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April 21, 2004
Tim Dunlop has responded to this earlier post by suggesting that it implies that "political debate isn't about good guys and bad guys!"
I responded to this in Tim's comments box by linking to these posts here and here and here. These posts on Carl Schmitt suggest that political debate is marked by a conflict between friends and enemies.
Tim misses the way the media mediates the political conflict and debate. Let me illustrate this by quoting a passage from a book I'm currently reading, Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. In it he says that:
"Modern politics tends towards an ever-tightening circle. It may reflect a primitive fear--all that media, all that public opinion, all that baying for blood. There are savages out there and ravening wolves. Only a brave politician or a desperate one would try to break out because he is conditioned to fear that, even if he is not cut down, he will never get back in. The aim is to be still alive at the end of the day..... and the end of the day is usually about 6.15 p.m. when the commercial channels are finished with the political news and everyone can relax."
I subscribe to that view of politics. It is all about refusing to concede ground in the daily battle and being seen not to have lost at the end of the news day.
It is not that politics is a battle between friend and foe because the media represents it that way. At its core politics is a battle between friend and foe.
Update
As an example, consider the account given by Watson when sitting in a plane next to Ian McLachlan at the end of a week of parliamentary sitting. Watson says:
"I wondered whether I should speak to Mr McLachlan, the more so because that night I was having dinner with a mutual friend, the grazier and writer Jim Morgan....I felt not animosity to McLachlan, yet I thought I might give up something valuable by attempting a friendly exchange and decided to stay behind the political battlements. I said nothing. Better to remain the anonymous adversary, keep the animus intact, better not to risk the ardour of conviction. So not a word did I speak, even as I thought how crass and hollow it was, and what churls politics makes of us."
Battlements, animus and conflict are the core of politics. It shapes the participants views, personalities, perspectives and strategies. Paul Keating understood this. Watson describes Keating working the floor in Parliament in the spring of 1992.
"There were times...when in the House it seemed as if he [Keating] felt that he must destroy his opponents totally, physically; that he thought his duty would not be done until they were all strewn on the floor, or slumped across the benches massacred like Penelope's suitors and impaled on their flags. No one would be spared."
That makes contact with Schmitt's conception of politics as a conflict between friend and foe. It is a long long way from Tim Dunlop's interpretation of "political debate isn't about good guys and bad guys!"Political conflict is about blood on the floor, death and wounded opponents.
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Well Gary, that's true, but the point's almost tautological. Politics is also, or should also be, or at least can also be, about much much much more than the imperatives of daily combat, as I'm sure you know. I'll go to your Schmitt posts when I get some time, but the amoral dualistic reduction to friend or foe is, in my view, no more than a trite conveniently self-deluding excuse to put your political feet up. Schmitt has been, of course, a font of inspiration for the neo-cons, all of which is sickly ironic given his career as a Nazi apologist.
BTW, I enjoyed that Watson book very much. If I recall, you are following on from the later Watson?