Here are the results of a recent survey conducted by Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service:
Seventeen percent (17%) of voters believe America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed in last week’s attempted assassination.
That figure includes 28% of Democrats who say that America would have been better off if Trump had been assassinated. Another 24% of Democrats were not sure. Fewer than half (48%) of Democrats could bring themselves to say that America would not be better off if the opposing party’s candidate for president had been assassinated.
Let that, as they say, sink in: “Fewer than half (48%) of Democrats could bring themselves to say that America would not be better off if the opposing party’s candidate for president had been assassinated.”
I know I’ve been mentioning Carl Schmitt a lot recently, but for anyone familiar with his work it is impossible not to see current political events through a Schmittian lens. Here’s a relevant passage (my emphasis):
The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not the foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. The ever present possibility of conflict must always be kept in mind. If one wants to speak of politics in the context of the primacy of internal politics, then this conflict no longer refers to war between organized nations but to civil war.
For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat. All peripherals must be left aside from this term, including military details and the development of weapons technology. War is armed combat between organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within an organized unit. A self-laceration endangers the survival of the latter. The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.
– Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (p. 33). The University of Chicago Press.
Politics and war are not different things; they are a continuum. The very concept of the political necessarily includes the distinction between “us” and “them”, the possibility of escalation, and the willingness to fight.
Where are we on that continuum today? What will happen in November?
3 Comments
The Federalist Papers warn against the degeneration of party politics into factional politics. Under party politics, each party recognizes the other parties’ right to exist. The parties merely oppose each other, like two halves of an arch. When the party of labor opposed the party of capital, for instance, it aimed to secure the interests of labor but not to destroy the capitalists and capitalism. This was the old reason for outlawing Communists parties: they were factional parties that aimed to destroy and not simply oppose their rivals.
We have been creeping towards factional politics for a long time. The evidence down here on the peon level is that we peons are not talking to each other about the looming election. There are very few yard signs and I have yet to see a bumper sticker or button (or does talk of campaign buttons simply betray my age?). Everyone knows that it is dangerous to put on a uniform and announce one’s side.
I know that much of the political energy has moved online, but this has to be at least partly because it is less dangerous to express one’s political opinions online. Put up a yard sign and you might get a brick through your window. Say the wrong thing in the break room and you might be looking for a new job.
The Federalist Papers say that factional politics is just a cold civil war, and that it is very hard to return from the cold civil war of factional politics to good old log-rolling, backscratching, party politics. Sooner or later the cold civil war goes hot.
I expect the Democrats who would welcome Trump’s assassination tell themselves that their hatred ends with Trump. If he were taken out, they tell themselves, all of his unspeakably loathsome supporters will come to their senses and go back to voting for Uniparty hacks. I think they are mistaken and that MAGA without a leader would be far more disruptive than MAGA led by Trump. Lots of autonomous, radicalized and angry people can cause a lot of trouble.
JM,
Schmitt wrote extensively also about the idea of “neutralization” in politics: the attempt to pretend that certain areas of public affairs could be shaped and guided simply by law and common principle, and were therefore beyond the potentially bellicose arena of the political. People could then try to claim the high ground by pretending that they were just acting in a neutral way, on neutral territory, while it was the other guys who were bringing “politics” into it all. (We see this around us all the time as each side routinely accuses the other of “politicizing” events.)
Ultimately, though, he said, this fails, because what is and isn’t “neutral” is itself an unavoidably and irreducibly political decision.
It seems to me that a compact ruling oligarchy with general agreement on social and philosophical axioms can avoid this kind of fracture, but even so it must keep the subject classes away from power politics, either by distraction, deceit, or outright subjugation. None of that is working very well at all at the moment, and the pretense of “Democracy” is fraying fast. It becomes difficult to maintain the fiction that the People are sovereign when they are so obviously not — and especially so when fraud, lies, stolen elections, lawfare, and even political murder and attempted murder are all in such plain view.
On the one hand, there is a bunch of psycopaths, full of hatred, who think they are angels and are fighting Satan and want to win whatever it takes, even committing crime.
On the other hand, there are some reasonable gentlemen, who gently disagree with the other party and want to convince them by the force of their arguments. For them, following the rules is more important than winning.