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America and the Friend-Enemy Distinction
In politics (and on Twitter), all that matters is what side you're on.
Editor’s Note: No, this is not about the Eagles game today, even though that, too, elicits its own kind of friend-enemy distinction.
The German jurist-philosopher Carl Schmitt is a popular figure on Twitter, even if he died in 1985. He was, for a time, one of the Nazi Party’s most prominent intellectuals. This inconvenient fact doesn't seem to have reduced his influence. In this sense, Schmitt echoes Marx and Engels, the rare theorists-cum-visionaries who managed to outlive, in ideas, the destruction they helped sow in war and politics.
If you’ve heard someone talk about the “friend-enemy distinction” or, more simply, the idea of politics being about “us” and “them,” they are most likely channeling Schmitt without necessarily realizing it. I’ve been thinking more lately about how we decide who to take as friends or enemies, because to categorize fellow citizens in this way must be a conscious choice. There must be a feeling, even if it can’t be put into words, that other people have crossed a line—and that, in some sense, it is too late for them to return.
I’ve long argued that the primary divide in American politics today is cultural, which sadly means that most of us will be living with this—whatever this is—more or less forever. Call it, if you must, the forever culture war. (The end of class politics has helped make this possible).
But nothing can just be about culture, the word “just” suggesting constraint and limitation, because culture is always claiming more territory. It can overwhelm everything, because it’s about the habits, norms, and attitudes that sustain a civilization. So cultural divides inevitably run the risk of becoming religious ones. Religion, after all, shapes culture. And culture shapes religion. It is more challenging to be outwardly religious in a culture that devalues outward displays of religiosity. And it is challenging to be outwardly non-religious in a culture that views non-observance as a mark of moral laxity and failure, or worse.
But you still need a couple other ingredients to graduate into full-spectrum culture war—which is characterized not just by cultural division (which is natural in any society) but by something more intensely tribal.
In the United States at least, sorting between friends and enemies has become easier and more tempting, because instead of cleavages being “cross-cutting,” they are now overlaid one on top of the other. If you are an evangelical, there’s a very good chance you’re a Republican. If you’re a Democrat, there’s a much better chance that you’re suspicious of, or outright opposed, to public displays religiosity or the very idea that religion should inform politics in the first place. It wasn’t always this way. Religiosity, and specifically Christian religiosity, used to be more evenly distributed among the two parties. And this was a good thing, because it meant that the different cleavages were tempering each other, even crossing themselves out. Now, though, you can look at the other side, and you see them as being on the opposite side in everything: culture, identity, religion, politics, and partisan affiliation.
And so culture becomes a catch-all for everything else. And in this the forever culture war, everything—even small, silly things—become focal points for anger, outrage, and outright enmity. This is the worst of both worlds: Politics manages to feel existential while somehow also remaining shallow and superficial, where one might expect existential divides to elicit depth. It is about being on the right side, even if the right side is wrong. There are friends. And there are are enemies.
America and the Friend-Enemy Distinction
I'm a middle American Anglo guy questioning everything I see and hear these days. I'm also a religious conservative with a strong taste for populist economics. When I look at the Democrats, both in the abstract and those I've known myself, I want to ask: why do you hate people like me so? Why would it be such a bad thing to make space for someone like me in your party? Why would you try and force me to bend the knee before Planned Parenthood? Why would you force me to compromise my conscience on what marriage is, and isn't? Why can't we disagree civilly, so that on the big picture items like trade, economics, foreign policy, domestic policy, there can be room for a populist Democrat of the old school, grounded in Christian faith (William Jennings Bryan? Al Smith? FDR?), to attempt to fight for what is right and just and best for the people of this country? Why has that become so verboten? Does the ordinary Democratic voter and low-level politician (I'm looking at you, Nick Hinrichsen of Pueblo, Colorado) realize how badly they are being played, and how they are made to compromise themselves and their beliefs, as well as their relations with friends, family, and neighbors, in the service of a political party and machine that demands compliance in almost Stalinesque terms?
This divide is really going to be the death knell of this country as a functioning, pluralistic, nation. We can't be this large, this diverse, this geographically vast, and be at the same time this polarized and easily separated and categorized by the holders of power, capital, and influence. Either the divides that force us into opposing camps are dissolved, so that there can be some real debate, agreement, and disagreement, or we go ahead and acquiesce to the installment of a permanent police state to hold the whole thing together. We need to choose, and I certainly don't choose and don't want the latter.
The impulse to demonize those who are not our ideological brethren may not be new, but the ferocity of the backlash seems new. Listening to our political opponents is not much in vogue. We'd rather shout over them. Call them names. Or shut them out altogether. Having spent decades squarely with the progressives, admitting my own (former) contempt for converatives hasn't been easy. Listening to those I disagreed with instead of shouting over them was the only way to develop empathy. Most of our faces are buried in our devices. We used to have platforms for healthy debate in schools and on TV. Learning to debate was considered essential education. Not anymore. We divide classrooms into oppressor and oppressed. The rules of debate have been tossed out as relics of the patriarchy. I am hoping this all this blows over, that we come to our senses, learn to empathize again with those we disagree with, become comfortable again with marriage, family, prayer and worship. When Americans and Europeans left the church, they did not do themselves any favors. The collective misery of disaffected hundreds of millions of self-loathing, childless-by-choice atheists is the primal scream heard round the Western world.