Motus Mentis

This is getting some attention today, and rightly so: conservative commentator and gadfly Jack Posobiec attended a Jamie Raskin rally and shouted out a couple of pointed questions, and Raskin sicced a bunch of union goons on Posobiec to assault and beat him.

Tim Pool has video here.

This Jamie Raskin critter is one of the worst of the worst. (Sadly, he also spends summers in Wellfleet, where I live; the lefties here just love him. I see a lot of Raskin bumper stickers around town, even though he represents Maryland, not Massachusetts, in Congress.)

All of this brings to mind (as the news seems to do more and more often) what Carl Schmitt saw as the essence of the political: the distinction between “friend” and “enemy”.

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 a post a year ago about being called a “Trumper”, I had this to say:

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.

(See also this conversation I had with Bill Vallicella last fall.)

When things get to this point, they typically get worse: political violence provokes more of the same, and dehumanization of “the enemy” is usually a ratchet. People on both sides of this deepening political and social tension should be asking themselves whether a reconciliation seems likely, or even possible. If it isn’t — and at this point I can’t really imagine on what terms such a thing could happen — we should be thinking about what to expect, and how to prepare for it.

Make no mistake: you may think you’re a decent, mild-mannered person who doesn’t have any “enemies”, in the sense of people who genuinely hate you and want to destroy you — but if voted for Donald Trump, you do. And they think you are vermin. And Jamie Raskin is one of them.