The Nazi Had a Point

An important thinker was right about the friend-enemy distinction. A liberalism that can survive the twenty-first century must integrate some of his insights.

This is a long but necessary post. Let me know what you think.

Liberals have a bad habit of describing their hard-won victories as the natural condition of mankind. They have a Whiggish idea of progress. Once the religious wars burned out, they thought, enlightened Europeans had shown the world that people who disagree about the path to salvation can still share roads and a common polity. And that’s not entirely wrong.

But somewhere along the way, they downplayed the fact of fundamental disagreement. Everyone should be content to reduce all ways of life to preferences, which can simply peacefully coexist with others' preferences. It does seem obvious to those who prefer peace that others would come to see the light. So most liberals just assumed a blanket of reasoned reciprocity in this regard. Otherwise, preferences can be privately traded, individually weighted, or, at least, democratically aggregated.

Process and procedure can handle the rest, liberals insisted with a wave of the hand.

I count myself as a liberal—that is, one who values freedom—so this is tough love.

Philosopher Carl Schmitt called liberalism out, and rightly so. Despite his Nazi past, we have to take Schmitt’s ideas seriously—not so much because he welcomed conflict, though he did, but because he believed that a political order that refuses to identify its enemies will eventually be destroyed. That implies that if you fail to know your enemies, you and your way of life risk being vanquished.

Shores of Tripoli

I’m reminded of the liberal Jefferson and Adams, who, while serving as American diplomats, met in London in 1786 with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked why Tripoli claimed the right to wage war on nations that had done it no injury—at a time when Barbary corsairs had preyed on American shipping and enslaved captives. In their joint report to John Jay, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, they recorded the ambassador’s answer:

It was founded on the law of their great Prophet: that it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their Authority were sinners: that it was their right & duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, & to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; & that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

It turns out that conflict with the Barbary pirates would be America’s first war as a free and independent nation.

How much has changed today?

The Insight That Won’t Go Away

Schmitt’s claim in The Concept of the Political is deceptively narrow. The nature of the political, he argued, differs from that of subjects like economics or aesthetics. The political is fundamentally about disagreement, which involves degrees of intensity. Any disagreement—whether about tariffs, salvation, or pronouns—becomes political when it reaches a pitch where one group is willing to see another group dominated or defeated.

At that level of intensity, the operative relation is friend and enemy.

The enemy in this schema is not necessarily a person you dislike. Schmitt was explicit that private enmity has nothing to do with it. The enemy is the other whose way of life, lived on his terms, is incompatible with yours, on your terms—which presents a conflict no general rule or peaceful process can settle. The reason no rule or process can settle it is that the rule would have to be written by someone, from somewhere—like a neutral Gods-eye perspective.

Neutrality evaporates at the boundary where it matters most, thinks Schmitt.

This is an unavoidable insight liberals must stop trying to talk their way out of. A liberal constitutional order that permits every way of life—including those who seek to abolish that very order—has failed to draw a vital line. Drawing that line is a condition of survival, and it is not negotiable. One can call that line procedural rather than substantive if it makes him feel better, but either way, those on the other side of it experience it as a judgment about who belongs.

Schmitt was right that neutrality is a delusion. Otherwise, a society that refuses to fight for its ground rules will be destroyed by those who despise it. The goal, then, is not some impossible, passive neutrality, but a self-aware, armed pluralism—a liberalism that drops the pretense of neutrality and explicitly draws its battle lines at second-order behavior. (More on this to come.)

Where Schmitt falls short is in treating friend and enemy as a simple, ontological binary. He leaves no room for the most common condition of coexistence: someone who thinks you are deeply, consequentially, even damnably wrong, but who intends to go on living beside you in peace. Schmitt’s schema only registers a fellow citizen or a mortal threat.

But there is a third category.

Three, Not Two

Political theorist Chantal Mouffe addressed this gap decades ago with what she called “agonistic pluralism,” the idea that a pluralist democracy can convert some antagonism into agonism, and some enemies into political adversaries. Her Schmitt-inspired scheme needs one more move to become operational—a third political category with its own definition.

Mouffe addressed this gap decades ago with what she called “agonistic pluralism,” the idea that a pluralist democracy can convert some antagonism into agonism and some enemies into political adversaries. Mouffe argues that democratic politics should transform antagonism between enemies into agonism between adversaries—people “whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question.”

Her crucial insight was that Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction needed another category. We can extract that insight from her democratic theory, even if we aren’t willing to swallow the idea that democracy itself should convert antagonism into agonism.

Instead, we can turn Mouffe’s distinction into a more general tripartite classification, defining each category according to the relationship it permits.

1. A friend shares your substantive commitments. Not all of them, of course, but enough that you can build together without renegotiating first principles every morning. The relation is cooperation, and the currency is solidarity in reciprocity.

2. An enemy is not defined by the depth of a disagreement but by what he’s willing to do about it. The enemy is an actor who seeks to eliminate the possibility of coexistence. He wants to extinguish your way of life—to make the field of play unavailable to you, to close the exits, and to ensure you make no more arguments against him. The relation is resistance, and the means are coercion, exclusion, and domination.
   
   Here’s the third, which disrupts Schmitt’s binary.
   

3. An adversary rejects your substantive commitments but accepts your right to hold them anyway. This is one who thinks your religion is superstition, your economics is theft, and your family arrangements are a mistake. He will argue his case, organize against you, win and lose elections as your adversary, without imposing his worldview on you. The relation is competition, and the means are argumentation, “sweet talk,” and parallel experiments in living.

Note: These categories don’t rank how much you like or dislike people. They are a classification of what a given actor requires of you.

A friend requires your collaboration.
An adversary requires your coexistence.
An enemy requires your absence.

Schmitt's mistake wasn't recognizing the friend/enemy distinction. It was treating the friend-enemy distinction as definitive of the political, leaving no adequate category for profound disagreement among people who nevertheless accept one another's continued existence and freedom to dissent.

Of course, there are shades and grades between each category, which complicates matters. But we must soldier on.

The Membrane that Matters

Once you have three categories, a more decisive political line is no longer the one Schmitt drew. Instead, it falls between adversary and enemy.

This new line-drawing exercise does most of the work. It means that the question a political order puts to its members is not What do you narrowly believe but rather What, given sufficient power, does your overall belief system permit you to do to those who believe otherwise? There is no stopping point to the first question. However precisely you define acceptable belief, a finer distinction can always be drawn, and someone will eventually draw it. (A Leninist is not a Trotskyite. A Wesleyan is not a Presbyterian.) But the second question does stop somewhere. It boils down to a fairly short list of things a person will or will not do toward those who disagree with their way of life, and the list is short enough that people who disagree can still agree on it.

Karl Popper is usually conscripted into these discussions, albeit poorly. The “paradox of tolerance” is often quoted as if it were a permission slip to suppress opinions one finds obnoxious, which misses what Popper actually wrote. His actual position was far subtler. A free society should tolerate even intolerant ideas so long as they engage in rational debate. Suppression becomes a legitimate duty only when a movement renounces reason itself—teaching its followers to dismiss rational argument as mere "tools that will never dismantle the master’s house," forbidding them from listening to counter-arguments, and answering debate with violence or coercion. The threshold for suppression is reached not when an idea becomes offensive, but when a movement explicitly abandons the realm of persuasion for the realm of force.

Despite the shades and grades, that is a stark behavioral threshold. And the right one.

The trigger can be found more in institutional design and individual conduct than in doctrinal content. Enemy acts are concrete, so they can be enumerated:

1. Deny exit, so people cannot leave your community or your jurisdiction;

2. Deny speech, so dissent can no longer be voiced;

3. Deny association, so alternatives cannot be organized; and

4. Deny political participation, so an organized group is consigned permanently to the margins.

A paradox looms.

Number Four Cannot Be Absolute

An order built within this threshold will end up tolerating people whose first-order beliefs it finds repugnant, but that is no defect. A neighbor who believes I am hellbound, but who would not lift a finger to hasten my descent, is safer than an agnostic willing to assassinate someone for his opinion.

An operating maxim emerges from this reflection:

Maximize diverse ends while vigorously defending the few rules necessary for coexistence.

The word that’s easy to miss here is vigorously. A simple, narrow liberal commitment is not a weak one. The whole point of keeping the perimeter clear and simple is that you can defend it without apology.

This makes for a more muscular liberalism.

Worldview and Meta-Worldview

Everything above operates at the level of orders and movements, but the framework becomes genuinely useful when you apply it at the level of an individual’s life. That requires separating two conjoined ideas.

A worldview is first-order. It’s what is true, what is good, and what is worth pursuing—by your lights. Christianity is a worldview. So are socialism, environmentalism, and Confucianism.

A meta-worldview is second-order. It answers how competing worldviews ought to be treated politically. It is less a belief about the world than a matter of how one stands in relation to what others believe. Pluralism is a meta-worldview.

These vary independently, which is important to acknowledge. Two Catholics with identical creeds can hold opposite meta-worldviews. Two pluralists—i.e., identical meta-worldviews—can be a Catholic and an atheist.

The meta-worldview is the political variable, and it runs along a spectrum.

1. The Naive Pluralist says, My worldview competes alongside yours in peaceful coexistence.

2. The Muscular Pluralist says, My worldview competes alongside yours in coexistence, but only if you are also a Pluralist. (Otherwise, 3 or 4.)

3. The Chauvinist says, My worldview should dominate culturally, though yours may persist in the spaces it leaves.

4. The Hegemonist says, My worldview deserves exclusive political privileges and formal set-asides, while yours should be restricted or punished.

5. The Absolutist says, Your worldview must cease to exist.

Most politics today happens in positions 3 and 4, which is why these two deserve more attention than perhaps they get.

Chauvinism is nearly universal and mostly still compatible with coexistence. Consciously or not, almost everyone prefers that their own priors become the norm, and a culture where some worldview happens to be dominant is not thereby a form of tyranny.

Hegemonism is where we should sound the alarm, because formal privilege is the mechanism by which a temporary majority is tempted to convert itself into a permanent one, or a tyrannical minority launches a violent takeover to move to 5. Call it the paradox of liberalism, but to survive, a pluralist republic must adopt a strictly targeted hegemonism of its own: using the full force of its law to restrict the political participation of any partisan whose second-order goal is the dismantling of the pluralist order itself.

Pluralism cannot extend unlimited legal protection and rights to those who organize to abolish legal protection and rights. In any case, between chauvinistic ambition and hegemonic architecture lies the boundary that most institutional struggles are really about.

Universalism Reconsidered

Cross the meta-worldview against a second axis, that is, the intended scope of the worldview’s expansion, and you get four types that are worth identifying because they are far too often confused.

A particularist worldview claims to be right for a people, a lineage, or a community.

A universalist worldview claims to be right for everyone, everywhere, whether they know it yet or not.

Particularism plus pluralism gives you a pluralist tribe. Our worldview is right for us, though some may differ slightly, and this is not an emergency. Orthodox communities that maintain intense internal discipline—but have no ambitions to force conversion or threaten ostracism—are a pluralistic tribe.

Particularism plus monism gives you the closed tribe. Our way is ours. Outsiders are a contaminant, and insiders must conform. This posture is defensive rather than expansionist, though it can become brittle under pressure and treats defection as betrayal.

Universalism plus pluralism gives you the evangelical pluralist. Everyone ought to share our pluralism, and everyone should come to it freely. A missionary who accepts the door being shut in his face, the abolitionist who argues in the public square, or the philanthropist who buys advertisements might all qualify.

Universalism plus monism gives you the imperialist. Everyone will eventually live according to our worldview, and the means by which they arrive is not the point.

Set the four side by side, and the conventional worry collapses. It is not universalism that generates the danger. Islam and Marxism hold worldviews of identical scope, as an imam and a commissar want the map colored green or red, respectively. What separates them is the second-order question: What will they do to the people who refuse? An imam who accepts refusal and a commissar who does not both harbor ambitions for their creeds. What distinguishes them is whether they seek consent or demand submission.

That is why “extremism” can be a clumsy term. It tends to measure distance from the median in terms of one’s substantive first-order commitments, which tells you almost nothing about whether someone is willing to let you live or keep your way of life. For now, we must pass over the problem of whether a given person is willing to lie.

The Aperture of Pluralism

Everyone carries what we might call an aperture of pluralism. It signifies the degree of worldview difference one can absorb before one ceases to classify someone as an adversary and starts to classify him as an enemy. A wide aperture means one can tolerate a great deal of disagreement as part of ordinary politics. A narrow aperture means one receives the same disagreement as a threat to one's way of life.

The aperture is not a fixed personal trait. It contracts under perceived threat, and it contracts quickly. This mechanism is worth observing because it can be exploited in either direction.

For example, “Queers for Palestine” tolerate mass migration of immigrants committed both to a substantive commitment to Islam—which forbids homosexuality (worldview)—and to the imperial project of Sharia Law, under whose rule homosexuals are to be executed (meta-worldview). Members of the Red-Green-Black axis are happy to exploit “Queers for Palestine” until their allyship is no longer needed.

By contrast, a politician with a narrow aperture might, after some single sensational event—such as the murder of a citizen by an immigrant—seek to shut down all migration and deport all non-citizens, full stop. This exploits the sensational event that disturbs others temporarily so they narrow their aperture in xenophobia.

Another big problem is an enemy spiral. Group A, under political pressure, narrows its aperture and reclassifies Group B from adversary to enemy. Group B, correctly observing that it is now being treated as an enemy, narrows its aperture in turn. Each contraction is a rational response to the last. Nobody has to lie or be wrong about the facts for the spiral to run. In the end, two populations that might have shared a country hold a mutual enmity and suspicion that neither invented.

Enemy spirals can be manufactured, which makes them dangerous. An actor stoking mutual enmity need not persuade anyone of anything. They need only supply each side with evidence that the other’s aperture has narrowed.

Provocation is cheap, especially in the digital age.

The Ratcheting Sovereign

Which brings us to an objection Schmitt would raise against this whole exercise, and he would be correct to raise it.

Deciding who counts as an enemy is one of the greatest powers in politics. Schmitt knew this. It is why he located decision-making power, “sovereignty,” among leaders who exploit the exceptional cases rather than in, say, legislatures drafting and passing ordinary laws. The moment one builds a political framework that licenses exclusion and coercion against enemies, he has created an office worth capturing. And someone will capture it. But the sovereign will stretch the category of enemy. He’ll apply it first against a genuinely dangerous enemy, setting the precedent. Then, he’ll stretch it against mere adversaries, which was the point all along.

His sovereignty expands beyond reasonable bounds.

There is no clever formulation that dissolves this problem. Only design constraints raise the cost of leveraging exceptions and making enemies.

It would be nice if the enemy designation could therefore be more decentralized, so that no single institution could hold the power to classify a group as such, making institutional capture more decisive. Making enemies must be constrained by procedure—slow, evidentiary, and subject to an appeals process—so that the classification tracks conduct that can be demonstrated rather than merely alleged. In short, it ought to be hard to invoke and easy to revoke, because the relative asymmetry between those two costs is what keeps the sovereign from ratcheting. And everyone operating must admit the failure, since every actor correctly classified as an enemy represents a failure of coexistence—whether international or domestic.

However, Schmitt argues that the sovereign arises in the exceptional case. Whether Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, or every president since Truman has used U.S. military force abroad without a formal declaration of war by Congress.

Note also what I don’t claim with this framework.

The pluralist meta-worldview is not a neutral point of view. I, too, am committed to a specific second-order outlook. To the absolutist, then, I look like his mirror image: an enemy with a preferred outcome and the will to enforce it. Does that make me an illiberal liberal? Perhaps. Schmitt’s point about the impossibility of neutrality survives, though. An honest response is not to deny the perspective but to restrict it.

That way a liberal can state exactly what he is willing to defend and exactly what he is not. One must then accept that such defense is itself a political act rather than some form of ideological gnosticism, even if my goal is eventually to transcend politics, for example, in its current American form.

The very existence of my enemies forces me into the political realm, with loins girded, if I want to preserve my way of life.

The Deeper Question

Political philosophy in its consensus-seeking mode keeps asking what has never been answered sustainably at scale: What do we believe together? Every serious attempt at an answer has required either conformity that no large society can maintain or coercion that manufactures the appearance of such conformity.

Best to ask a different question then.

What is the minimum we must believe together to remain adversaries?

The answer has to be simple and clear enough that peaceful people with genuinely incompatible notions of the good life can all sign on, and substantial enough that signing means something to the signatories. Somewhere between those two constraints sits the constitution of a liberal order that has any hope of lasting.