. A Guardian opinion article discussing Senator Elizabeth Warren's perceived faux-progressivism sums this view up well: "a president who is not progressive in their dealings with the rest of the world is not a progressive at all," it claims, meaning that Warren "is not one of us".
Schmittian identity politics has begun to find its way into the mainstream political discourse of both sides. "Red" or "blue" have become ideological identities, with members of both sides believing that significant harm will occur if the other party succeeds. Both sides perceive the opposing side as far more extreme than the other, making sweeping generalities about each camp. This has caused a rise in friendships broken over politics and a decline in actual conversation about complex political issues that cannot be solved in 250 character tweets. Assumptions and simple, diametric political thinking has grown into the partisan problem the country faces today.
It's Never As Simple As Us Versus Them
Political discourse in the United States as well as the rise of the authoritarian right seems to have Schmitt smiling smugly in his grave. After all, his distinction between friend and enemy seems to have been proven true, and the liberal pluralism of the United States has produced camps that find themselves pointing spears at one another. Indeed, an identity politics based on ideology and race is the perfect validation of Schmitt's beliefs. He seems to have accurately diagnosed the problem of de-politicization that liberalism can lead to. This allows pluralistic differences to fester. When they come to light, the body politic is in no prepared to deal with them through deliberative public debate, and the result leads to diametric views. Yet this does not mean Schmitt's theories have come to pass and the United States is on a course towards the injection of one "normality" over another, the choices being between a whitewashed ethnostate or an ideologically rigid dystopia that clamps down on criticism. Indeed, a strengthening of theoretically based liberalism and republicanism would result in a far better, and unfortunately for Schmitt, more stable outcome.
Like Hobbes, Schmitt believes that stability comes from the elimination of those who have ideological differences from the sovereign. Hobbes, who wrote Leviathan while witnessing the English civil war, understood the state of nature (which civil war is) to be the utmost evil and sought to avoid it at any cost. Schmitt believes in this too, with the addition that ideological rigidity allows a state to function at peak performance. This belief becomes complicated, however, when the distinction between the public and private comes into play.
Hobbes argued that the sovereign could always demand that a citizen believe something in public, but the sovereign has no control over the private thoughts of people. This was one of the main reasons why Hobbes promulgates Leviathan as a textbook and calls for an overhaul of the universities. Nonetheless, Hobbes' admittance that the sovereign cannot control private thought leaves open the possibility that widespread, popular dissent could exist, threatening the stability of the commonwealth, beyond the sovereign’s authority. The true father of liberalism, the rationalist Baruch Spinoza, saw this weakness and used it to entirely invert Hobbes’s authoritarianism. Indeed, in his book on Hobbes, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt goes so far as to blame Spinoza (in seemingly anti-semitic terms) as the "liberal Jew who noticed the barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the sovereign state." In chapters 19 and 20 of Tractatus Theologico Politicus, a work that takes much from Leviathan, Spinoza argues that stability does not come from the suppression of views, as they will inevitably come back and do so violently, but instead their toleration. This leads Spinoza to not only advocate for a pluralistic society but also religious tolerance, something almost unheard of in the late 1600s. As Schmitt recounts in The State Theory, this laid the seedbed for liberal thought based on pluralism to blossom and ultimately made Hobbes' leviathan toothless.
It is this same spirit of pluralism that is needed to stir the stagnating political culture of the United States today. Through increased toleration of opposing viewpoints, rather than a condemnation of tough conversation, the political discourse can grapple with nuances that exist beyond political labels. That also demands a move away from current political labels such as simply "red" and "blue". The Democratic party reacts more to what the Republican party does instead of espousing its own political theory. The Republican party did not even have a platform for 2020, instead of relying on the threat of "socialism" to energize voters into supporting them. Modern-day presidential candidates are not theorists or philosophers, but instead those with the most charisma and those who can win over the most voters. Others, like Senator Bernie Sanders, represent inflexible ideological revolutionaries, or alt-right leaning populists, like President Donald Trump. If Plato, who argued for philosopher-kings to serve as the leaders of Kallipolis in The Republic, were to see the candidates the modern parties offer, he would be madder than a gadfly in the Athenian streets.
The absence of the philosophical and the theoretical in politics has grave consequences. It naturally leads to demagoguery, as is evident from the success of politicians who are glib speakers or wield cults of personalities. The emergence of the alt-right shows that less theory in politics leads to simpler narratives. Schmitt's philosophy was able to be diluted down into "us versus them," and conservatives used socialism while progressives used racist as similar buzzwords. The deeper meaning of what is liberal and what is conservative is both lost on the public and lost on the candidates who bear their mantle.
To remedy a reliance on overly simplistic catechisms, theory should make its way back into the mainstream political discourse. This needs to come from both an increase in political literacy and engagement among the public but also a strong defense of pluralism by American leaders. The philosopher Hannah Arendt understood the need for pluralism as much as Spinoza did. In The Human Condition, Arendt described plurality as "the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction.” For Arendt, plurality is what makes a human a political being. Plurality keeps all equal while also meaningfully distinct through our opinions instead of attributes like physical identity or ideologically devotion. Arendt also realizes that plurality is dangerous, as it forces us to engage with other meaningfully distinct opinions to establish a common world. This can lead to a fear of pluralism and a reliance on ideological bulwarks. If citizens are to be politically engaged, or if stability is hoped to be achieved, pluralism must be brought to bear and faced head-on.
The fact that Schmitt found a home among Americans is a wakeup call. His popularity with those fed-up with politics reveals how the current political paradigm has failed to bring to light the ills haunting United States culture, and how pluralism, which should have confronted the rising illiberalism from the right, was ignored. What should have been an educating effect that increased nuanced thought instead resulted in the ascendancy of a simple dogma based on tribalism, and one that has reached the fringes of the left. The danger that Schmitt's influence poses is the legitimizing of a violent public discourse, one that results in the dystopian vision he believes in. Now that the sheet has been ripped off of the alt-right, the United States needs to embrace a more philosophically and politically reflective politics rather than one based on identity. The Democrat and Republican party need to reimagine their values and priorities, retaining voter’s faith in governmental institutions while also working to better understand the ideology of those they claim to represent. After a four-year flirtation with identity politics, the United States has seen enough. While deliberative democracy is far less flashily and demands more thought and work, it is leagues better than authoritarianism based on who we are not.
