When your president quotes Napoleon approvingly on social media, it’s easy to be pessimistic about a lot of things: human nature; democracy; our ability to live together and self-govern. Can procedural democracy, with all of its potential limitations, properly check executive authority? Given that people can so easily become tribal, how does this fit with liberalism and its demand for tolerance? No matter how we romanticize it, will politics forever be a jockeying for power between conflicting interest groups?
This pessimism is reflected in my recent reading: the legal theorist and Nazi, Carl Schmitt, and the theologian and American Cold War democrat Reinhold Niebuhr. Schmitt and Niebuhr had different political outlooks: Schmitt supported a powerful unitary executive, while Niebuhr supported a redistributionist but neutral state. Yet, they shared tragic ideas (as do I) about human nature, believing that we are limited, self-interested, and tribal. Politics, they maintained, is always a conflict between different groups with parochial interests.
Once you examine their tragic ideas about human nature, the two were as similar as they were different. Neither thought that anyone truly could represent all of humanity and when they’ve tried, they’ve always (self-interestedly) represented a particular segment of it. But, this shared skepticism about human nature pointed them in entirely different political directions. Like Hobbes, Schmitt’s distrust of human nature led him to advocate for a strong executive who can lead people and create political unity that never would develop organically. Niebuhr, by contrast, argued that if humans are inevitably flawed — and especially when they are a part of tribal groups — the worst scenario would be one in which someone gets to claim absolute power. Like James Madison, Niebuhr maintained that the best we can do is keep an uneasy liberal democracy by checking interest with interest and power with power.
My recent adventure with these two started with Schmitt, whom I read because I wanted to understand how the United States could have a sitting president who quoted Napoleon Bonaparte in response to criticisms about executive overreach: “He who saves his country,” Trump announced, “violates no laws.” He appeared to be saying that strong executive power is justified when a nation is faced with an emergency…as defined by the executive. I wanted to read an intelligent justification of this idea, and I found it in Carl Schmitt.
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt relentlessly critiques democracy, liberalism, and any variant of “political romanticism” that doesn’t recognize what, to Schmitt, is obvious: At their root, all governments have a strong executive who decides when to suspend the rule of law for the good of the people. And who is “the people”? For Schmitt, the people are always a people and are defined by boundaries that determine whom they allow into their group; that is, who are friends and who are enemies.
For Schmitt, one problem with liberal democracy is that it tries to do away with this friend/enemy distinction, by acting as if different groups with different interests can live together, because procedural rules of government, mixed with rational deliberation, can bring us to some sort of consensus on “the will of the people” at any given time. But as even the friends of democracy note, this is inherently unstable, because “the will of the people” often changes depending on which faction attains enough power to proclaim it. And it is ultimately “wimpy,” because liberal democracies profess political neutrality between ways of life, allowing different people to live differently, thereby undermining unity. Schmitt suggests that this professed neutrality is ultimately illusory, as even the most liberal society demands that its citizens embody non-neutral, liberal values like toleration and respect for the rule of law.
If I read Schmitt in an effort to better understand what people see in Donald Trump (or what Trump sees in himself), it worked. I’m not saying that Trump is a Schmittian, but rather that some factors of the present presidential administration can be explained in Schmittian ways. The crackdown on DEI can be justified by Schmitt’s call for political unity in the face of the danger of cultural fracture that liberalism tends to tolerate. Trump’s ignoring judicial efforts to block his executive orders is reminiscent of Schmitt’s idea that behind all governments, there is a strong executive who gets to decide when procedural rules no longer apply.
Schmitt’s conclusions are hard to accept, and this led me to Niebuhr. While the theologian and political commentator never mentioned Schmitt, he wrote with great concern during the rise of fascism and communism. Niebuhr shared Schmitt’s pessimism about human nature but extended it further, expressing doubts about permitting flawed people to assume power over others. He questioned how Schmitt could move from the idea of endless conflict between groups to advocating for a strong executive to unite people. As Schmitt wrote in Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, “If… the representatives of the people can decide instead of the people themselves, then certainly a single trusted representative could also decide in the name of the same people.” But if people are really that tribal, flawed, and self-interested, wouldn’t that single representative be too? And wouldn’t he or she be more dangerous when unchecked by others, even if they also are flawed and self-interested?
Like Schmitt, Niebuhr doubted that a diverse liberal society could sustain a harmonious will of the people, but this made him more skeptical of any group or individual uniting people by fiat. For Niebuhr, the messy process of politics, with all of its conflicts, is preferable to installing a dictator. He believed that giving one human or group the ability to exert power over everyone doesn’t solve problems but creates new ones. As Niebuhr wrote in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, “In all non-democratic political theories the state or the ruler is invested with uncontrolled power for the sake of achieving order and unity in the community. But the pessimism which prompts and justifies this policy is not consistent; for it is not applied, as it should be, to the ruler.”
Schmitt wants a bold nation, one united behind a leader who isn’t constrained by a heterogeneous polity and liberal separation of powers. Niebuhr wants a nation of people who are humble about their own moral position in the world, who can unite when they share a common interest, but who also can leave others be, no matter how difficult that is.
Which sort of nation do we want America to be?
