Arendt vs Trump (and Schmitt)
By: The Hannah Arendt Center
Tags: Europe, Politics, Donald Trump, Nationalism, America

Feisal G. Mohamed writes at The Stone in The New York Times that the U.S. Presidential election can be understood as a contest between the ideas of Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt.

“Listening to Donald J. Trump’s acceptance speech, I felt as though the election was turning into a battle between two very different, though equally formidable, 20th-century political philosophers, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced,” Schmitt wrote in his 1927 work, “The Concept of the Political,” “is that between friend and enemy.” It is a statement meant to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive: The friend-enemy distinction is central to politics in the same way that a good-evil distinction is central to ethics and a beautiful-ugly distinction is central to aesthetics. All other considerations are peripheral to this core concern.”

Schmitt’s “friend and enemy” distinction is the basis of his understanding of politics as a contest between conflicting groups or tribes. Schmitt sees it as realist counsel to understand that politics is about groups fighting other groups. To win and succeed, any political unity must be willing to sacrifice and fight for itself and against other groups. A political order for Schmitt is not a matter of laws that treat all people equally. When we mistake legality for politics, Schmitt argues, we weaken the friend/enemy distinction and the bonds of unity amongst friends in opposition to enemies that is the core of politics. Politics is the expression of the truth of a people in opposition to its enemies; and the Schmittian political dictator is the one gifted with the ability to speak for the people in a way that unifies and brings that people to exist. Trump’s “I am your voice” is a true example of a Schmittian political dictator.

Mohamed shows that Trump’s politics reflects Schmitt’s argument that politics is about the empowerment of a people based on mutual friendship in opposition to its enemies. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” and his insistence on “America First” are built around questions of borders and friendship. We will care for Americans, Trump insists, but that means we must define who is American. Mohamed writes:

“At several points, he emphasized that his republic will be a polity of caring. But he also strained mightily to identify the groups posing an obstacle to this goal: undocumented workers and Islamic terrorists. Responsibility for a supposed rising tide of crime was placed squarely at the doorstep of Mexican migrants and Islamic State sympathizers. The presence of these groups in our midst is, in this view, preventing true political community from emerging.”

To read Trump through Schmitt is to understand that Trump offers a vision of America open to anyone, of any race, religion, or creed, so long as that person identifies as American. The criteria for deserving American care and friendship is not racial, it is political in the Schmittian sense, it is to identify one politically as a friend and to join in the hatred of America’s collective enemies. This was especially apparent in Trump’s embrace of gay Americans who are targeted by Muslim extremists; when homosexuals recognize that their friends are Americans and their enemies are Muslims, they are for Trump welcomed into the American political world. That is why, as Mohamed writes, there were quixotic moments attempting to include Blacks, Gays, and other minorities in Trump’s convention.

“Despite the open hostility to the Black Lives Matter movement apparent at the convention throughout the week, African-Americans received mention from Trump as victims of globalization suffering from joblessness and urban decay. This move collapsed the racial division between poor whites and poor blacks that Republicans so often exploit, replacing it with a focus on the plight of all workers who are Americans. Even more surprising were the huge cheers in response to Trump’s vow to defend the L.G.B.T.Q. community from Islamic extremists — a turn of events that seemed to surprise the speaker himself, who paused to compliment the crowd on its decision momentarily to set aside one of the party’s pet bigotries. This alchemical change was of course effected in the crucible of Orlando, Fla. Here we see how blood sacrifice at the hands of an enemy can alter the terms of political friendship, allowing a previously marginalized group a path to the center of political life. It is a core insight of one of Schmitt’s finest current readers, Paul W. Kahn, in his books “Sacred Violence” and “Political Theology,” that American politics often works in this way, as when African-American sacrifice during World War II was mobilized to broaden anti-segregationist consensus.”

Mohamed makes an excellent case that Trump is a Schmittian politician. His tribalism works seeks, by “heaping hatred on foreign elements within America’s borders,” to “thicken the meaning of the nation as a category.” Perfectly named, Trump trumpets a national unity that is expressed and emerges through his voice.

“Or, put differently, he seeks to restore the racial and familial implications always at play in its Latin root, nationem, from nascor, to be born. In this way it is entirely fitting Trump was introduced by his daughter Ivanka, and that the week featured his children much more prominently than it did the usual party functionaries. We are being invited to join them under the beneficent wing of his paternal care.”

Trump imagines politics as based in a national coherence, the emergence of a national friendship built in opposition to enemies. If we don’t repeatedly identify who we are and thus who we are not, if we treat everyone simply according to rules and laws, we lose the defining force of politics; if anything legal goes, public morality is weakened. What is more, we forget what we are fighting to defend and we may well lose our political existence to others who are willing to fight for themselves — in Trump’s worldview, that is the Chinese and the Islamic extremists. They engage in Schmittian politics of the friend and enemy distinction. And they are winning. America is losing because it is not fighting as America. Trump promises to return us to the fight as Americans.

If we are to oppose Trump’s politics of tribal conflict, Mohamed argues, we need another vision of politics, one that he finds in Hannah Arendt:

“Not all of us will accept the invitation [to join Trump’s nationalist politics]. And in this respect we will share the skepticism of Hannah Arendt, whose core insight in her indispensable book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is that the path to totalitarianism is cleared when the nation-state hyphen is severed, when the nation becomes an exclusive group that must defend itself through actions residing outside of the law and beyond the protections afforded by state institutions and procedures. Once the logic of a threatened national genus is accepted, emergency action grossly expanding the brutal exercise of state power is not far behind.”

Arendt understands politics to be about plurality, not oneness. This is because politics means the acting and speaking of people who disagree, their coming together, amidst and despite their disagreements, to unite around what they share in common. Politics is for Arendt the unification of a multitude, but such a unification that does not forget that politics requires a multitude, and thus plurality. Arendt’s great statement of the central place of plurality to politics takes place in her Introduction to The Human Condition:

“Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life. Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words “to live” and “to be among men” {inter homines esse) or “to die” and “to cease to be among men” (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms. But in its most elementary form, the human condition of action is implicit even in Genesis (“Male and female created He them”), if we understand that this story of man’s creation is distinguished in principle from the one according to which God originally created Man (adam), “him” and not “them,” so that the multitude of human beings becomes the result of multiplication. Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

Against those who would reduce politics to the friend/enemy distinction, against those who aim to eliminate particular peoples from the world, and against those who would keep out others in the name of a unitary politics, Arendt argues that politics needs plurality and difference.

The great threat to politics is homogeneity and one source of homogeneity in politics is nationalism. That is why Arendt is so critical of European nation-states where national unity overcomes the foundational plurality of legal and constitutional orders. Whenever a state is a nation-state with a preferred national group (the Germans in Germany, the French in France, and the Turks in Turkey) there is the real danger that members of those groups will grant themselves legal privileges and advantages over minorities. At that point, minorities can either accept second-class status, emigrate, or assimilate to the national majority.

After she emigrated to American in 1940, Arendt came to see the United States as an alternative to the European nation-states. She loved American pluralism, which she took to mean that in America different groups could continue to exist and co-exist without having to assimilate fully and abandon their distinctiveness and uniqueness. In America Jews, Germans, Slavs, and Mexicans, as well as Christians, Muslims, and spirit worshippers could remain who they were and also commit themselves to being American. To be American, Arendt believed, was not a national identity inconsistent with other national and religious identities. To be American was to commit oneself to living amongst a plurality of peoples and persons. It was, she argued, the first state that aspired to be — and to some important extent was — free from being a nation-state.

Arendt saw at least two great threats to the American respect for a politics of plurality. One was the rise of bureaucracy — the rule of nobody — which is not the same as no rule. The danger of bureaucracy is that rule is depersonalized and rationalized. In a bureaucracy, there is no one to argue against since each individual bureaucrat is not responsible for the policy. In the rule of nobody, political opposition is like pushing against a rubber band. Governed by rationality without a face, one bureaucratic opinion reigns and disagreements are seen as disorderly. Bureaucracy is, Arendt sees, the antithesis of a plural politics.

The second great threat to plurality and politics in America was and is the rise of the national security state. In the demand that America be a world power and the consequent need for America to see the world through the friend/enemy lens, Arendt feared the forced conformity and homogeneity that would be deadly to an American version of political plurality.

If Schmitt’s concept of politics helps explain the real and undeniable appeal of Donald Trump, Arendt’s understanding of politics and plurality explains why Trump’s tribalist politics is so dangerous. The desire for a “voice of the people” who will fight to make America great again is real, and it speaks to urgent political needs for membership and also for a political ideal we can believe in. But such a dictatorial politics of national friendship chafes at the constitutional and legal constraints that, for Arendt, are the structural foundations of pluralism. The laws that protect civil rights; the laws that prevent discrimination; the laws that defend privacy; and the laws that protect private property are all, for Arendt, necessary bulwarks that protect the pluralism that is the prerequisite for real political argument, persuasion, and compromise.

Such a pluralist politics is messy, often inefficient, and at times irritatingly indecisive. We live in such a time. And the impulse to dispense with politics in the name of getting things done is strong. That impulse, to elect a miracle worker who will solve our insolvable problems, is understandable. And insofar as Trump offers an inclusive ideal of America open to all Americans who identify the right way as Americans, it even has a patina of equality. But the overarching claim is to replace laws and restraints with a politics of salvation by a strong man. Trumps politics threatens a totalitarian anti-politics, one that replaces plurality with national unity. What Arendt helps us see is that such a politics is not only dangerous, it is distinctly anti-American.