At time of filming, the results of the USA presidential election are not in. So whilstI wait
to find out what colour I should paint my doomsday bunker, I invite you to the idea that this
election - particularly Mr Trump's role in it - has revealed something very interesting
about politics. Particularly if you aren't usually interested in politics at all.
Carl Schmitt was a very influential political philosopher. He was also a Nazi, literally
a member of the Nazi party, and as we will see his ideas very much tied into
that. But what's interesting is that they have influenced people not just on the right
wing, like him, but also on the left wing. Schmitt thought that all politics ultimately relies
on a distinction between friend and enemy. The friend/enemy distinction is often pretty
arbitrary: it's just about what people choose to identify as - American, British, liberal, conservative,
whatever - and who they think is not a part of that identity.
'Enemy' makes it sound like these are people that we trying to actively kill, but that's
not quite what Schmitt means. Your political enemies, he thought, are people that you might not have
anything personally against, you might even like some of them, but when push comes to
shove you will sacrifice them. That might mean killing them but it might mean just letting
them die. You may feel bad about that, but you're still gonna do it, because they don't share your
identity. So it's not so much friend and enemy as Friend and Other, Us Vs Them.
It should come as no surprise to you that the friend/enemy distinction is often pretty vague and arbitrary.
A lot of political distinctions are! Take the distinction between migrant and refugee:
refugees are to be taken in and cared for whereas migrants can just be left to
die - at least that's what my country seems to be doing. This distinction is literally life and death, but if you actually look at the causes of migration
the distinction isn't really very clear at all. But these distinctions don't need to make sense: they
just need us to believe in them.
And that, Schmitt thought, is what makes political conflict so deadly. If the blue team believe
that the red team pose a threat to their identity just by existing, just by having a different
identity - then even if the red team aren't a threat, even if the distinction between reds
and blues doesn't make sense, and even if the red team themselves don't believe in the distinction,
no amount of evidence, Schmitt says, is ever going to change the blue team's minds. He thought that a true
political conflict isn't about facts. It's about the fight against Other
identities - however arbitrarily we might point them out.
So you can chat all you want about what the best way to organise the market is or manage the economy
- liberal governments in the West love talking about that stuff: just turn on the news and you'll find out - but for Schmitt those aren't
really political conflicts. They're just management disagreements. And if your government
can only talk about how to change the economy by one or two tenths of a percent, how are
you gonna cope when someone genuinely comes along and says that they think Muslims should be
banned from entering the country? How are you gonna come when someone genuinely says that they don't believe trans people and therefore that they shouldn't have rights?
Those are capital P Political issues, issues about who is allowed to have power over themselves
and who is not. And Schmitt says that liberalism allows people not to care about
politics. It doesn't give them a sense of identity strong enough that they are willing to
kill for it. I invite you to the idea that some of what Trump has said in this election truly
embraces the capital P Political: the restriction of power to certain identities.
And here comes the twist. Schmitt worried that if you have a liberal government with no strong sense of identity, an enemy group might come along
and they might have a very strong sense of identity and be very unified and very
and very determined and they might take over. And that is how Schmitt justified
becoming a Nazi. Because in 1920s Germany, he thought "Oh crap! Some enemy group is gonna
come along and take us over, so we have to strike first. We have to unify
in a very aggressive nationalist way and crush that enemy before they can get us. And in Nazi Germany that enemy
became Jewish people. Like I said, the distinction between friend and enemy doesn't need to be real or make sense; it just needs people to believe in it.
And what we get is fascism: an authoritarian governments that don't treat people
equally, and don't care because the people they treats like crap are the enemy. And who cares about the enemy? Do you care about the enemy?
Are you a traitor? Are you sympathising with them you traitor?
In an ironic way, Schmitt kindof became the very thing he was worried about. The
distinction between friend and enemy has been very influential in political philosophy. But where he took the next step
was with this strike first idea. I invite
you to the thought that a version of this "strike first" mentality is something that we can see
some people using today with regards to Muslims. Some people see Muslims as a threat and say
that they need to destroy that identity, and that they have no choice and it's all in the name of freedom. Well just be aware that
that move has been made before.
But I said earlier on that Schmitt's ideas have influenced people both on the right wing,
and on the left wing. And they have. The left has also used this friend/enemy distinction but in a bit of
a different way. The left traditionally defines itself in opposition to those who are rich and powerful.
If you are rich and powerful you can give it up; if you're oppressing somebody, that's something that you
can stop doing. So if you're a political enemy of the left you can become a friend.
If you're a political enemy of the right though - because you're gay, trans, Jewish, brown, disabled, whatever -
the only way you can make them happy is to stop existing. The right-wing says,
"People who don't share my identity shouldn't have power over themselves." The left wing says "Those
who currently have power should not because they got there and stay there
by oppressing others." This is where we get so-called 'Identity Politics'
- people on the left talking about which identities are allowed to have power
and seeking to redress the imbalances.
Liberalism can sometimes overlook the differences in the ways that the right and the left use the friend/enemy distinction, it fact it can sometimes overlook the relationship between
power and identity entirely. Remember when Bernie Sanders suggested that all Americans should get free education, or
when people say that Americans should have free healthcare, or that the US and UK should not have armies that they use to invade other countries?
Liberalism sometimes laughs that off as "unrealistic," or "idealistic" or even "dangerous and radical." That's because,
Schmitt would say, liberalism's only good if the person you're talking to
basically already agrees with you. If you're in the centre, politically, it can look like
those either side of you are banging similar drums but they're really asking for very different things.
Part of the criticism of liberalism from the left that it can sometimes look a little hollow.
Even hypocritical. Take John Stewart Mill, one of the fathers of modern liberalism who loved to talk about the value of liberty and freedom, but supported
the British invasion of India. Or the US founding fathers, who talked about the values of "life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but owned slaves. Or maybe the biggest hypocrisy of all, some people in Britain worry that foreigners
will come and "destroy our way of life," and steal "our" resources, and yet we only
have a country as rich as we do because we spent centuries doing those very things to
the rest of the world and never paid it back.
That apparent hypocrisy is what has inspired criticisms of liberalism from people as far ranging as
Lenin and Marx to Martin Luther King Jr. And many of those
critics, faced with that hypocrisy, began to doubt whether liberals really mean what
they say about freedom and equality at all.
The Black activist Kwame Ture said that liberalis love to talk about how they don't like violence. But,
"Is it not violent for a child to go to bed hungry in the richest country in the world?
I think that is violence. But that type of violence is so institutionalised that it becomes
a part of our way of life. Not only do we accept poverty, we even find it normal." Ture says that the
liberal propensity to avoid talking about
power and identity prepetuates oppression.
Because liberalism doesn't look at those Schmittian categories of power and
identity it doesn't realise that actually all politics is identity politics.
In this video, we've looked at liberalism both from the right wing and frm the
left wing. Most people, when pushed, will describe themselves as "centre," or "moderate,"
"reasonable." And if that's you, then okay, cool. Maybe you can think of some replies
to these criticisms, there are definitely some that you could make. I've "inhabited the characters" of Carl Schmitt and Kwame Ture, if you like, but
you don't have to agree with them. The idea I invite you to though is that this election, for better or worse, has shown that liberalism
is not the only way of looking at the world. The people who criticise liberalism, on
both sides, are not mad or joking; they are serious. And they are political: concerned about
the distribution of power. Maybe that's something we could all think a little bit more about?
Patreon.com/PhilosopyTube helps me pay the rent. I do need some help with that
so if you can give even $1 a month that would be amazing. And don't forget to subscribe.