A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics

The Chronicle ^ | From the issue dated April 2, 2004 | By ALAN WOLFE

[Russian Sage]

A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics

By ALAN WOLFE

To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.

Strauss and Schmitt were once close professionally; Schmitt supported Strauss's application for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to Paris in 1932, the same year in which Strauss published a review of Schmitt's most important book, The Concept of the Political. Their paths later diverged. Strauss, a Jew, left Germany for good and eventually settled in Chicago, where he inspired generations of students, one of whom, Allan Bloom, in turn inspired Saul Bellow's Ravelstein. Schmitt, a devout Catholic who had written a number of well-regarded books -- including Political Theology (1922), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), and Political Romanticism (first printed in 1919) -- joined the Nazi Party in 1933, survived World War II with his reputation relatively unscathed, and witnessed a revival of interest in his work, from both the left and the right, before his death in 1985 at the age of 96.

Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi commitments, the left's continuing fascination with him is difficult to comprehend. Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a fellow at All Soul's College, Oxford, points out in his recently published A Dangerous Mind, that attraction is undeniable. Müller argues that Schmitt's spirit pervades Empire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the antiglobalization movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as the writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, recently much in the news because of his decision to turn down a position at New York University as a protest against America's decision to fingerprint overseas visitors (although not those from Italy).

When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of political and social science at the New School for Social Research in the 1990s, the efforts of the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a conference on Schmitt's thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish donor who informed me that he was not going to give any more of his money to an institution sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to "that fascist." I was tempted to tell him, not that it would have helped, that Schmitt had become the rage in leftist circles. Telos, a journal founded in 1968 dedicated to bringing European critical theory to American audiences, had started a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt's legacy, impressed by his no-nonsense attacks on liberalism and his contempt for Wilsonian idealism. A comprehensive study of Schmitt's early writings, Gopal Balakrishnan's The Enemy, published by the New Leftist firm of Verso in 2000, finds Schmitt's conclusion that liberal democracy had reached a crisis oddly reassuring, for it gives the left hope that its present stalemate will not last indefinitely. Such prominent European thinkers as Slavoj Ziûek, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida have also been preoccupied with Schmitt's ideas. It is not that they admire Schmitt's political views. But they recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a perspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like Michel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.

Schmitt's admirers on the left have been right to realize that after the collapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable rethinking. Yet in turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they have clung fast to an authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by such 20th-century thinkers as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. And it hasn't just been Schmitt. Telos, in particular, developed a fascination with neofascist thinkers and movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that anything would be better than Marx's contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his legacy.

Schmitt's influence on the contemporary right has taken a different course. In Europe, new-right thinkers such as Gianfranco Miglio in Italy, Alain de Benoist in France, and the German writers contributing to the magazine Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) have built on Schmitt's ideas. Right-wing Schmittians in the United States are not as numerous, but they include intellectuals -- often described as paleoconservative -- who expend considerable energy attacking neoconservatism from the right. One of them, Paul Edward Gottfried, a humanities professor at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, is especially prolific. Himself an occasional contributor to Junge Freiheit, Gottfried defends the magazine for rejecting "the view that every German patriot should be evermore browbeaten by self-appointed victims of the Holocaust." No wonder he has a soft spot for Carl Schmitt. Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term "fascism" in quotation marks, as if its existence in the European past is somehow open to question.

But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian sympathies. Still, Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics.

"The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis. "Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam," she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire." (Coulter recently displayed her vituperative talents by calling former Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee, politically "lucky" for having dropped a grenade on his foot while serving in Vietnam.) Liberals, by contrast, even in their newly discovered aggressively anti-Bush frame of mind, stop well short of Coulter's violent language. Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe.

Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil." Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt's ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.

No wonder that Schmitt admired thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, who treated politics without illusions. Leaders inspired by them, in no way in thrall to the individualism of liberal thought, are willing to recognize that sometimes politics involves the sacrifice of life. They are better at fighting wars than liberals because they dispense with such notions as the common good or the interests of all humanity. ("Humanity," Schmitt wrote in a typically terse formulation that is brilliant if you admire it and chilling if you do not, "cannot wage war because it has no enemy.") Conservatives are not bothered by injustice because they recognize that politics means maximizing your side's advantages, not giving them away. If unity can be achieved only by repressing dissent, even at risk of violating the rule of law, that is how conservatives will achieve it.

In short, the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself. Schmitt's German version of conservatism, which shared so much with Nazism, has no direct links with American thought. Yet residues of his ideas can nonetheless be detected in the ways in which conservatives today fight for their objectives.

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency -- conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

There are, of course, no party lines when it comes to conservatives and liberals in the United States. Many conservatives, especially those of a libertarian bent, are upset with President Bush's deficits and unenthusiastic about his call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. And, on the other side of the fence, there are liberals and leftists who want to fight back against conservatives as ruthlessly as conservatives fight against them.

Still, if Schmitt is right, conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political. From the 2000 presidential election to Congressional redistricting in Texas to the methods used to pass Medicare reform, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have indeed triumphed because they have left the impression that nothing will stop them. Liberals cannot do that. There is, for liberals, always something as important, if not more important, than victory, whether it be procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations.

If all that sounds defeatist, at least for liberal causes, Schmitt, inadvertently, offered a reason for hope. Searching for examples of liberalism to dismiss, he happened upon Thomas Paine and the American founders. Here, in his view, were liberals typically afraid of power; indeed, he wrote with some astonishment, they naïvely tried to check and balance it through the separation of powers. In that, Schmitt was correct. John Locke, not Thomas Hobbes, was the reigning social-contract theorist of the American experience. Our tradition owes more to Montesquieu than to Machiavelli, and even when we relied on the latter, we were influenced more by his thoughts on the Florentine republic than by his apologia for The Prince. America, Schmitt seemed to be saying, is the quintessential liberal society, a point rendered with great gusto, long after Schmitt's Concept of the Political appeared, in Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Liberal to its very core, the United States has never been as attracted to the realpolitik tradition in political thought as the Germans; in fact, our best thinkers in that tradition, Hans J. Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, were immigrants from Germany. Because he showed so little appreciation for the American liberal tradition, Schmitt, supposedly a theorist of power, misunderstood the most powerful political system in the world.

To the degree that conservatives bring to this country something like Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, they stand against not only liberals but America's historic liberal heritage. That may help them in the short run; conservative slash-and-burn rhetoric and no-holds-barred partisanship are so unusual in our moderately consensual political system that they have recently gotten far out of the sheer element of surprise, leaving the news media without a vocabulary for describing their ruthlessness and liberals without a strategy for stopping their designs. But the same extremist approach to politics could also harm them if a traditional American concern with checks and balances and limits on political power comes back into fashion.

In the meantime, we are left with a fascinating example of the ways in which ideas fashioned at another time and place can anticipate events in this society at this moment. No wonder the 2004 election has aroused so much interest. We will, if Schmitt is any guide, be deciding not only who wins, but whether we will treat pluralism as good, disagreement as virtuous, politics as rule bound, fairness as possible, opposition as necessary, and government as limited.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College.

[Russian Sage]

I think that Wolfe is way too reductionest for this to have very much validity, but it is interesting.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Yada, yada, yada.

[GeronL]

National Socialists are not 'conservative'.

National Socialism was even anti-christian, it was a "gutter religion".

National Socialism bears a strong resemblance to the Democrat Party.

[vbmoneyspender]

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency -- conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

Still, if Schmitt is right, conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political. From the 2000 presidential election to Congressional redistricting in Texas to the methods used to pass Medicare reform, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have indeed triumphed because they have left the impression that nothing will stop them. Liberals cannot do that. There is, for liberals, always something as important, if not more important, than victory, whether it be procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations.

My Lord, talk about projection. The liberals controlled the levers of power in this country for 60 years. Now all of sudden they start to lose their grip on control of the country and the result is they are slowly but surely going stark, raving mad.

[Diddle E. Squat]

This author is full of horse excrement, as revealed in this paragraph where he declares day dark and night light:

Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency -- conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

Rest assured, the Chronicle printed this so they could put 'facism' and 'Republican' in the same sentence. In fact they do that in the title and first sentence, so someone skimming the headlines will get the idea.

[little jeremiah]

I was thinking about picking this drivel apart, but realized I'd have to do it sentence by sentence. This is such horse s**t that calling it such is a grave insult to horses.

Two points:

"Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it."

This is just one of the many outright, bald, in-your-face lies in this drivel. The author is using Goebbels "Big Lie" technique heavily. The truth is the exact opposite.

Another point: Why do leftists insist that fascism and Nazism are "right wing"? Nazi is an acronym for National SOCIALISM!

[little jeremiah]

LOL!!! I hadn't read your comment when I made mine. Great minds think alike.

But I still say that's an insult to horses. Another kind of animal dung is more appropriate - say dog, the most repellent kind.

[Diddle E. Squat]

My apologies to Mr. Ed's butt!

[little jeremiah]

I was a fellow insulter. I apologize to all horses.

[MNJohnnie]

I think that Wolfe is way too reductionest for this to have very much validity, but it is interesting.


HAAAAAAA!!! ONLY a member the America Left could have the gall to accuse REPUBLICANS of slash and burn retoric!!! After 6 months of Bush the baby killer, Bush the Deserter, Bush the Corporate Stooge, Bush the new Hitler etc etc etc from the Democratic Party, we are suppose to believe CONSERVATIVES are guilty of "No Holds barred partisanship"?????? This would be funny if the Hysteric Bush haters didn't really BELIEVE they are the victims, not the PRACTIONERS, of this fascist style politics!

[Reactionary]

Here we have it: By way of Leo Strauss we arrive at Carl Schmitt. By way of Schmitt's aesthetics we arrive at Republican beliefs concerning good and evil. By way of a single American writer we arrive at Schmitt's influence in academia.

As usual, the entire thing is laughable. Strauss held a dialogue with Schmitt. Schmitt was the fascist. Strauss did not agree with him. He also didn't agree with the communist Alexandre Kojeve, whom he also held a written dialogue with, yet somehow no one accuses Strauss of being a communist.

[JLS]

Let me see if I have this right. A German philosopher of the early 20th Century who joined the Nazi party becomes all the rage among a segment of the left after the fall of the Soviet Empire and thus he can explain the modern GOP party? WHAT?

[Risor]

This guy Wolfe has certainly made a mess of his life!

[Russian Sage]

Another point: Why do leftists insist that fascism and Nazism are "right wing"? Nazi is an acronym for National SOCIALISM!

Originally, Left vs.Right meant Communist vs. Fascist and had nothing to do with Liberal vs. Conservative. The animosity between Leftist Communism and Rightist Nazi Socialism was centered around the Nazis being Nationalists and the Communist being Internationalists. So, classically, the difference between Left and Right has nothing to do with Socialism. The Nazis were defned as "right wing" before the term was ever applied to Conservatives.

This is how Wolfe is using the terms - at least in distinguishing the Left and Liberals. He doesn't seem to recognise a distinction between Rightist/Fascists and Conservatives.

[marron]

The article starts off to be interesting but slips the leash about half-way through and becomes simply incoherent.

He points out that Schmitt is primarily of interest to modern day leftists, and that Republicans haven't heard of him and would reject him if they had. He then goes to align Schmitt with US Republicans.

He has already admitted that it is the modern left that admires him, but asserts that conservatives are his disciples. This is a square-peg-round-hole problem; but his biggest problem is that he misunderstands the meaning of both conservatism and liberalism as the terms apply in the US.

US conservatism is wedded philosophically to the concept of limited government and rule of law; individual rights and protection of property are key elements. John Locke, in other words, Mr. Classic Liberal. His description of a belief in politics as a fight to the death has everything to do with the left's view of politics, and the fascist view, but nothing to do with the classic liberal view which is essentially what US conservatism is.

His remarks about liberalism are more of the same. The liberalism of the founding fathers is the "classic" variety, what we now call conservatism. It has nothing to do with modern "liberalism" which is the ideology of the left which we have already established is anything but "liberal" in the sense he tries to use it.

Schmitt's German version of conservatism, which shared so much with Nazism, has no direct links with American thought.... he admits but then proceeds to lay his thought at Republican feet. US conservatives supposedly believe in injustice, they are good at fighting wars because they don't care about humanity. He misses the point that if you believe in limited government, and rule of law, and individual rights, you are the precise opposite of aa fascist. If anything, that is bound to lead you into conflict with the real fascists at large in the world.

Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power

"Classic liberals", which is to say, US conservatives insist that freedom is that space that is independent of the state. Specifically family, the Church, the individual, and these must be protected from government or there is no freedom. Limited government; the "anti-fascism".

I get the feeling that this whole incoherent rant is just his way of calling Ann Coulter a Nazi, when her primary crime is exposing people like him as Schmittian leftists.

[TheMole]

I don't know where to begin refuting this steaming pile of used food, but here's a couple of things. Professor Wolfe doesn't mention, when he discusses Paul Gottfried and Gottfried's supposedly German-fascist-influenced conservatism, that Paul Gottfried is Jewish. Now someone's ethnic origin or religion shouldn't make any difference to the validity of their ideas, but that fact might have undermined Wolfe's argument. Secondly, the absolutely bizarre notion that Hitler and the Nazis were "conservative". They were radical revolutionaries who hated everything about the existing order and did their very best to destroy it.

[Diddle E. Squat]

Just watch a ton of papers print this garbage in the next few days.

[Tom A]

"The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.

If politics tends to bring out the worst in people, as the article implies, wouldn't that would be a very good reason for minimizing its social influence by keeping government small?

Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.

This illustrates an axiom of "modern" liberals that they are somehow exempt from the laws of nature, particularly those human laws whose workings have been long-established. Their "smartness" has bootstrapped them from the human condition, and therefore any political behavior couldn't be just an exercise of power because it is "enlightened", and really not political at all.

[marron]

Their "smartness" has bootstrapped them from the human condition, and therefore any political behavior couldn't be just an exercise of power because it is "enlightened", and really not political at all.

Nice one.

[Conservomax]

I disagree with the article in many places - particularly using Ann Coulter as an example of conservative antagonism.

Did he read Slander? She documents far more hateful things that libs have said about conservatives (Donna Brazile on JC Watts for example) than Ann Coulter has said about anyone else.

Her writings, particularly slander, are a reaction to lib hate speech.

However, he does have some valid points about the nature of politics.