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April 9, 2004
I've been a bit inward turned of late because I have so little time to read or surf the web. With a little more time up my sleeve I've come across this article on Schmitt by Alan Wolfe.
I recall reading Wolfe when a postgraduate. So it caught my eye. Wolfe says that Schmitt has become the darling of the left in search of a way to renovate Marxism; a left that still has a soft spot for totalitarianism.
Hmm.
Might it not be the case that the texts of Schmitt offer an insight into how politics works in liberal society?
Wolfe's is a fluff piece but he does make an interesting point. He says that:
"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."
That is a good insight. It is a high point of the article. But Wolfe fails to distinquish between neo-conservative and paleoconservative.
You can see the American liberal rejection/closure at work in this paragraph
"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."
There is a denial that politics within a liberal polity with its moderately consensual political system has an element of unreason; that it is about destruction; that it has an element of war to it.
I read stuff like this and think---its academic. The New York Review of Books is full of a closed liberalism that rejects--not engages with---anything from the European content that is unpalatable. This bloodless liberalism fails to make not contact with the nitty gritty reality of political life. These liberal academics need to do a tour of duty in Congress. Maybe then they will begin to reflect on the unreason within a liberal polity.
You can see the repudiation in this paragrah:
"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."
Why not try to understand how Schmitt's insights into the workings of Weimer liberal democracy can help to understand the American liberal system? Schmitt's arguments against liberalism are applicable to US liberal government as they are to Australian liberalism. The public forum and public debate are undermined by the workings of closed committees and mass party politics; liberals trade principles for compromise, have a preference for legal form (legality) and offer no fundamental opposition to technological civilization.
So why not engage with Schmitt rather than play?
Is not the American liberal polity creaking in its joints? Is is not turning its back on the republic in favour of empire? Does it not currently work in the name of the exceptional.
Was not 9/11 but an exceptional situation that calls for the emergence of a potentially all powerful sovereign who rescues the constitutional order from its own technical and formal procedures? Do not the consequences of 9/11 indicate that Americans aspire to a world state because they make universal claims for their way of life? Do they not view liberal democracy as something they are morally bound to export? Are they not pushed by ideology, as well as by the nature of their power, toward a universal friend/enemy distinction?
Answering in the affirmative is what makes sense from the edge of the empire here in Australia.
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