(Great article by David Dyzenhaus. Authoritarianism does not survive on demagogy and populism alone; it needs to articulate dictatorial tropes in democratic and secular language. This requires a shrewd and skillful lawyer as Hitler found in Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Trump found in AG William Barr. f.Sheikh)
Donald Trump’s presidency has made the dominance of strongmen elsewhere only more vivid: in Russia, Thailand, Hungary, Brazil, Nicaragua, the Philippines and many other countries. Since around 2016, the question of where the strongman phenomenon comes from has been a constant issue for political theorists. What allows these men to rise? And why now? The answer is often wrapped up in some idea of ‘populism’. ‘The people’, so the thought goes, have gained control of ‘the elites’. This is a view of populism as essentially thuggish and anti-intellectual. The people are insurgent, and with great bluster and bravado the leader claims to speak for them.
But there is, in fact, a robustly intellectual foundation for strongman politics. Populism is not just a bull-in-a-china-shop way of doing politics. There is a theoretical tradition that seeks to justify strongman rule, an ideological school of demagoguery, one might call it, that is now more relevant than ever. Within that tradition, one thinker stands out: the conservative German constitutional lawyer and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). For a time, he was the principal legal adviser to the Nazi regime. And today his name is approaching a commonplace. Academics, policymakers and journalists appeal to him in order to shed light on populist trends in the US and elsewhere. A recent article in The New York Review of Books argues that the US attorney general William Barr is ‘The Carl Schmitt Of Our Time’. The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2017) came out in print the year after Trump’s election. After decades as a political rogue, forced to launch his attacks on liberalism from the sidelines, Schmitt’s name has returned to prominence.
He was the great systematiser of populist thought, which makes him useful for understanding how populist strategies might play out in politics, as well as in the legal/constitutional sphere. In The Concept of the Political (1932), he claimed that fundamental to ‘the political’ is the distinction between friend and enemy – who is in the political community, and who is out – and that what matters in politics is only whether some ideological proposal stands a chance to be successful, given the historical context.
In the Weimar period, during which a rickety republic governed interwar Germany from 1918 to 1933, Schmitt took it as a basic fact that democracy was the sole principle of legitimacy capable of garnering mass support. So, for this supreme anti-liberal, the challenge of the times was to reinterpret democracy into authoritarian terms. Any ideology based on an idea of the ‘substantive homogeneity’ of the nation would do – a secular substitute for the religious basis on which political legitimacy had been founded in the past. Schmitt yoked that idea to his claim that the sovereign is ‘he who decides on the state of exception’. Sovereignty is revealed in a situation of crisis, when the identity of the political community is at stake. In the circumstances of post-First World War constitutionalism, Schmitt located the bearer of sovereignty in the figure at the apex of the executive branch of government (in Weimar, the president of the Reich) because only he could rise above the fray of partisan politics and represent the political community.