Can Carl Schmitt Explain How We Got from the Cold War to Trump?

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and the West lost their common foreign enemy. Would the sense of rivalry that characterized these tensions abroad then turn inwards, once no common enemy remained?

The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States, along with growing discontent over the liberal international order, has been a cause for consternation among some political theorists, commentators, and politicians. From The American Interest reflecting on the possible “end of liberalism,” the Council on Foreign Relations worrying about U.S. abdication of liberal international leadership, to Edward Luce’s Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017), there is a palpable concern flooding the mainstream Left and Right over the future of the post-Second World War order. President Trump’s election has also renewed old domestic and cultural divisions within American society, old divisions that were transiently overcome (or became less publicly pronounced) during the Cold War because of the necessity of bipartisan and national unity in confronting the Soviet Union. Donald Trump is not a Schmittian, but his rhetoric and political desires fall within the analysis of decadent and hypocritical liberal democracies offered by Carl Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt, whose work will be the focus of this article, was a controversial German legal scholar and political jurist active from the 1920’s until his death in 1985. The height of his prominence came during the 1920’s-1940’s, at which time he was a member of the Nazi Party. The fact that he never formally renounced Nazism effectively barred him from ever returning to the professional academy after the end of the Second World War. As such, Schmitt’s later works were independent from the academy. Yet, all his works remain of considerable interest to political philosophers, jurists, and constitutional theorists. With the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the supposed triumph of liberal democratic capitalism in mind, what can one make of the fact that many Western nations are suddenly turning inwards and towards strong-man politics? Perhaps the works of Carl Schmitt have something to teach us.

Conceptualizing the Political

In Concept of the Political, Schmitt posits that the metaphysical underpinning to politics itself was the friend-enemy distinction. As Schmitt wrote, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction was a politicized re-rendering of Hegel’s epistemological and ontological dialectic. To understand oneself required the Other—or as Schmitt contextualized it within the concept of the political—the enemy. That is, one could not fully understand oneself (politically) without a political enemy to contrast oneself against. Thus, the I-Not-I distinction in German idealist philosophy was now manifested in the political realm by Schmitt’s analysis.