The beginning of Trump’s second term saw summaries of [Carl] Schmitt’s views in The New York Times and several smaller publications. As the historian Jan Werner Mueller wrote in Foreign Policy, “It’s Carl Schmitt’s world, and we’re all just living in it.” Schmitt was a prolific writer well into his nineties. Though most of his books are short, I doubt most latter-day Schmittians have read them. Their ideas are so easy to summarize that they’ve passed into the psychic air we inhale every day. As Heather Cox Richardson put it:The apparent plan of the Trump administration reflects the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. ... As J. D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”I’ve suggested we should learn how to recognize evil actions but beware of calling people evil. Calling someone evil expresses a finality that I’m loath to leave in human hands; condemning them to hell, or even death, should be left to others. Still few fit the judgment as well as the erudite legal theorist who defended the Nazis till his dying day. “The crimes against humanity are committed by Germans,” Schmitt wrote in an essay titled “The Tyranny of Values.” “The crimes for humanity are committed against Germans. That is the only difference.” Both his critics and his defenders argued over the question of whether Schmitt was a committed Nazi or just a craven fellow traveler. The critics won the argument with the discovery of private prewar writings full of hateful remarks about Jews.
The revelations of his antisemitism are not, however, the reason I’m tempted to ignore my own scruples and call him evil. Like any form of racism, antisemitism stems from the view that the world can be divided into friends and foes. Schmitt’s worst contribution to the contemporary world is that thought—combined with Hobbes’s conviction that this damns us to brutal anarchy without an absolute sovereign in control. Schmitt would have mocked Trump’s ignorance along with his devotion to gilt; even gold, he implied, was a value only liberal merchants prize. Though he had no objection to luxury, the real coin he treasured was power. The recent spate of U.S. Supreme Court shadow docket rulings supporting Trump is an ominous sign, for they are issued without legal reasoning or any other sort of justification. Like Schmitt, whose oracular pronouncements were seldom accompanied by argument, the rulings suggest that the Court is moving toward the view that power can supplant reason—if only you have enough of it.
Days after the coup in Venezuela, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller spelled this out precisely:We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. Those are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.Schmitt’s influence is hardly confined to the U.S. There are large Schmitt revivals in Russia and elsewhere. As a twenty-three-year-old adviser to right-wing British politician Nigel Farage recently told The Guardian:El Salvador is a lesson for those in Britain who wish to take back control of their country. Power works, and it’s all that matters. State power when used efficiently is basically omnipotent. The meritocracy will be established, criminals and corrupt officials will be jailed, immigration will drop to zero, houses will be built, and our citizens will once again feel proud of the country they call home.Neiman, Susan. Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (pp. 36-38). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Quite a week, 'eh?
Below, a comment in The Atlantic.
Trump automatically provokes a very visceral vomit reflex in me because he's just absolutely repulsive in every possible way, but Miller sends shivers down my spine. 'There's nothing in those eyes but evil and hatred.'Right...
