The Terrible Danger of Friends and Enemies Politics

I don’t like to evoke Nazism when thinking about political enmity in the United States today. But there are some haunting “intellectual” parallels.

When politics is looked upon as warfare, rather than as a give-and-take negotiation, for instance, it can give rise to some of humanity’s worst behavior, to big lies, scapegoating and dirty tricks, forms of political extortion designed to addle, confuse and dupe the electorate. And, of course, using the war metaphor to motivate partisans can be even more dangerous than that — as the murderous and genocidal history of the 19^th and 20^th centuries shows us so clearly.

But while contemporary American politics is nowhere as monstrous and horrific as the madness that gripped Europe before and during World War II, it’s not a far stretch to say that what the Nazis thought about politics then seems uncannily like the political attitudes of the American Far Right today. In fact, it seems as if the GOP’s principle motivating ideas were taken directly from the writings of German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who served the Third Reich in the early 1930s as its principal jurist.

In his many essays, Schmitt alluded to what I’d call “minority rule,” a condition in which the apparent losers exercise disguised dictatorial control until they can overturn their electoral defeat. “Minority rule” is a matter of compulsive and obsessive refusal to abide by democratic processes. It’s made possible by the loser’s partisan fanaticism driven by the governing principle of “friends and enemies” politics, or to use another Schmitt phrase “political theology,” which sees its opponents as heretics with all that that implies.

In an essay on dictatorship Schmitt wrote famously that “If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.” Examples of an “exceptional negation” might be denying a sitting democratically elected president approval of his judicial and administrative appointments, using the logic of friends and enemies politics to negate their elected authority. To support the nominations of your enemy would be acquiescing to heresy. We’ll see how this plays out again in the upcoming approval process of President Biden’s choice of a new Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.

The friend and enemy dichotomy in politics is a war metaphor. In a war, anything goes. “All’s fair,” as the saying would have it. Compared to a sports metaphor — a zero sum game with winner and losers governed by the rules of “good sportsmanship — or a negotiation metaphor, the friends and enemies war metaphor permits “no holds barred” competition and allows for the denial of defeat, as we’ve seen with Trump partisans in the last election.

Friends and enemies politics is the absolute antithesis of democratic processes in which there is a loyal opposition that puts the good of the country as a whole over its own immediate power and identity interest. Friends and enemies thinking is the logic of mafias, dictators, juntas, “dear leaders,” fuhrers, warlords, and “Presidents for Life.”

In a democracy, by definition there are no enemies to permanently defeat. There may be forces who are unfriendly, but they are not defined as capable of dishonesty and violence against you. You both merely differ and comprise two parts of a whole, a full spectrum of opinion, that engages in an ongoing power debate aimed at refining concepts and practices and convincing an engaged and thoughtful electorate that retains the power of dissent. Democracy has rules of fairness and civility. Friend and enemy politics do not. When you turn your opposition into an enemy and treat them unfairly, eventually they will come to see you as an enemy in return, an enemy against whom they may direct any ferocity and deceit. This has not happened yet in the United States. The so-called American Left has not yet adopted Right Wing tactics, largely because it owns a substantial and solid majority. But if that is eroded by unreciprocated political warfare, the solidarity among friends coalescing around hatred of an enemy could dramatically start to go both ways, and then democracy (and the peace of mind it brings) goes out the window altogether.

In an eerie premonition of the theology of politics to come, psychologist Carl Jung asked in “The Undiscovered Self,” in 1957, “What will become of our civilization, and of man himself, if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State absolutism should spread over Europe? … We have no reason to take this threat lightly,” he wrote. There is a “split…which divides humanity into two halves…” into friends and enemies, I’m tempted to add. “Everywhere in the West,” he wrote, there are groups who are subversive of democracy “who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should never overestimate,” he warned, “the thickness of this stratum.” Jung thought it amounted to about forty percent of the electorate. In the United States, it’s still an 8 million person majority.

Friends and enemies politics, however, make Jung’s premonition of a dark and lurking subversion of democracy into a formerly unthinkable possibility. Such forces of “exceptional negation of democratic principles,” straining to take over political power, a power they did not earn through winning an elective majority, are driven by a war metaphor that allows almost any license in their dealings with “the enemy.”

And we’ll see it again in full bloom this election season. The specter of Watergate burglaries, Lee Atwater’s dirty tricks, Willie Horton horrors, the frenzied fibbing of Pizzagate’s completely fabricated political lie about a child sex rings and perverted “enemy” Democrats, and the January 6 riot — the ghosts of all the usual suspects — will rise again like giant Halloween balloons. And if they lose, they’ll go into a state of enraged denial, perhaps carrying their subversion of democracy another step deeper into the dungeon of irrationality and the ravings of political theology.

But maybe more of us than ever are starting to tune out these charades and fiddlesticks and shrieks of madhouse ballyhoo. Maybe more of us are finally wising up.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it