When we face the question of what makes us who we are, different people have different answers. Some see ourselves as receptacles of tradition. Others see us as a self to be discovered in the world. Still others see us as blank slates who can become whatever we can dream.
Carl Schmitt captured the essence of totalitarian politics in his book The Concept of the Political (1932). It is the distinction between friend and enemy. The poison of this kind of thinking is in the ugly fact that the declared enemy must be treated as the declared enemy once a political faction has declared one, and anyone who doesn't go along with that declaration declares himself one of the enemy.
James Lindsay examines Hitler’s Mein Kampf in his Nazi Experiment series, exposing how totalitarian ideas resurface today in woke and populist movements.