Carl Schmitt (1888–1985)
German legal scholar and Nazi jurist; major (often unacknowledged) intellectual resource for the MAGA New Right
Who He Is
Carl Schmitt was a German constitutional and international law theorist who is simultaneously one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the most morally compromised. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and served the regime as a legal apologist before being sidelined by the SS in 1936 (for insufficient ideological purity, ironically). He continued writing until the end of his life.
Field describes him plainly as a “German legal scholar and Nazi jurist.”
Key Ideas
The Friend/Enemy Distinction: Schmitt’s most famous concept. In The Concept of the Political (1932), he argued that the specifically political distinction is between friend and enemy — not good and evil, not beautiful and ugly, but us and them. Politics is not about managing disagreement within a shared community; it is about identifying and opposing an existential enemy. This framework licenses the treatment of political opponents as threats to be destroyed rather than citizens to be persuaded.
Decisionism: Schmitt argued that sovereignty is defined not by legal rules but by the ability to decide on the exception — to declare a state of emergency and suspend the normal legal order. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” This is an explicit argument that law is ultimately subordinate to power, not the reverse.
The “State of Exception”: Normal legal rules apply only in normal times. In a crisis, the sovereign can and must act outside the law. This provides theoretical cover for executive action unconstrained by constitutional limits.
Critique of parliamentary liberalism: Schmitt argued that liberal parliamentary democracy rests on a faith in rational deliberation and the power of argument that is naïve — real politics is about power and will, not reason.
Schmitt’s Intellectual Context
Schmitt was raised Catholic in Protestant Germany and, though not a committed Catholic late in life, his thought — especially its “decisionist” aspect — was influenced by Catholic counterrevolutionaries: Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés. This creates a direct line between Schmitt and Catholic integralism: the same counterrevolutionary tradition that shaped Schmitt also shapes the contemporary integralist movement.
Schmitt saw some real problems with the Weimar Republic — a liberal democratic constitutional order that was highly unstable — and wrote about them with unusual clarity. Like Vermeule after him, he worried about the dangers of a weak state. His eventual support for Hitler was the catastrophic consequence of applying that theoretical framework without moral limits.
Schmitt and the New Right
Adrian Vermeule is the most sustained Schmitt rehabilitator on the New Right. His work with the Schmitt corpus spans more than a decade:
- 2009: Harvard Law Review — “Our Schmittian Administrative Law”
- 2009 (with Eric Posner): “Tyrannophobia” working paper — fear of dictatorial power is irrational in American context
- 2011 (with Posner): The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic — “the legally constrained executive is now a historical curiosity”; “Madisonian separation of powers is obsolete”
- Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt: “Demystifying Schmitt” — argued for “governance through ex post standards, rather than ex ante rules” (acts first, asks questions later); “Schmittian commissarial dictatorship is just the purposive approach to legal interpretation, writ very large and applied to the constitution as a whole”
- 2015: Northwestern University Law Review — “Optimal Abuse of Power”
- 2019: “All Human Conflict Is Ultimately Theological” (speech at Robert P. George’s James Madison Program) — ended with Schmitt: “To the political belongs the idea, because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief”; mocked critics of Schmitt as “demi-intellectuals infected by ‘intellectualized moral Puritanism’”
More broadly: the friend/enemy distinction maps directly onto the New Right’s culture-war framing — the “regime,” the “ruling class,” the “enemy” as existential threat rather than political opponent. The Claremonters’ “Flight 93 election” logic is also Schmittian: a state of emergency in which normal rules do not apply. Nathan Pinkoski’s NatCon 3 talk openly cited Schmitt.
Why This Matters
Schmitt is the intellectual who provides theoretical justification for abandoning liberal proceduralism in a crisis. Once you accept that (a) the republic is in an existential crisis and (b) the sovereign can decide the exception, the logical path leads to January 6. The catastrophism of The Flight 93 Election + the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction + decisionism = a framework that can justify almost any political action in an “emergency.”
Important distinction: Schmitt’s original ideas are about the structure of sovereignty and political identity. The New Right’s use of Schmitt is often selective and distorted — but the distortion is toward more, not less, authoritarianism.
Cross-References
- Adrian Vermeule — most explicit user of Schmitt in the New Right
- Postliberalism — the camp most influenced by Schmitt
- Decisionism — Schmitt’s key political concept (needs its own page)
- The Flight 93 Election — catastrophism that resonates with Schmittian emergency logic
- Leo Strauss — wrote a notable early critique of Schmitt; complex relationship
- January 6 2021 — the downstream political consequence of Schmittian emergency logic applied to 2020