Motus Mentis

Well, here we are: mid-January 2024, with the first round of electoral winnowing behind us, and another a few days away. Already we are down to three still in the running for the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look like much of a contest.

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. has put up two posts today featuring articles about the Trump candidacy. The first quotes at length an item by Dov Fisher declaring sturdy support, while the second presents “dueling” articles, pro and con: one by never-Trumper David Frum, and the other a rousing call to solidarity by Steve Cortes.

I’ll add a pick of my own: a piece published today at American Greatness by Edward Ring, titled The Intellectual Foundations of MAGA.

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Biden and his puppet-master must be chucked out of the White House, and that for anyone who cares about having any chance at all to reverse our nation’s fatal course, the overwhelmingly obvious choice should be Trump. Our cause is just and right. What grieves me, though, is that things are almost certainly too far gone, and the nation too unbridgeably divided, for any election to stave off a further descent into chaos.

Both sides in this bitter conflict are equally confident in the moral correctness of their position, and are equally disinclined to yield their stewardship of the nation to a hostile faction they see as arrogant, disconnected from reality, and a mortal threat to our future. Both sides, at this point, are inclined to drop any pretense of civility, and to speak of the other not as political rivals, or “loyal opposition”, but as the Enemy.

How did the merely political become mortal antipathy? To understand this, we should turn to Carl Schmitt, who said that the very essence of politics — that is to say, the residue that remains after all purely formal and neutralizing aspects of law and government have been sequestered from debate — is its ever-present potential for sanguinary conflict. In his indispensable book The Concept of the Political, Schmitt described it thus (my italics):

Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. [p. 26]

…Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy. [p. 37]

And we shouldn’t be taken in when the other side presents itself as the “party of reason”, reluctantly forced to deal with petulant troublemakers:

[D]esignating the adversary as political and oneself as nonpolitical (i.e., scientific, just, objective, neutral, etc.) is in actuality a typical and unusually intensive way of pursuing politics. [p. 80]

At some point, when political division becomes too threatening, the State will typically pick a side, and declare the other to be the Enemy.

Schmitt:

As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy. The declaration in the public law of the Greek republics and the hostis declaration in Roman public law are but two examples. Whether the form is sharper or milder, explicit or implicit, whether ostracism, expulsion, proscription, or outlawry are provided for in special laws or in explicit or general descriptions, the aim is always the same, namely to declare an enemy. That, depending on the attitude of those who had been declared enemies of state, is possibly the sign of civil war, i.e., the dissolution of the state as an organized political entity, internally peaceful, territorially enclosed, and impenetrable to aliens. The civil war then decides the further fate of this entity. [p. 46]

There is of course much more; Schmitt is one of the wisest political philosophers ever to lift a pen. His penetrating insights frame our current crisis with chilling accuracy.

So, as regards this year’s election: no matter who wins, we can be sure that the other side’s rage at its Enemy will only intensify.

As far as I can see, then, from this point forward there are only three possible futures for America:

1) The two sides just say “aw shucks”, and hug it out, and their fundamental, incommensurable differences simply vanish;
2) The nation finds some pathway to a “divorce”;
3) One side crushes and subjugates/eliminates the other.

Have I left anything out? If not, which of these three seems most likely?