Recently there’s been a spate of postings on X from “mainstream conservative” types who are aghast that people on the actual Right have been paying attention to Carl Schmitt. The scoldings generally are of the ad-hominem/genetic-fallacy sort — “Schmitt was a bad guy, and so whatever he says must be bad”, but occasionally also include midwit manglings of his ideas, such as “Schmitt tells us that we should have an all-powerful sovereign who will decide who our political friends and enemies are.”
This is all rubbish, of course (we’ve been discussing Schmitt in these parts for some time now, most recently here), and it serves me right for even paying attention to it. Nevertheless, I posted this on X about a week ago:
It's hilarious to watch people ejecting Carl Schmitt from permissible thought and discourse just as everything he described as always possible – the breakdown of neutralizing legal and political structures, and the deepening fracture of civil society into implacably hostile…
— Malcolm Pollack (@mtpollack) August 17, 2026
Today, Auron MacIntyre weighs in with a brief essay of his own about what a real, and deepening, friend-enemy problem actually looks like. An excerpt:
Modern Americans expect Mr. Smith to go to Washington, make a speech, win an argument, and then shake hands with the opposition. Every election is called the most important of our lives, but the ritual remains the same because the underlying disputes are assumed to be manageable. If the argument is over marginal tax rates, retirement ages, or entitlement formulas, that expectation makes sense. Those are technocratic disagreements inside a shared political order.
But some disputes are not like that. Consider the fight over the euphemistic “gender affirming care” for minors. One side believes the state must protect children from genital mutilation. The other believes the state has a right to seize children if parents refuse to go along. There is no clever tax-credit compromise that resolves the underlying question. One side’s victory necessarily means the other side’s destruction. That is what existential politics looks like.
This is why Carl Schmitt has re-entered conversations on the right. Certain conservatives often reduce his friend-enemy distinction to a license for treating anyone who disagrees with you as a mortal foe. That isn’t the useful part of Schmitt. His point is that politics becomes political in the fullest sense when groups understand that a conflict touches the survival of their way of life. His framework is gaining salience because Americans increasingly encounter disputes that feel exactly like that.
As I’ve often said: politics, like geometry, must start from unprovable axioms. If we agree about those, we can set about working out theorems. But axioms, by definition, must simply be accepted as truths; if we can’t agree on those, we won’t agree on any system that’s built on them. This applies just as much to moral and metaphysical axioms as well, and it is impossible to build a harmonious political system where there is fundamental, existential disagreement about these unprovable assumptions, and nobody who takes them seriously will willingly submit to a system that contradicts them. As Bill Vallicella often says: “No comity without commonality!”
This is the pass we’ve come to in America: one political system trying to govern using two incommensurable and contradictory sets of axioms. It cannot possibly work — and so, either it fractures and collapses, or one side must cow and subjugate the other. Friend and enemy.
One Comment
I think one should be careful here, Malcolm. It’s easy to engage in breast-beating, lamenting about how everything is going to hell with out polorization, something I sympathize with. Yet the system does seem to be working on an issue like transgenderism. Most people are against prominent abuses such as under-18 sex reassignments or athletes with members participating in xx sports. Honest liberals and conservatives needn’t always destroy their foes, but simply stand up to them – especially in elections. Take the wins when you can in a democracy, although I suppose things will come to a head sometime and this will no longer be possible (five years? ten? fifteen?). Let the experiment run its course, although also be ready for the transition into a new age.
Anyway, it looks like The Concept of the Political needs to be put on my book queue. So much to read, so little time!