In recent years, there has been growing concern with right-wing attacks on liberalism broadly conceived. A “post-liberal” movement came into being, spearheaded by Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. While post-liberalism as an organized intellectual movement seems to have petered out, its ethos has lived on and appears to be growing more and more popular among young people who not only question liberalism in the abstract but are alienated from the concrete institutions and ideas that make up our liberal society and see little value in them.
No doubt this is an alarming trend, and many people find it even more alarming to see young people on the right openly embracing a politics of confrontation and open hostility while tossing out the concern for norms and decorum that have characterized much of conservatism in the past few decades. A powerful symbol of this rejection is the embrace among some right-wing populists of the National Socialist political theorist Carl Schmitt and his concept of the “friend-enemy distinction”.
In a recent piece, Thomas Howes joins a chorus of writers who look with alarm at Schmitt’s rising popularity. In particular, he emphasizes how this Schmittian approach is at odds with America’s heritage of constitutional limited governance and the rule of law rooted in the liberal tradition.
However, I fear that Schmitt’s Nazi affiliation and the young right’s penchant for populist pugnaciousness is leading to defenders of the liberal order to miss the structural forces at work in our society that are incentivizing this increasingly common outlook of political total war. Accordingly, they focus their ire against the fact that disenchanted minds are turning to men like Schmitt rather than directing their efforts at thinking through the serious ruptures in society and the creative solutions necessary to correct them. Often (Howes may or may not be guilty of this), they rest their case with a lame appeal to constitutionalism, which fails to acknowledge the decayed constitutional order as it actually exists. Instead of dismissing those who embrace illiberal thinkers out of hand, it would be more beneficial to understand the broader, structural reasons why such thinkers are becoming popular at all.
One need not be a fan of Carl Schmitt to understand that politics is an inherently conflictual enterprise stemming from the violent and conflict-filled potential of human social life. Indeed, Leo Strauss considers a Hobbesian understanding of social life to be essential to the development of liberalism, going so far as to suggest that Hobbes may be the “founder of liberalism.”
Similarly, Ludwig von Mises, quite a different flavor of liberal than Strauss, also placed the foundation of his liberalism on a utilitarian method aimed at reducing social conflict in a hostile and dangerous world. In Mises’s telling, property is the essential aspect of liberalism because it provides a clear set of rules that minimize conflict and can, therefore, facilitate social cooperation and coexistence. Mises is clear that the social order rests upon the state’s ability to use violence to uphold the institution of property, stating that “without the application of compulsion and coercion against the enemies of society, there could not be any life in society.”
One may say that liberalism, at least of a certain kind, is ultimately about establishing an institutional framework in which the numerous competing interests, drives, and temptations to defect from social cooperation are suppressed by making the costs to defect outweigh the benefits. Writ large, liberalism aims to balance the social power of the core institutions of society in such a way as to ensure that persons are ensconced in overlapping layers of institutions that provide both existential meaning and security.
The entire liberal project begins to collapse when people begin to question the ability of the state to act as an impartial mediator.
However, the entire liberal project begins to collapse when people begin to question the ability of the state to act as an impartial mediator to protect rights and/or property from encroachment. As this occurs, people naturally begin to consider defecting from the current (in their minds failing) constitutional order, and to instead begin to embrace pre-constitutional methods of securing their life, liberty, and property.
The United States is currently in a paradoxical situation where the massive growth of the state has not led to a Hobbesian Leviathan, which would at least entail some degree of secure equality under the sovereign’s power. Rather, as the state has grown larger, the danger of conflict has only increased and, in a sense, led to a condition growing ever closer to anarchy.
I have previously discussed at length sociologist Frank Tannenbaum’s theory of the balance of power in society, in which a healthy society is characterized by each of the core social institutions (the family, the church, the state, and the market), each carrying out its natural functions, which provide both meaning and security to its members. However, Tannenbaum argued that due to the fixed nature of social power, when one institution grows, it can only do so at the expense of the others; institutional growth, then, is a zero-sum game. This, in turn, creates an imbalance that breeds insecurity and conflict to control the commanding heights of the dominant social institution, in our case, the state.
The contemporary American state is not a neutral institution. Government takes in, and in turn redistributes, over 36 percent of GDP, establishing a system of legal patronage. At the same time, mountains of regulations are written via regulatory capture, and the central bank-administered inflationary currency system promotes the financialization of the economy that benefits certain people and sectors over others. Even more seriously, growing numbers of people on both the left and the right have become skeptical that the state’s core function of providing security and meting out justice via the court system is being carried out in a neutral manner.
As society’s mediating institutions falter, the state becomes the only source of security. In this situation, the only method to ensure personal security is for one’s crude, cobbled-together tribe to seize the state.
Tannenbaum’s “balance of power” framework naturally lends itself to analyzing America’s current disorder through the lens of the theory of structural realism. Though almost exclusively associated with international relations (IR), realism is technically a theory of how groups behave in an anarchic system. While it is true that the US is not living in a Mad Max world, the system continues to accrue more and more characteristics of anarchy.
In IR, the international system is often described as anarchic due to the fact that there is no higher power, like the police, for states to call upon when one is in trouble. The international system is a self-help world. In reality, the differentiation between anarchy and order is a sliding scale, rather than a pure binary switch. When you live in a bad neighborhood and the police fail to show up after your house is broken into, it’s not exactly anarchy in the USA, but it can hardly be classified as order either.
This feeling of anarchy and constitutional decay is further amplified when the institutions of the state no longer appear to be more or less neutral arbiters of disputes, but rather as a method of distributing resources to patronage networks and shielding one’s friends and allies from consequences while punishing one’s enemies: Will the police show up if I am victimized by a crime? Will I be arrested for trying to stop a violent, drug-addled man on the subway? Will my competitors be able to secure lucrative government contracts or engage in regulatory capture at my expense?
The answer to these questions increasingly does not hinge on the rule of law but rather on which political group holds state power.
Liberals can heed this warning, acknowledge these issues, and take the difficult steps to solve them, or they can ignore them and content themselves with defending a system that has brought us to the present crisis.
This framework also explains why opposition to immigration is on the rise and has reached a fevered pitch. In a scenario with less disorder and more social balance, immigrants are not necessarily a threat, especially when introduced at a manageable pace. But currently, immigrants are
merely another group that one must compete with for state resources and patronage, and, as fears about the deteriorating rule of law continue, they are feared as unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous, threats to one’s life and property. This is especially magnified when there is the perception, whether correct or not, that certain immigrants, such as Somalis or Indians, are maintaining their ethnic identity group and use it to accrue political and social power.
Under an offensive realist theory of human behavior, the natural and logical response to this state of affairs is to secure as much power for one’s group as possible, so it is not surprising that more and more people are turning to theorists, like Schmitt, who they believe speak to this unpleasant reality. The alternative is to be at the mercy of one’s enemies, and since the world is radically uncertain, we can never know what those enemies will do to us, though both the right and the left have no shortage of imagination when it comes to envisioning what terrible fates await.
If there is to be any chance of liberalism surviving, this tragic reality must be acknowledged.
It would be wise for liberals to adopt the realist understanding that it does not matter if you think someone is insecure; it only matters what they think. It does not matter that I think many leftist fears seem to be straight out of la la land; it only matters that they do, in fact, fear. This is, of course, equally true for right-wing fear and insecurity. Dismissing these insecurities as being a tribalistic character flaw is an excellent way to ensure that one loses all credibility and is, in turn, dismissed by those one is trying to persuade.
Relatedly, any response to growing insecurity is hampered by the constantly increasing credibility issues that plague basically every institution of society. Young people, in particular, and especially those who endured the Covid lockdowns as children, are deeply suspicious and cynical about basically everything. In fact, a 2023 poll found that Gen Z has the lowest support for democracy at all, with only 27 percent strongly agreeing it is the best form of government, and 32 percent agreeing somewhat. In contrast, a full 31 percent are just ambivalent, with 11 percent disagreeing partially or totally!
Those who desire to preserve America’s liberal tradition must wrestle with this unpleasant reality. People hunger for security, and if actually existing liberalism cannot provide it, then people will turn elsewhere.
Liberals must put forward a bold program that addresses the structural issues in American society that have set us on a road to increasing conflict and violence. Such a program will need to address the failures of our institutions and systems without nostalgia for a past that has ultimately led us to the point where we are now. It must acknowledge the harsh political realities and declining standards that any attempts at reform face. And it ultimately must embody a maturity reflected in moral realism and versatility that is able to navigate today’s rapidly changing circumstances without succumbing to the temptation to take comfort in rationalistic and idealistic conceptions of morality that are incapable of dealing with the present crisis.
Schmitt’s increasing popularity is a warning that our liberal constitutional order is failing to provide the security and order that are necessary for life in society. Liberals can heed this warning, acknowledge these issues, and take the difficult steps to solve them, or they can ignore them and content themselves with defending a system that has brought us to the present crisis. Those who do the latter cannot claim to be surprised when Schmitt’s ideas supplant their own.