If you had to choose one word to characterize the normal operation of society, would it be cooperation or conflict? That choice turns out to be crucial for history and the future. Some ideologies imagine the whole of the social order is and always has been about seething and intractable conflict.
Others see such conflicts as constructed and unnecessary, a result of toxic systems and ideologies.
This division in outlook is arguably more foundational than any other, including every form of left and right.
Let’s consider an interwar classic as an example.
You can respect professor Schmitt as a thinker, and please remember: His intellectual template provided the essential template for the Nazi Party. His influence here was what you might call right-wing Marxism with roots in Hegel. In short, this is not a classically liberal, much less, democratic way to see the world.
In this view, the assertion of human rights is balderdash, and the notion of democracy is, too. These are nothing but myths we tell ourselves, delusions we temporarily held in the 18th and early 19th centuries that vanished as quickly as they came. Schmitt was a believer in power and a successor to Machiavelli in instructing a ruling class on how to gain and hold power, but his view was more extreme and raw.
It remains popular today perhaps as a descriptive theory of the world into which we’ve descended, one in which half the public is wired to fly into a frenzy if the other side wins the election. It seems to be where we are headed. The great worry is that there is no coming back from this descent in Schmittianism.
This struck me recently in talking with friends about what will happen after the November election. Everyone seems to be in fighting mode depending on the outcome. This seems to be a new approach in American politics in which one side will not accept power being held by the other side. This is precisely the nightmare feared most by the framers of the Constitution.
Federalist 10 says: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”
The point is simply that authoritarianism is no solution to factionalism. The only way to keep conflict and division in check is liberty itself. That was the dream and the philosophical outlook that shaped the most transformative period in the history of humanity. The elevation of liberty as the solution to conflict is the greatest discovery in the history of ideas.
The sheer number of people who have visited New York City and yet not taken a boat trip around the Statue of Liberty is astonishing. It remains today the most marvelous and inspiring sight in the United States. It looks smaller than you expect from a distance and its sheer scale is awesome on close viewing. From the foot to the tip of the flame, it covers the length of a football field.
It is impossible not to be utterly delighted in the viewing. It’s more than just a wonderful piece of art. It’s not a historical figure, an author, or an intellectual. Lady Liberty symbolizes a high ideal. That is the Enlightenment conviction that all people carry within themselves the dignity to deserve the presumption of rights and freedom that should and must be the very core of the human experience.
Also, the very word and the time in which it was installed (1886) further suggest that a society that values liberty allows society to take its own form without centralized management from above.
This conviction briefly ascended to a kind of Western orthodoxy about this time. This was 21 years after the end of the Civil War and before the Spanish-American War, a period in U.S. and Western history known as the Belle Époque, a time of incredible technological growth, cities soaring to the skies, communications and flight within view, and even better access to food and medicine.
France gifted this statue to the United States as an homage to shared ideals in a time of wonderful optimism, peace, and plenty. The United States was then seen as the paragon of the practice of human liberty, especially given that the United States had finally dealt with its original sin of slavery. The United States was perfectly poised to be a light unto the world, with the statue marvelously symbolizing the thinking and the ideal.
It stands there today both as a reminder and rebuke. As I stared at it from the boat, my heart was lifted up. Yet I remembered the movie from my childhood when Charlton Heston in the original “Planet of the Apes” finds the statue buried in the mud. It’s one of the most riveting scenes in the history of film. The dream had died amidst the brutalization of the country sometime in the distant future.
It strikes me that we are not there yet, not even close. But the trajectory is now very dangerous. To put it simply, there is no way to continue to run a form of government that relies fundamentally on the consent of the governed expressed through the vote in which the outcome will be rejected by one-half of the country.
To be sure, elections are always disappointing to some when the winner takes all. That said, the ethos of the past suggested that this was the time to become active, to educate, to inspire, to mobilize for your cause so that it can prevail the next time. And so on it has been for the better part of 250 years. Is it still true today? Regardless it seems less true, with the questionable practices employed by every federal agency, the aggressive censorship of information distribution, and the use of lawfare against political enemies.
This represents the descent into Schmittian madness. It will take us to the brink unless we find a way out. The friend/enemy distinction is not the desiderata of life itself. The torch held by the Lady of Liberty does indeed light a better way. Let us all gaze at it, be inspired by the ideals, and follow that light where it leads.
