In this week’s Chronicle (subscription may be required, I’m not sure) Alan Wolfe documents the fascination of the contemporary intellectual left with the Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt. He notes, accurately, that in the wake of Communism’s collapse some on the radical left “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 contemporaries.” He further notes, again accurately, that this widespread attraction to Schmitt’s antiliberalism on the left is not mirrored on the right, that “right-wing Schmittians” are limited to some very marginal paleocons; “there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place anywehere 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.”
So far so good. We’re at the bottom of column two of a six-column article, and I think everything so far has been just right.
And then the following four columns are about how the Republican right is Schmittian; “Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt’s conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals.” Ann Coulter is exhibits a, b, c, and d; she and Bill O’Reilly are contrasted with “say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe,” rather than with their genuine counterparts in the popular-press left.
The following is offered, with no evidence or support whatsoever.
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.
Other than Coulter and O’Reilly, exactly all of the examples from contemporary politics are in the following jaw-dropping passage:
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.
Now, I loathe Rove’s influence on politics as much as the next guy. And maybe, on balance, Rove and DeLay are worse than James Carville, Paul Begala, Bill Clinton at his worst “We’ll just have to win, then” moments, Hillary “VRWC” Rodham Clinton, Ted “Robert Bork’s America” Kennedy, George Mitchell, or Tom Daschle (to say nothing of the Al Sharptons or Michael Moores of the world). But Wolfe doesn’t give us any reason to think so; he’s named a few right-wingers, and on the liberal left… himself. He hasn’t compared likes, or looked at the evidence for friend-enemy politics on the left, or asked whether any conservatives view anything as more important than victory (“I’d rather be right than be President”– Calvin Coolidge [UPDATE: I’d always heard this attributed to Coolidge, but a couple of people have e-mailed to say that it was Henry Clay]), or asked whether there are left-liberals for whom that’s not true.
There is an unfortunate selection effect in electoral politics: those who care about nothing else more than winning– on both sides— tend to have at least some competitive advantages (though these aren’t boundless, because being principled is part of how one gets a highly-motivated base of support). There’s a particular premium on victory-above-all consultants; consultants, like lawyers in an adversarial trial process, are hired for their skill in getting their side to win. But deciding whether “liberals” as such are less Schmittian, less prone to view political contests as apocalyptic and existential conflicts, than “conservatives” as such would presumably require comparing consultants to consultants, intellectuals to intellectuals, elected officials to elected officials, and popular demagogues to popular demagogues.
Wolfe closes with this:
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.
Surely this is friend-enemy politics posing as an opposition to it. It is Wolfe who sees this election as an apocalyptic contest between liberal democracy and its opponents rather than a competition between two legitimately opposed parties in an ongoing contestatory system.
Comments are closed.