Carl Schmitt might be to Trumptivism what Leo Strauss was to George W. Bush.
During Dubya's reign, fear revolved around the neoconservative control of foreign policy and the cafe cabals of neo-Straussians determined to reshape the Middle East.
These days, Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt seems to be required reading for the Claremont barricades. Schmitt's theory of the “state of exception” offered the Nazis a philosophical framework to justify acting outside existing state judicial structures and laws. Making much of sovereign power, Schmitt determined that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
Enter Michael Anton, whom the Weekly Standard describes as "a fast-talking 47-year-old intellectual who, unlike most of his colleagues, can readily quote Roman histories and Renaissance thinkers". Before his appointment as a national security official in the Trump administration, Anton had a pen-name and an intellectual passion:
....readers knew him throughout 2016 as Publius Decius Mus, first at a now-defunct website called the Journal of American Greatness and later in the online pages of the Claremont Review of Books. As Decius, Anton insisted that electing Trump and implementing Trumpism was the best and only way to stave off American decline—making a cerebral case to make America great again.
To Jonathan Chait, Michael Anton is nothing less than "America's leading authoritarian intellectual", as he writes in a recent NY Magazine:
If there is a single passage of the essay that most succinctly summarizes its case, it is this: “I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.” Anton equates all these things — his party, his country, and his people, insisting that four more years of a Democratic presidency will extinguish all three. This is a textbook example of the kind of reasoning, the conviction that a single election defeat will usher in permanent destruction, that liberal theorists see as inimical to democratic government.
What does this mean for constitutional law and the USC? A few brief snippets from the keyboards of others:
While the Bush administration may have contorted law and pushed legal and constitutional interpretations past their reasonable limit, when the courts pushed back, the administration always yielded. And while there might have been doubt as to whether the courts would assert themselves against the executive, there was never doubt that that the executive would accept the authority of the courts if and when they did so.
To say that a President ultimately accepts restraint is, obviously, not high praise. And by arguing that the Bush administration at its highest ebb of fixation on executive power never came close to Schmitt’s vision of the sovereign exception, I don’t mean to offer a defense, let alone an endorsement, of any of the policies of that period. Rather, I’m drawing a distinction between an executive branch that relied on expansive understandings of Article II of the Constitution and one that bears a real risk of paying no attention to the Constitution whatsoever—and, moreover, of denying the authority of any other institution to check it.
[Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare]
“It’s cronyism,” Amash told The Hill, echoing other conservative critics who have said such a deal amounts to the government picking winners and losers in violation of basic free-market principles. “We have a Constitution. The president doesn’t just get to do anything he wants. He has to work within the constitutional framework, regardless of why people elected him.
“And deals like that hurt the people of Indiana; they don’t help the people of Indiana,” Amash added. “They redistribute resources and offer benefits to one company when another company down the road doesn’t get those same benefits. Sometimes competitors don’t get those same benefits. That’s just central planning. That was tried in the Soviet Union. It didn’t work very well.”
[Scott Wong, The Hill]
It was because we could not reject the finding of the military authorities that it was impossible to bring about an immediate segregation of the disloyal from the loyal that we sustained the validity of the curfew order as applying to the whole group. In the instant case, temporary exclusion of the entire group was rested by the military on the same ground. The judgment that exclusion of the whole group was, for the same reason, a military imperative answers the contention that the exclusion was in the nature of group punishment based on antagonism to those of Japanese origin. That there were members of the group who retained loyalties to Japan has been confirmed by investigations made subsequent to the exclusion. Approximately five thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and to renounce allegiance to the Japanese Emperor, and several thousand evacuees requested repatriation to Japan.
[Korematsu v. United States, USC 1944]
Trump’s ban on travelers from 7 Muslim majority countries is on a very different scale. It is a Leninist, Robespierrian, fuck you to the rule of law and I suspect it is only the beginning of things to come.
[Mark Koyama, George Mason University]
I leave you with orange lollipops and an interview with American Greatness this past weekend wherein Michael Anton responds to his critics:
What’s especially risible about this is that I’m a Straussian. It’s metaphysically impossible to be an anti-Semitic Straussian. My great teacher, Harry Jaffa—a man I revere more than any other I’ve ever known—was Jewish. I will go to my grave with my two greatest intellectual influences, the two people who more than any others formed my mind, being Jewish. Anti-semite? Give me a break.
But that’s the modern Left for you. They will turn that around and say, “Oh that’s just the old ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ line.” Which in my case, happens to be true. The point is, nothing you can say is considered a valid defense. Once they have the chance to smear you, they will do it and continue the smear because it serves their interests. The human damage that they cause, the destruction of reputations—they don’t care about that. Actually, they do care, but they see it as a positive. Enemies are to be destroyed by any means necessary.
Though I cop to “nationalism,” but I do wonder what is the difference between nationalism and patriotism? I am open to being educated on that point if someone wants to make a case why “nationalism” is so awful but “patriotism” is OK. If I am a nationalist, I am an American nationalist. I am also an American patriot and I don’t see the difference.
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As for the “white” part, where do people get that? It’s just a convenient way to destroy and smear and not have to deal with the argument.
Actually, one of my great hopes for a Trump Administration and Trump economic policy is that he will build class solidarity among the working classes of all races. I think that would be good for the country and put salutary pressure on the political system. That sounds sort of Marxist of me, but I can live with that.
I know there are people who call themselves “white nationalists” but they strike me as a fringe. I don’t think “white nationalism” per se is actually possible or viable. The root of “nationalism” is “nation.” A race is not a nation. Nations come together and cohere in various ways. There is the French nation, the Chinese nation, the Navajo nation and so on. Nationalism exists on that basis, of “peoplehood” for lack of a better term. This goes back to the ancient distinction between friend and enemy, citizen and foreigner. This is the way humanity organizes itself and always has. Individual nations do not exist by nature but the impulse to form nations is natural. There will always be nations, but it has never been done on a racial basis—that is, by trying to unite an entire race into one nation—and I don’t think ever could be.
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As Strauss notes, the political community as such is closed. There is no possibility of a universal state, or certainly no possibility of one that is not a universal tyranny. He and Schmitt agree on this. Where they disagree is what gives the political—the state—its moral standing. Strauss identifies in Schmitt a kind of implicit indifference to this question. It doesn’t matter what the people agree on so long as they coalesce around something.
For Strauss—and the ancients, and the American founders—this is the vital question. What is the moral basis of the state? Only a government dedicated to just ends, to the good, is truly legitimate. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, refers to the “just powers” of government. Harry Jaffa always pointed students to the vital importance of that qualifier. The government may not legitimately do anything it wants, for the same reason that the people cannot rightly do anything they want: because right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust exist by nature. And the proper role of government is promote the good and prevent, resist and mitigate the bad.
Clearly, Anton knows the prime ingredient to truly spooky ghost story is a sense of fluid, amorphous threat. What "the bad" might be is left to the imagination. I can't help thinking Stephen Miller, Bannon, and Anton will build up a big beautiful monster for us to battle-- a monster outside that overlooks the monster within-- an exceptional sovereign concoction.
