Motus Mentis

The political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote:

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.

The Concept of the Political (1932), 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.

Ibid, p. 37

In healthy and cohesive societies, with high homogeneity and trust, and the commonalities of culture, heritage, language, folkways, philosophical axioms, and moral principles that bind mobs into nations, the realm of the political can remain relatively small, confining itself to questions about which policies will most effectively implement generally agreed-upon goals. When, however, these commonalities break down, the sphere of the political expands to include almost every aspect of life, especially in large, managerial states, such as the United States has become, in which power once largely distributed to local communities has mostly been surrendered to the central government.

This has two important consequences. First, because decisions that affect everyone are now administered by the central State, control of that governing apparatus matters far more than it does in more subsidiarian societies. Second, as more and more of civic life is forced into the realm of the political, the essential characteristic of the political — the “friend-enemy distinction” — comes increasingly to the fore, and those with whom you might once have simply disagreed about, say, highway-budget priorities or zoning bylaws now become your enemy.

This in turn has further consequences. It’s in the nature of how we think about enemies that we seek to simplify them, to reduce them, to boil off their human complexities in order to avoid the natural tendency, in decent human beings, to have qualms about wishing others harm and ill-fortune. It’s also part of human nature for this to become easier the more we see other people in our own social or tribal group doing the same; this is why mobs are so often capable of violent and destructive behavior that most people, if acting as individuals, would find abhorrent.

In order to reduce our enemies to simplified, depersonalized models, one of the first things we do is to find a handy term to refer to them, not as persons, but as instances of a type.

Such a term is “Trumper”: a convenient, dismissive catch-all that reduces all who might, for any number of good reasons, vote Republican in November to cult-like followers of a man whom those who use the term see only as a horrifying avatar of the Enemy. So reduced, such people become mere soldiers in the opposing army, and — most importantly of all — far easier to hate. (And let’s be clear: this happens on both sides of deep political divisions; where Blue myrmidons have “Trumpers” and “MAGATs” to loathe, the Red team have “libtards” and “Demonrats”.)

Barring some “Black Swan” event between here and November, I’ll be voting for Donald Trump: not because I’m besotted by the man’s personality, intellect, or moral rectitude (though the grotesquely corrupt Joe Biden is certainly in no position to claim moral or intellectual superiority, especially in his current condition), but because I’m deeply concerned about a variety of destructive trends that I believe will, if unchecked, result in the utter collapse of the American nation. (To list them all here would take a post of its own, and I’m not going to bother; we all know what they are.)

The point is this: there are thousands of individual issues, policies, axioms, and principles upon which we might have nuanced and divergent opinions, but under our current system of government (which is itself a subject of widely divergent opinion) we have a binary choice to make in November. We must throw everything in the scales and choose either what Biden and the Democrats represent (and we’ve seen it in action over the past four years), or Trump and the Republicans.

Nothing is perfect — and to be frank, given how irreversibly degraded and broken the American nation, and the American spirit, have already become, nothing is even cause for much hope — but to reduce merely to “Trumpers” those scores of millions of decent Americans who will, for so many complex reasons, choose Trump over Biden is a symptom of exactly what Carl Schmitt described: the wholesale transformation of “religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other” antitheses into the political, and the accelerating division of America into friends and enemies.

Buckle up, folks. 2024 is just getting its boots on.