Highlights
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2024-12-11 21:52 Think of the history this world is emerging out of the age of Reason. And the political thought of the Enlightenment produced for us what we’ve long considered to be the greatest political strategy in existence, Liberal Capitalist democracy By this Time for over a hundred years, liberal capitalist democracy has been the gold standard in the west when it comes to how we should be structuring our societies.
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2024-12-11 23:17 The pre liberal standard of there being some single anointed authoritarian leader that has ultimate say over the political process is quickly being replaced by things like parliamentary politics, separation of powers, democracy, civil and human rights.
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2024-12-12 13:07 Now, somebody born into our modern world that’s largely grounded in liberal principles might be confused as to how anybody in their right mind could ever possibly disagree with this method of doing things politically. This episode is not talking about the merits of liberalism, but Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism might think, look, I know we’ve had our problems in the west over the years, but all this stuff just seems like common sense.
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2024-12-12 13:08 back to the modern United States. Liberalism seems to be the foundation of both political parties. How could anybody possibly think that it’s liberalism that’s the problem with liberal capitalist democracy? Carl Schmitt would probably say to this person that the most dangerous political ideology is the ideology that’s currently popular. The kind of ideological assumptions you make about the political process that are so ingrained, so steeped in tradition, that you don’t even think twice about them.
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2024-12-12 13:08 we may be totally different people. We may disagree on almost every element of how a society should be structured, but at the end of the day, we can shake hands, live and let live, and just go on about our lives. Carl Schmidt would say that this is a liberal fantasy world, that if you pay attention to what’s actually going on in the real world of the political, this is not the way extreme political differences interact with each other in our societies. Liberalism just creates the illusion that they do. To Carl Schmitt, this expectation that we’re going to be able to coexist, tolerant of extreme political differences comes from the more fundamental liberal belief that there is no political difference.
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2024-12-11 23:25 But Carl Schmitt believes all that liberalism really does is allow people to avoid engaging in the political. Rational debate puts on a good show, but it’s mostly political theater. We have long periods of normalcy where a bunch of people get dressed up in suits and go to this building downtown and scream at each other for a few hours about issues that are almost entirely inconsequential.
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2024-12-11 23:26 Schmitt would say, look at history. What happens every single time there is a truly serious political issue where the differences between parties are irreconcilable?
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2024-12-11 23:27 The reality of the world is that there are political differences that are irreconcilable, and these differences are not all that uncommon.
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2024-12-11 23:27 To Carl Schmitt, this is one of the failures of liberal political philosophy. No matter how good it feels to tell ourselves we’re going to be open to outsiders and just talk things out when we disagree, rational debate cannot solve political problems of this magnitude. No matter how much of a poster child you are for liberalism.
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2024-12-11 23:28 Society is an agreement between the citizenry and the sovereign. The citizen’s job is to serve the sovereign. The sovereign’s job is to ensure the security of the citizen.
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2024-12-11 23:28 to do this effectively, the sovereign needs to wield an authoritarian level of power.
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2024-12-11 23:29 The idea of a dictatorship, which at the time was historically one of the most common structures of a successful society, dictatorships in this new liberal world become unthinkable.
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2024-12-11 23:30 To put it bluntly, Carl Schmitt is saying that liberalism is terrified of the idea of a sovereign dictator holding power. So to safeguard against that possibility, they’ve come up with all these different attempts to hold political power to a set of predefined norms and rules. Liberals are obsessed with this process of normativism. This is the rise of constitutional democracies in the West. Constitutions are designed to be safeguards against the swift and decisive action of authoritarianism.
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2024-12-11 23:32 To Carl Schmitt, this isn’t actually how things ever play out in liberal societies anyway, because even the most liberal society in existence eventually recognizes how necessary temporary extra constitutional power is given the right circumstances.
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2024-12-11 23:32 Schmitt is saying that even in liberal societies, whenever it really comes down to it, and they’re faced with some sort of existential crisis, the Constitution goes out the window anyway.
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2024-12-11 23:32 They’re held to the Constitution. There are checks and balances. They got to get permission to do something, right? But what happens every time there’s an emergency and something needs to get done? Oh well, they just take action.
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2024-12-11 23:32 In other words, to Carl Schmitt, liberalism claims to have gotten rid of the sovereign from the political process. But what happens in these societies whenever something actually has to get done and we need a sovereign? Abracadabra, poof. The sovereign was there the whole time. Who would have thought?
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2024-12-11 23:33 This is yet another liberal theory versus reality thing.
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2024-12-11 23:34 Schmitt, the biggest difference between our modern societies and the ones that existed in the pre liberal world is that the pre liberal societies were just a lot more honest about the authoritarianism that was going on on nowadays. We got this grand illusion of liberalism that puts a bunch of window dressing on the whole process and pretends the world is something that it’s not. Liberalism is in many ways an impossible utopian fantasy in the eyes of Carl Schmitt.