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January 20, 2005
What happened to Mark Latham, the leader of the ALP, was very strange. On my interpretation Latham was ripped to shreds by the baying hounds of the media and his own party. Few friends came to protect him whilst he was being savaged. Apparently all felt that he had to be sacrificed for the good of the country.
What sense can we make of this bloody sacrifice?
In his text The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt conceptualizes the political
"...'within the totality of human thought and action', in terms of the primordial and seminal antithesis between 'friend' and 'enemy': 'just as in the field of morals, the ultimate distinctions are good and evil, in aesthetics, beautiful and ugly, in economics, profitable and unprofitable, so the significantly political distinction is between friend and foe.'"
For Schmitt, then, the political is primordial; it comes before the State and transcends its mundane and routine policies. It reveals itself, historically, at the foundational moment of the polity, and conceptually, in the unwritten metaphysics of the constitution. Indeed, the political in the specifically Schmittian sense incarnates existential totality and determines a choice between being and nothingness.
We understand the enemy side of the political as it is expressed in the media as part of the normal,everyday workings of politics.The enemy is the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien. The enemy is solely the public enemy.
On this account Mark Latham become an enemy: so the party hierarchy wanted him out and quick.
What then of the friendship side of the political? Is it the quiet word and the sympathetic arm on the shoulder? Is there friendship in political life?
A key aspect of the media commentary about Mark Latham, as the former leader of the federal ALP, is that he had few friends. This is attributed to him being a lone wolf by the unknown senior ALP members who offer their comments to the media on the condition that their names are not mentionsed. A senior ALP person said that ....
The tacit assumption is that friendship operates in the ALP and that ALP leader spurned it, more fool him. Latham's choice was to die and leave his friends, thereby remaining true to his real love, his family. He had become a political pariah. The significance of the intervention by the state ALP premiers was that they gave permission for the sharks to move in.
There has been very little reflection about the nature of political friendship in the media commentary. Is there such a thing?
In politics friendship is negated in the very gesture that invokes it. As Aristotle is reputed to have said, "O friends, there are no friends."
Very enigmatic. And yet Latham found out that political friends are just that, not real friends at all. even some of his closest allies started to shun him. Even some of his closest allies started to shun him as his colleagues turned on him. Many of those who will praise Latham's contributions as Labour leader in public would also be privately raising a glass in relief and joy at his departure.
does that say about human sociability in the ALP? Is not political friendship based upon human sociability, which is what makes man human?
And yet, in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle also says that one cannot live without friends, he distinquishes between friendship based on utility and virtue where the friend is loved as such, that it is not possible to have many friends, that friendship at a ditance results in oblivion, friendship is linked to community and living together, the pleasure friends take in being together and the good of friendship is in some sort of activity of self-realization.
What then of political friendship? Does it exist? Would friends have ended a sick Mark Latham's leadership in such a brutal way?
According to Aristotle no. He understands that friendship (philia), Aristotle to mean something like affection or love. Though its most form is the love between parents and children, it is friendship, rather than justice, that holds the city together. Friendship is the basis of all human associations that require sharing and mutual responsibilities. To the extent that we have a relationships in political life there is friendship to the same extent—and justice.
Thsi did not happen with the ALP. Latham was not treated as a political friend. The party machine is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict and annihilation, and it requires a sovereign who, in the face of existential uncertainties, incarnates an authority that is superior to that of the law itself.The sovereign is the machine no the leader.
If, as Schmitt says, 'The sovereign is he who decides on the exception', then this 'realistic' view of the workings of politics in the ALP, subordinates de jure authority to de facto power. The law is made by the one who has authority (i.e. power) and not the one who possesses the office (the legitimate sovereign or leader). There is no room for political friendship.
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"There is no room for political friendship"
so true, And Mark uncovered the ALP on this.