“Sovereign is he,” wrote the German political theorist Carl Schmitt in 1922, “who decides on the exception.” The opening line of Political Theology was meant to shock even a century ago. In a liberal democracy, after all, sovereignty rests in “the people,” not in a “he” who “decides” on an “exception.” But Schmitt is the great prophet of liberal breakdown. He understood liberalism as an Enlightenment project that would not survive the modern era of mass industry, mass media, and mass politics. The liberal state runs smoothly on its rails of law and norms until it encounters the “exception”—a strike, a beer-hall putsch. Then, and only then, when someone (some “he”) steps forward to fill the vacuum with action (the decision) do we discover where true power—that is, sovereignty—lies. At the moment of crisis, the flimsy structure of liberal normativity collapses and power reveals itself. Schmitt was the twentieth century’s own Thomas Hobbes. Perhaps we would regard him today as the preeminent rival of Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls—the great liberal thinkers of the twentieth century—had he not, at the decisive moment of his career, welcomed, celebrated, and justified the Leviathan of his own day: Adolf Hitler.

It is a safe bet that Donald Trump had not read Political Theology when he declared his own version of a state of exception on January 20. Trump did not need an actual crisis in order to issue a torrent of executive orders usurping the independence of federal agencies, preempting the role of Congress, threatening the press, mobilizing the armed forces against immigrants, etc. As Trump himself put it, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” He had filled the vacuum with decisive acts. Whether Trump will turn out to be “America’s Hitler,” as Vice President J.D. Vance once suggested before changing his mind, he is a kind of fulfillment of Schmitt’s dire expectations.

Until very recently we would have said that history had proved Schmitt wrong. In the decades after the Second World War, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and other autocratic powers made a peaceful transition to liberal democracy. Europe became, as the pundit and historian Robert Kagan put it, “a Kantian paradise.” Now we have to wonder if Schmitt’s dark prophecies were merely premature, and it was not the industrial but the post-industrial era that put the quietus to liberalism.

This is Carl Schmitt’s moment. In the past year, two New York Times columnists have accused Trump and his followers of borrowing from Schmitt’s playbook. J.D. Vance has insisted that, on the contrary, it is liberals who share Schmitt’s fixation with raw power. The journal Liberties published a nearly 12,000-word demolition of Schmitt’s work by intellectual historian Richard Wolin—a kind of backhanded tribute to Schmitt’s burgeoning standing on the right. Schmitt has, indeed, become a key figure for paleoconservatives like Paul Gottfried, the author of a book-length defense of Schmitt. Telos, an academic quarterly formerly of the New Left but now of the alt-right, devoted its Fall 2024 issue  to Schmitt’s work. He enjoys special appeal among bloggers of the far right who foresee the collapse of secular liberalism. The pseudonymous N. S. Lyons recently suggested that in Schmitt’s work we can recognize “the undercurrents so obviously raging beneath the chaos, absurdity, and official obfuscations of a Weimar America.”

Today’s right-wing extremists are as profoundly disgusted with “Weimar America” as Schmitt was with Weimar Germany. Yet the truth is that while Schmitt furnishes powerful diagnostic tools with which to lay bare the failures of liberalism, few want to follow him all the way down the anti-liberal path to which he beckons. Even Lyons urges conservatives to read Schmitt with care, for in a secular world drained of the magic of religious faith, he observes, Schmitt had turned the state into God. A Schmittian America, if one could imagine such a thing, would be a charismatic dictatorship, a state defined by power. That is no one’s ideal—save, perhaps, for Donald Trump’s.

Authority, Not Truth, Creates the Law

One of the various psychobiographical theories that seek to explain Carl Schmitt’s obsession with power and contemptuous dismissal of moral reasoning holds that his “search for order” offered him relief from the deep anxiety he felt about his own powerlessness and marginality. Schmitt was, in fact, born (in 1888) on the margins, a provincial from the nowhere town of Plettenberg in western Germany, and a Catholic in a Protestant country. Fiercely ambitious, the young scholar churned out a steady stream of articles and pamphlets and hopped from one academic position to another as his reputation grew. Yet he suffered from lacerating bouts of self-loathing, fear, and loss of faith. “Horrible torment and mental anguish,” Schmitt writes in his diary, “there is no one with whom I can speak.” At times suicide seemed to Schmitt the only way out of the mental cage in which he felt trapped.

Schmitt was also a profoundly conservative thinker deeply at odds with the revolutionary currents of modernism. In his earliest works, whose subject was culture rather than politics, Schmitt wrote as a Catholic defending authority, tradition, and hierarchy against the intense individualism and hedonism of turn-of-the-century Mitteleuropa. Though in later life he would become notorious for his positivist repudiation of the moral foundation of law, as a young Catholic thinker he sought to found state legitimacy on the “higher law” of the church—what we would call “natural law”—rather than on the secular liberal principle of reason. Schmitt wrote with a deep aversion for the corrosive forces of modernity—machine culture, industrial capitalism, avant-garde art—that he felt were emptying the world of meaning and ushering in a terrifying nihilism. Nevertheless, as Joseph W. Bendersky, a very sympathetic scholar, drily notes, “[I]t is difficult to identify with specificity what Schmitt considered morality.” It is far easier to identify what Schmitt loathed.

It’s impossible to know whether Schmitt’s subsequent habits of thought were shaped more by his internal turmoil and fundamentally reactionary spirit or by the external turbulence into which he was plunged with the onset of the First World War. Schmitt spent the war in Munich, first working with the civilian staff administering martial law in Bavaria. Unlike Romantic nationalists, including Thomas Mann, the young Schmitt regarded the war as madness—a “frightful nightmare” and “useless waste of human life” provoked by Prussian militarism and global capitalism. Yet it was the chaos and violence at home unleashed by the end of the war that would reshape Schmitt’s thinking. In November 1918, a revolutionary socialist government was appointed to lead the Bavarian state in Munich. Three months later a right-wing extremist assassinated Kurt Eisner, the visionary head of state. “Workers’ councils” then established an anarchist government allied with the revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. That utopian experiment, in turn, came to a savage end when the federal government in Berlin ordered the Freikorps, a cluster of paramilitary units that included several future Nazi leaders, to crush the regime. In the ensuing mayhem, more than a thousand people, including virtually the entire leadership of the regime, were murdered.

For a moment, Germany had appeared to be the next phase in the Soviet dream of worldwide revolution—the most terrifying of all nightmares for Catholic conservatives like Schmitt. It was during the fateful year of 1919 that he was writing Dictatorship, his first major work. Now Schmitt dropped all talk of natural law and moral order. Instead he embraced Hobbes’s dictum, “Auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem”: Authority, not truth, creates the law. We obey not because the law is just, but because the state is mighty. The author of what professes to be a neutral historical account of the practice of dictatorship was plainly drawn to absolutist rather than democratic models of governance. In a 1997 essay offering yet another psychological explanation of Schmitt’s work, historian Mark Lilla hypothesized that Schmitt had spent his life seeking secular equivalents of the absolute authority of the Catholic Church from which he had drifted away. The state supplanted God—thus the warning to religious conservatives issued by Mr. Lyons.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the liberals who framed the Weimar constitution of 1919 feared the breakdown of public order, and above all the growing popularity of Bolshevism, every bit as much as Schmitt did. Hugo Preuss, the chief author of the constitution, insisted that Germany’s choice came down to “Wilson or Lenin.” In drafting a constitution that placed parliament at the heart of the state and explicitly protected individual rights, Preuss chose Wilson. Max Weber, who had first theorized “charismatic authority” in his famous 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” looked to parliament as the means to institutionalize political authority and thus avert the “Caesarism”—the demagoguery of the popular leader—that he regarded as a natural feature of democracy.

Though he attended the lecture and greatly admired Weber, Schmitt’s answer to those fears was: It’s too late. In his 1923 Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, which of all his works remains the one that speaks most directly to our own time, Schmitt virtually embraces Caesarism and describes liberalism as a set of archaic restraints on democracy. Liberalism, to Schmitt, was the fair-haired child of the Enlightenment faith in reason, science, law, and human virtue; its essence is the belief in open discussion, a free press, and transparent politics. Harmony arises from fair competition, whether in the domain of the marketplace or of public opinion, and from the balance rather than the concentration of power. The political expression of liberalism is thus the parliamentary debate. Schmitt cites the philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “In Parliament ideas meet, and contact between ideas gives off sparks and leads to evidence.”

Schmitt argues that this imagery of ordered debate presupposes the hierarchical social order of the nineteenth century. The disinterested gentlemen of Bentham’s legislature stood far above the citizenry and its unruly appetites by virtue not only of education and social standing but of the mechanism of representation. They were exceptional individuals to whom the actual guidance of the country had been entrusted by voters—themselves a tiny fraction of the overall populace. Liberalism, thus understood, did not serve democracy but operated as a bulwark against its full expression. Of course, that is just what reassured liberals like Preuss or Weber.

Schmitt skates over the primary justification of the legislative branch, which is that large-scale democracies (unlike city-states) require representative bodies: Since all citizens cannot engage in deliberation, they must choose a small number to do so on their behalf. For reasons I will come to, Schmitt, like Rousseau, regards representation as anti-democratic. He also makes the reductio argument that, if the people need to choose proxies, “a single trusted representative could also decide in the name of the same people.” The people, that is, could democratically choose a legislative dictator. This feels suspiciously like a logic game; a contemporary critic, Richard Thoma, thought that Schmitt had simply ignored the crucial role of representation in his eagerness to discredit parliaments.

Schmitt’s central claim is that in the age of democracy, parliaments no longer function as a counterweight of prudence and reason. “Who still believes in this kind of openness?” Schmitt asks sardonically in the preface to the second edition of Crisis, written in 1926. By this time, Weimar’s endless succession of presidents had deployed the emergency powers vested in them by the constitution’s Article 48 to supersede state governments, end strikes, stabilize the currency, and so on. The state of exception had virtually become the rule; real power had passed from the people’s elected representatives to officials appointed by the president. What’s more, deliberation, supposedly the essence of parliament, had become a dumb show. Parliamentary debate, Schmitt claimed, was the veil behind which the real power of modern society—economic power—operates. “What representatives of the big capitalist interest groups agree to in the smallest committees,” he writes, “is more important for the fate of millions, perhaps, than any political decision.” Of course, Schmitt concludes, people still care about “the old liberal freedoms of speech and the press,” but few still regard parliament as their custodian.

Democracy Without Liberalism Is Populist Dictatorship

At a time when a world shattered by war was seeking to restore itself through multilateral institutions, peace treaties, vows of disarmament, and all the paraphernalia of political liberalism, Schmitt’s scorn for public reason and the moral foundations of law registered as a reactionary crusade. He was an outlier in German thought. Yet the underlying theme of Crisis, which is that liberalism belongs to an aristocratic past and democracy to an egalitarian present, was the source of Schmitt’s enduring appeal to the anti-liberal left, starting with Walter Benjamin and stretching forward to Herbert Marcuse and to European postmodernists like the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who celebrated Schmitt in her 1993 book The Return of The Political.

Yet those, whether of the left or right, who wish to treat Schmitt as a guide need to fully reckon with what he meant by democracy in the absence of liberalism. With his flair for the resonant opening line, Schmitt begins The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy by declaring, “The history of political and state theory of the nineteenth century could be summarized with a single phrase: the triumphal march of democracy.” But by “democracy” Schmitt does not mean the political and civic institutions through which the wishes of voters shape the policy of the state, or even the deep conviction of human equality that Tocqueville regarded as the essence of American democracy. Schmitt means the idea of “the people” as supreme governing force that descends from the French Revolution. For Schmitt, as for Rousseau, the people are not a pluralistic group of individuals, but a single homogeneous mass possessed of a “collective will.” The leader seizes upon that will to guide the state. Democracy is thus incompatible with pluralism, which Schmitt describes as a form of “liberal individualism” that reduces the state to “a revocable service for individuals and their free associations.”

The whole panoply of individual rights set forth in the great democratic documents—and, indeed, individualism as an ethos—belongs, Schmitt argues, to liberalism rather than to democracy. The collective will is not the sum of individual wills individually expressed, but rather the single will of a unified people. That unity must be forged if it does not naturally exist. In one of his most brutal passages, Schmitt writes, “Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity, and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” The “other” must be excluded, he argues, whether by restrictions on immigration or the denial of citizenship.

Democratic homogeneity can in theory be based on any unifying characteristic. But in 1923 one did not have to look far for the deepest sources of identity, which Schmitt saw in “[t]he more naturalistic conceptions of race and descent…the speech, tradition, and consciousness of a shared culture and education.” Homogeneity meant racial identity. Schmitt goes on to ridicule the precept of “absolute human equality” as a meaningless article of liberal hypocrisy. A society that embraces people of every faith, doctrine, and language—that is, a pluralist society—will never cohere around a collective will. Democracy depends on exclusion of the other and of the non-equal. Behind this strange argument is Schmitt’s deep conviction that it is the state that ultimately creates the people rather than the people who create the state. A strong democracy is one in which the state has forged the people into a united force.

This unstated principle becomes explicit when Schmitt considers the question of how the people express their will. He describes the casting of ballots “in deepest secrecy and in complete isolation” as another remnant of liberal individualism. In another work, Constitutional Theory, Schmitt writes, “Only the present, truly assembled people are the people and produce the public.… They cannot be represented.” The public exists in the palpable form of the crowd. How does the crowd express its will? “They can acclaim in that they can express their consent or disapproval by a simple calling out.” Schmitt openly embraces precisely what terrified the Weimar liberals. “Dictatorial and Caesaristic methods,” he asserts, “not only can produce the acclamation of the people but can also be a direct expression of democratic substance and power.”

Private acts of choice belong to an outmoded liberalism; the roar of the crowd belongs to democracy—makes democracy. In the final pages of Crisis, Schmitt celebrates the irrationalism of democratic acclaim, the moment when the “endless conversation” of parliament is annulled by the power of the decisive act. He quotes Mussolini at the outset of the 1922 March on Rome: “We have created a myth,” Il Duce cries. “Our myth is the nation, the great nation, which we want to make into a concrete reality for ourselves.” Mussolini made the homogenous nation, forged it through the irrational force of myth. All political systems are forms of myth, Schmitt had written in Political Theology. What matters, at bottom, is not their truth but their ability to attract belief. Schmitt was perfectly clear that mass public opinion was being shaped by party propaganda, advertising, and mass media. The operative question was who would seize control of those immense forces. Mussolini was the quintessential modern Caesar; the new myth of the people on the march, Schmitt wrote, “is the most powerful symptom of the decline of the relative rationalism of parliamentary thought.”

Liberalism presupposes rationalism; democracy harnesses the irrationalism of man in the mass. Can we claim not to recognize Schmitt’s formulation because we find it abhorrent? Who is Donald Trump if not the “Caesaristic” figure whose vital force Schmitt celebrates at the end of Crisis? What was January 6, 2021 if not a moment of mass acclamation in which Trump marshaled his devoted followers into America’s own March on Rome?

We live in a time when liberalism and democracy, so long thought indissoluble, are delaminating, and doing so in one direction only—more democracy, in the Schmittian sense, and less liberalism. Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and of course Trump all treat the rule of law and the protection of the political rights of individuals and minorities as impediments to the achievement of the people’s will. Each, fairly elected, has every right to call himself a democrat. They represent what voters want. In The People vs. Democracy, political scientist Yascha Mounk notes that support for a strongman leader who can dispense with rules has been growing across Europe and the United States, and especially among the young. Between 1995 and 2011, the percentage of Americans aged 18-24 who favored strongman rule increased from 34 to 44. A 2022 survey showed that most Americans, and an overwhelming majority of Republicans, favored such a figure. We should not be surprised that they reelected one. How confident are we that Schmitt was wrong in thinking that liberalism was the past and democracy the future?

Politics Is the War of “Us” Against “Them”

All political philosophy reflects the moment in which it was written: Hobbes wrote in a period of continual warfare, Locke in the long era of relative tranquility that followed. It’s no surprise that in Hobbes’s “state of nature” life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” while in Locke’s, men tend to their property and form a compact to preserve it. Schmitt was a Hobbesian, though he characteristically attributes his own view not to sociological judgments but to the demands of intellectual coherence. In The Concept of The Political, first published as an essay in 1927 and then issued as a full volume in 1932, Schmitt insists that “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.” What he means by this is that liberal optimists like Thomas Paine—who regard man as good and the state as bad, and thus seek to protect the individual from the state—do not have a “genuine political theory” because they only theorize the state negatively. If, by contrast, you understand man to be refractory, as Edmund Burke did, or irremediably sinful, as did the reactionary Catholic thinker Joseph de Maistre, a favorite figure of Schmitt’s, the state necessarily assumes the central position in political thought.

Schmitt’s view of human nature seems oddly backwards: He treats man’s iniquity not as a religious conviction or even an observed fact, but rather as an axiom. His theory of the state requires evil. Perhaps we should concede that Thomas Jefferson similarly required man to be good in order to be capable of the principle of self-rule to which he was committed. Or we should say what Schmitt himself would not say: that he lived through the horror of World War I and then the breakdown of order in Germany and thus drew his own conclusions about human nature. Yet the liberals of his own day—like Preuss, Weber, or Hans Kelsen, who enjoyed a reputation as a legal theoretician equal to Schmitt’s—lived through the same chaos without drawing the same conclusions. From the start, Schmitt recoiled from liberty and was drawn to control; he repudiated reason in favor of the irrational. Perhaps he was simply  drawn to evil. Schmitt once confessed in his diary, “I see only evil and vulgarity in the world, perhaps because within myself there is so much evil and vulgarity.”

You can see why he found himself appalling: Raised in a pious Catholic household, Schmitt became what we would call today a sex addict, following strange women down the street and having a sexual encounter with any who would consent. In his diary he admits to acting as if “deranged.” He married a Spanish dancer who claimed to be a Croatian aristocrat and divorced her when she turned out to be a fraud and a kleptomaniac. The church refused to grant him an annulment and then excommunicated him when he married again anyway. This was an age when men made credos out of their own libertinism; Schmitt would not, or could not, and instead made a credo out of the suppression of the individual. Perhaps his obsession with order arose from a horror at his own inner chaos.

Schmitt would say that he simply followed the thread of his own logic. The Concept of The Political opens with the usual startling act of intellectual bravado. “The concept of the state,” Schmitt declares, “presupposes the concept of the political.” Schmitt meant that the state does not, as liberal theory held, foster “politics” through institutions like parties and elections, but rather rests on something prior and constitutive called “the political.” Every domain, Schmitt writes, has its own essence, expressed as a dialectic between two poles. Morality rests on the distinction between good and evil, aesthetics on that between beautiful and ugly. And the political? “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced,” Schmitt declares in his most celebrated maxim, “is that between friend and enemy.”

Here is the necessary connection between Schmitt’s understanding of human nature and his theory of the state. It is precisely because the sphere of the political “rests in the final analysis on the real possibility of enmity” that “anthropological optimism” has no explanatory power. The managed conflicts of liberal governance that are typically described as “politics” do not reflect man in his essence. (Nor, perhaps, does the supreme moral clarity of “natural law.”) Yet what is genuinely strange and slightly unnerving about Schmitt is that, unlike the Catholic reactionaries whom he admired, for whom every political battle was “Christ or Barabbas”—good or evil—Schmitt was perfectly agnostic over the terms of conflict. The enemy, he explained, need not be “morally evil or aesthetically ugly”; he need only be “existentially something different and alien.” The existentially different will be seen to “negate his opponent’s way of life” and thus “must be repulsed.” Schmitt was not writing figuratively. The friend/enemy distinction, he wrote bluntly, entails “the real possibility of physical killing.”

While only under extraordinary circumstances will rivalry explode into organized violence, war nevertheless represents not the failure of the political but its fulfillment. Just as the Schmitt who once professed faith in “the higher law” came to accept the doctrine of “Auctoritas facit legem,” so the young man who abhorred senseless killing became the mature thinker who made the willingness to kill the foundation stone of politics.

The friend/enemy distinction also explains why democracy requires homogeneity. In a pluralist society, each of us chooses his own way of life. John Stuart Mill titled one of the sections of On Liberty “Of Individuality, As One of The Elements of Well-Being.” The supreme good to which a liberal state is devoted is the protection of full individual self-expression. Schmitt would say that such a conception not only drains the state of its meaning but renders it defenseless in a world in which men are prepared to kill and die to preserve their “way of life.” The unwillingness to recognize this elementary fact, Schmitt writes in an extraordinary passage, constitutes a fatal delusion. In Russia before the revolution, “the doomed classes” romanticized the peasants who would massacre them; so, too, did sentimental aristocrats in France before 1789. If they had their wits about them, they would have smashed the enemy before the enemy smashed them.

In this Hobbesian fixation on mortal conflict we also find the source of Schmitt’s distinctive preoccupation with “the exception.” Political science tells us how political systems work under normal conditions, which is the obviously salient question in a more or less rational and predictable world. Schmitt didn’t believe the world operated according to our moral preferences or rational precepts. Things fall apart, and when they do, the latent source of power, or sovereignty, that lies underneath every political system rises to the surface. Schmitt regarded this truth as universal.

Dictatorship traces the history of this political principle from the Roman Republic to the present. Schmitt distinguishes between “the sovereign dictator,” a tyrant who wields absolute power in his own name, and “the commissary dictator,” upon whom the sovereign power confers a “commission” to exercise such authority during an emergency, as the Roman Senate did by law. In this early work, Schmitt is at pains to emphasize that the job of the commissary dictator is to restore ordinary rule; his power is temporary. In 1924, Schmitt delivered a speech at a conference on the uses of Article 48, the Weimar constitution’s emergency clause. Germany had just survived what looked like a moment of maximum turbulence, with far-right factions battling Communists in the streets, Hitler’s beer-hall putsch, political assassinations, and unprecedented inflation. The Reichspräsident regularly invoked his emergency powers, at times delegating executive power to a military leader. While most constitutional scholars argued that the language of Article 48 permitted the emergency authorities to suspend only specifically enumerated rights, Schmitt insisted that the powers of the commissary dictator were defined only by the goal he had been instructed to attain. The emergency superseded the constitution, and the state superseded the law. Authority, not right, made the law.

By now, Schmitt seemed less interested in the restoration of democratic order. Article 48, he argued, implicitly demonstrates that “[E]ven if there is a constitution that defines and separates state functions and spheres of authority, it always remains possible to introduce the full, undivided power of the state at some point.” Behind the veil of law and norm and parliament looms the Leviathan. Nine years later, in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire, Hitler would use Article 48 to effectively suspend the constitution and rule as an absolute dictator.

The Answer to Liberal Breakdown Is “Authoritative Command”

Schmitt, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, wrote in a time of chaos. After an interval of economic and political stability, parties of the extreme left and right gained seats in the Reichstag in 1928. The German economy collapsed with the sudden onset of the Depression in 1929-30. The Nazis won 18 percent of the vote in 1930; other parties joined with them to form an anti-parliamentary coalition. After the parliament rejected the new government’s package of financial reforms, Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg, the aged Prussian military leader, invoked Article 48 in order to dissolve the legislature, thus incarnating Schmitt’s “commissary dictatorship.” During this period, democratic governments were falling across central Europe; the post-war experiment with liberal rule appeared to be coming to an end. Fatalistic Germans expected either fascists or Communists to come to power.

Schmitt had been writing in the shadow of that fear throughout the 1920s. In his 1932 book, Legality and Legitimacy, he directly confronted the problem of liberalism’s weakness before illiberal forces. The “legislative state,” Schmitt argued, depended for its legitimacy on the neutral principles of law. Such a state is well suited to a “reformist-revisionist” era devoted to social progress through legislation. But the value-neutral principles of the legislative state afford no protection in moments of crisis. “One can today,” Schmitt writes, “consider a dissolution of the Reichstag ‘strictly legal,’ even though it is in fact a coup d’état.”

Schmitt went on to make a very acute point. The liberal legislative state must offer “an unconditional equal chance for all conceivable opinions, tendencies, and movements  to achieve a majority”. Otherwise, the ruling majority can simply lock out disfavored groups. That right was guaranteed by the Weimar constitution. Yet it was precisely the commitment of Germany’s system to the “equal chance” that had rendered the state helpless in the face of parties that did not actually accept the state’s normative grounding and were seeking power in order to eliminate the system. The state had thus been forced to destroy its own foundations, by dissolving parliament, in order to protect itself.

Today’s Germany is all too familiar with this problem. Mainstream parties have agreed to lock the far-right Alternative for Germany party out of ruling coalitions, though it received the second-most votes in recent elections. It was on that basis that, in a mid-February speech in Munich, J.D. Vance criticized Germany, and other European countries faced with a similar dilemma, as undemocratic. Yet any German acquainted with the history of the Weimar Republic would understand very well the danger of including in the government a party openly nostalgic for the fascist past.

Legality and Legitimacy illustrates both Schmitt’s genius for identifying problems at the heart of liberal democracy and his utter failure to offer acceptable solutions. Liberals desperate to preserve constitutional government amidst the crisis of the early 1930s had suggested strengthening the constitutional court as a counter to an all-powerful executive. That was not the answer Schmitt gave. The legislative state having failed, Schmitt wrote, the time had come to turn to the “governmental state,” whose legitimacy rests on “the exalted personal will and authoritative command of a ruling head of state.” This was stark language that even Schmitt had never used before. He had not yet endorsed the Nazis, yet he seemed to have accepted the inevitability of a populist authoritarian party. No logical leap was required for him to celebrate their arrival to power. He proposed saving Germany from the twin scourges of Bolshevism and fascism by empowering a sovereign dictator.

In fact, Schmitt had already come to see the liberal normative state as a fantasy that we seek because we cannot accept the harsh reality of the political. In 1929, he wrote an essay titled “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” in which he encapsulated 500 years of European history as a series of temporary escapes from the eternal Hobbesian truth. Again and again, he wrote, the domain of the political is “neutralized”—and then supplanted by a new source of homogeneous faith and enmity. God was the great casus belli until the Treaty of Westphalia put an end to the wars of religion. With faith reduced to “ merely private matters,” a new domain of cultural and national feeling became the source of conflict and war. Liberal parliamentarism, with its endless conversation, promised to solve the problem of enmity through negotiation and debate, but it had failed. Perhaps class war would come to succeed nationalism as a new domain of the political.

In recent years, Schmitt observed, “a religion of technical progress” had arisen—he called it “technicity”—“which promised all other problems would be solved by technological progress.” But this was nothing more than the latest illusion of neutralization and escape. In fact, Schmitt wrote, “technology is always only an instrument andweapon.” He predicted—accurately, as it turned out—that political forces would incorporate new technologies like the radio in ways yet unimaginable. Schmitt concludes this essay with a striking observation. Though it was true that technology was only “an instrument,” it held the same world-transforming spiritual power as the domains it had replaced: “The belief in unlimited power and the domination of man over nature, even over human nature…can be called fantastic and satanic, but not simply dead, soulless, or mechanized spiritlessness.” This is Silicon Valley avant la lettre.

Seeing the Nazis as Germany’s Deliverance

Carl Schmitt could have said, when young, that some of his best friends were Jewish. The great friend of his youth, Fritz Eisler, a Hungarian Jew, was killed in the early months of the war; Schmitt was despondent at the news. His publisher, Ludwig Feuchtwanger, was Jewish. Schmitt became extremely close with Eisler’s brother as well as several Jewish colleagues in the law faculty at the University of Bonn.. Bendersky calls the young Schmitt “a very humane, sentimental cosmopolitan” with complicated feelings toward the Jews. That sounds a little generous—and not only because Schmitt was not terribly humane and recoiled from the ethos of cosmopolitanism. As a young man,  Schmitt admitted in his diary that he had “a Jewish complex,” a fascination with the faith that was deeply colored by his hatred of Bolshevism, moral universalism, global capitalism, and modernism—all of which he associated with the Jews. In an early diary entry, Schmitt describes a Jewish scholar as “vermin.” By 1930, when the Nazis began their inexorable rise to power, the machinations of Jews had become an obsessive topic of Schmitt’s diary. Jews were deceitful, plotting, “horrid.” Professional and intellectual rivalry merged with race hatred. When the Nazis moved to purge the great liberal legal scholar Hans Kelsen, a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, from his post at the University of Cologne, every member of the faculty signed a petition in support of Kelsen—save Schmitt, the most important member.

Schmitt’s hatred of Jews is not a mere personal attribute that stands apart from the body of his political thought. Though he always maintained a stance of impersonality and impartiality, Schmitt’s posture of agnosticism toward the friend/enemy distinction strains credulity. Is the enemy simply anyone who threatens a given “way of life”? If the “us” of the homogeneous democratic mass is today determined racially, who is the other? Jews are, of course, the perpetual other, and they were the great other of Schmitt’s conservative milieu in 1920s Germany. Jewish politicians and thinkers had played the leading role in the 1919 revolutionary government that had briefly threatened to bring Germany under Bolshevist rule. The scholar Raphael Gross describes Jews as “Schmitt’s main enemy, privately, emotionally, politically, collegially, professionally, and, not least, nationally.” And of course they were Hitler’s other, too. Schmitt’s theory of “the political” did not cause but did anticipate, and justify, Hitler’s antisemitic crusade. Richard Wolin cites one of Schmitt’s former legal colleagues describing the friend/enemy distinction as the Nazis’ “algorithm of bestiality.”

Schmitt welcomed Nazism as Germany’s deliverance from all that he feared and despised. When Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, Schmitt recorded his feelings in his diary: “excited, joyously pleased.” Several months later, Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen asked Schmitt to write legislation eliminating state government in Germany, thus destroying the federal system established by the Weimar constitution. Schmitt soon became, as a former student put it, “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.” Thanks in no small part to the support of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated number two, he was appointed to the Prussian State Council and the Academy of German Law, and he was chosen to serve on the the executive committee  of the national jurists association. Over the ensuing three years, according to a count by scholars Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons, Schmitt wrote 47 popular and academic pieces celebrating Nazi rule. Among “the most notorious and loathsome,” they write, was one celebrating the expulsion of Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein. “Germany spat them out for all eternity,” Schmitt wrote triumphantly.

Only in 1936, when a Nazi publication called Schmitt an opportunistic latecomer to the cause, did his leading role come to an end. He may have needed Göring’ssupport even to survive. Schmitt continued churning out Nazi apologetics, but when he was detained and investigated after the war, he was able to point to his marginalization as evidence that he had been a reluctant Nazi, claiming he was forced to comply. So unrepentant was Schmitt, in fact, that though he lived in Plettenberg until 1985, still writing and publishing, he never disavowed either his antisemitism or his Nazism. Schmitt was a fascist to the last.

What is one to say of this singular figure? Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Schmitt’s work is its persistence. He was a reactionary, an antisemite, a fascist. He wrote with undisguised admiration for Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, Catholic monarchists who despised the Enlightenment and regarded man as irretrievably wretched. He thrilled—there’s no other word—at the irruption of popular fury through the “crust” of rational life. He founded politics on the willingness to kill and die. And yet here we are, in the moment of Schmitt’s revival. Perhaps he was just too brilliant and inventive to disappear altogether.

It is not Schmittians who have reintroduced the German thinker into the national discourse; only the overtly anti-democratic fringe of the right openly endorses his thinking. In our polarized world, where each side accuses the other of absolutism, Schmitt serves as an all-purpose bludgeon. Liberals find the traces of Schmitt in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 regime of torture and surveillance, and of course in Donald Trump’s gleeful trampling on the rule of law. The culture warriors of the right hear echoes of Schmitt on the left—in, for example, “Marcuse’s call for democratic states to practice ‘repressive tolerance’ (‘intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left’) by setting pluralism aside in order to rescue the ‘oppressed’ and prevent a ‘subversive majority’ from ever taking power.” No one claims the man, but everyone cites him in order to discredit the other. Who else—save Lucifer himself—enjoys such a distinction?

In reading Carl Schmitt we discover not what we wish but what we fear—that justice is a fraud and only power is real, that liberalism and democracy are not bound to one another in fruitful tension, as we have been told, but locked in mortal combat. Is it so? Was liberal democracy a moment in time, the latest development in an unending march of political forms? Did it depend on particular economic or demographic or cognitive conditions that no longer apply? We can no longer laugh off the proposition. Though our era bears little resemblance to Weimar, we, too, live at a moment when liberal principles have lost their hold on citizens. The illiberal populists of our day, Donald Trump foremost among them, have reduced democracy to a primal struggle between “us” and “the other,” eliminated competing centers of power, and encouraged their supporters to act as vigilantes. “Stand back and stand by,” as Trump signaled the Proud Boys. How much longer will they stand back?

So, while there may be no Schmittians, we have no shortage of illiberal democrats. Some among them, including Catholic “integralists” like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, really do imagine a better and more virtuous world than ours. Carl Schmitt has a message for them—the same lesson that Donald Trump is teaching us today. Illiberal democracies are not erected on theological or other non-liberal versions of truth; they are built on power. Schmitt feared the Nazis in the 1920s before he welcomed them in 1933. He backed his way into fascism—from “the higher law” to “commissary dictatorship” to the “authoritative command” of the sovereign dictator and, finally, to the hell of Hitler. Schmitt thought you could reject the binary of Wilson or Lenin—of liberal democracy or authoritarianism. He was wrong. Once you strip away liberalism, that supposedly archaic impediment of the popular will, there’s no telling how far you’ll fall into that hell. Or perhaps there is: We’ll be tracing that downward path in the years to come.