Friend-Enemy Distinction

Woke Usage

Source: [recommended to read in full] Engel, C Jay. Carl Schmitt and the Political. American Reformer. June 15, 2024.

“For Schmitt, whenever a collectivity of people contains any element that it considers a non-negotiable and intricate component of its own existence, and this collectivity comes into conflict with another collectivity which threatens that non-negotiable, there the political arises. Life is full of many types of disagreements between groups, but such disagreements transform into political phenomena when one group determines the threat against the non-negotiable is such that there is a need to distinguish between friends and enemies. Any cultural, ethnic, “religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis [can] transform into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.”

“Schmitt attempts to make us aware of the danger in ignoring the reality behind everyday politics. Often this is done in an attempt to place a veil over the political with procedure, legislation, rules, and even Constitutions. Such things can be helpful—and a healthy society incorporates them to function well— but they must not be treated as effecting the elimination of the core of the political as the clash of friends and enemies. In the twentieth century there was strong danger, Schmitt declared, to treat legislation and procedures as themselves the final arbiter of political dispute. This significantly ignores the underlying essence of political conflict. As Auron Macintyre explains, “Schmitt sees the friend/enemy distinction as the fundamental organizing principle of politics and says all other distinctions that exist while forming political coalitions are subordinate.””

New Discourses Commentary

The friend-enemy distinction refers to the cornerstone object of the political and judicial philosophy of a German theorist named Carl Schmitt, who wrote a number of works of right-wing political philosophy and thought before becoming such an enthusiastic Nazi in 1933, just after Adolf Hitler took power, that he earned the informal title “the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.” Though most of his significant political thinking was done both before and after he was a Nazi, during the years when he was a part of Hitler’s National Socialist movement and Party, he contributed strongly to the legal theory that justified the Nazi “total state,” including writing the 1933 piece that gets rendered in English as “The Legal Basis for the Total State,” which is significantly based upon the friend-enemy distinction.

Schmitt’s thought is primarily of interest on the Woke Right, where he is a favored thinker and model political mind. He is vigorously forwarded for a handful of his political concepts, perhaps most visibly his “friend-enemy distinction” as the essential criterion of what makes politics political. This idea is first presented and developed in full detail in his 1927/32 book The Concept of the Political.

For Schmitt, what makes the politics political is the distinction between (public) friend and (public) enemy, where enemies are defined as those who are interested in destroying one’s way of life and friends are defined as those who are willing to band together in its defense. Schmitt specifically compares the essential nature of this distinction in politics to the distinction between good and evil in morality, beautiful and ugly in aesthetics, and profitable versus non-profitable in economics. That is, politics is only political to the degree that it recognizes the possibility of factions that exist in mutual enmity underwritten by the potentially existential threat of violence. Of course, that means that Schmitt believes the essential criterion of politics is war, which he reveals also in part by making his point by completing the identity contained in von Clausewitz’s famous remark that “war is politics by other means.”

For Schmitt, who is thoroughly a statist, it is ultimately the state and its sovereign executive who has the capacity to “declare the enemy.” While he explains in Concept of the Political that any other domain of life whatsoever, including religion, can become political by adopting the friend-enemy distinction and declaring a public (not private) enemy and banding together as “friends” (better: allies), it is essentially the state that has the power to declare the enemy. To wit, the first chapter of The Concept of the Political is a discussion of the state and how it is an intrinsically political object, and only after this development does he talk about what makes politics political by defining the friend-enemy distinction. That is, for Schmitt, it is the executive power of any institution, but particularly the state as a whole, that has the power and responsibility to “declare the enemy” and in so doing define the parameters of the political sphere for that institution or the state at large.

Of course, there is an obvious conclusion to this way of thinking: once the state declares an enemy, anyone who does not agree and who fails to ally itself as “friend” to the state is also, by default, an “enemy” of the state. This fact is one of the reasons that Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction not only fit in perfectly with Hitler’s Nazi ambitions and totalizing “leader principle” [Führerprinzip] but also served to define its working parameters in the Third Reich.

In terms of political movements, once a (totalizing, pre-totalitarian) movement declares an enemy, this same logic plays out. The entire movement is meant to target that enemy, and anyone who doesn’t is a traitor to the cause. This logic manifests not only in National Socialism but also in all other totalitarian ideologies, including Communism (the division between “the people” and “the enemies of the people”), Islamism (under the doctrine of “al-wala’, al-bara’” (lit.: “loyalty and disavowal”), Fascism, and all movements and doctrines (including Woke Left and Woke Right) that culminate in total/totalitarian states. These doctrines are characteristic of the totalitarian environment, and, when they gain state power, the total state.

For practical examples of this doctrine familiar from the Woke Left, you can consider that under Critical Race Theory (which operates according to the friend-enemy distinction in its racial politics) there is no such thing as “not racist.” There is only “racist” (enemy) and “antiracist” (friend). The organization Antifa, along with most Communists, might apply this doctrine as “fascists” (enemy) and “antifascists” (friend). Trans ideology would see the world split into “trans allies” (friends) and “transphobic bigots” (enemies). Neo-Nazi ideology might see it as “Aryans” (friends) and “Jews” (enemies). Islamists would see the world split into “Muslims” (friends) and “jahili” (ignorants) or “infidels” (nonbelievers), which are enemies. We could go on. Most of the disqualifying names used by totalitarian movements are, in fact, not genuine labels at all but declarations of “enemy” status under Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, according to which they operate.

The friend-enemy distinction also therefore generates the pretext for a radicalizing doctrine. On the Left, this doctrine might be called “No Enemies to the Left” (NETTL), and on the Right this doctrine is called “No Enemies to the Right” (NETTR). These doctrines serve as radicalization funnels and shields that make it so the more radical members of the movement by default have the power to declare the enemy and require people play within their friend-enemy distinction paradigm. With NETTR, for example, the result is that no one can criticize a more radically “right-wing” position, but the more radical position can and will target anyone at all “to their left,” including their more moderate nearest ideological neighbors. This all such movements do as a power-consolidation tactic, and they justify it on Schmittian logic.

Schmitt offers this idea specifically as a “right-wing” or counterrevolutionary critique (read: critical theory) of liberalism. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt’s argument is that by denying the friend-enemy distinction, at least for internal factions, liberal regimes remove the political from politics and are therefore intrinsically incoherent. A liberal state is a contradiction because the state is inherently political and yet, to Schmitt, denies the political itself. This is a critique of liberalism from a right-wing critical theory.

Schmittian thinkers (both implicitly on the Woke Left, etc., and explicitly on the Woke Right) also view the friend-enemy distinction in a disingenuously totalizing way. When they are told (say, by classical liberals and traditional conservatives) that their brand of politics is out-of-bounds, they will routinely reply with an accusation that a friend-enemy distinction is being made (against them), thus validating that the friend-enemy distinction is the true criterion of politics and that their political opponents (classical liberals and traditional conservatives) are hypocrites who use the friend-enemy distinction while denying it to their political opponents. This play is very Alinsky-like, and it works exactly like the Woke Left (Critical Race Theory) doctrine of “White Fragility” from Robin DiAngelo.

For DiAngelo, once a white person is accused of racism, their only options are to agree that they are racist, pledge to be “antiracist” on her terms instead, or to resist the accusation, which is to participate in a form of racism called “White Fragility.” That is, she uses her own friend-enemy distinction to place everyone into either the friend (antiracist) or enemy (racist, including by denial) categories, which she sees as totalizing. To declare people who reject the friend-enemy distinction as doing the friend-enemy distinction is the same move. It is actually possible not to be racist, and similarly, it is absolutely valid to reject the friend-enemy distinction in politics and to deal with the individuals declaring friends and enemies as taking an illegitimate approach

On the grounds that Schmittians as such are also intolerant, divisive, and manipulative, it is also valid to admit that the friend-enemy distinction in politics sometimes applies without being characteristic of the political itself and that it applies neatly from the perspective of a free society to intolerant, divisive, manipulative Schmittians who have positioned themselves against a free, classically liberal, and/or traditionally conservative society. That is, the idea of political friends and enemies, even as Schmitt characterized them, doesn’t have to be wholly invalidated to invalidate the much more comprehensive idea that politics itself is friends-versus-enemies all the way down. Sometimes and enemy is an enemy, though coalitions can be made against them without having to draw upon “allyship” or “solidarity” models like the “friends” in Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction.

Extended Example of Woke Usage

Source: [recommended to read in full] Engel, C Jay. Carl Schmitt and the Political. American Reformer. June 15, 2024.

“One of the figures in the twentieth century who was most adamant about the failures of the procedural approach to matters of state was the German jurist, Carl Schmitt. For many, Schmitt’s critiques of the liberal tendency in the West offer a compelling challenge to the foundations of the now faltering liberal order—especially since it was Schmitt’s position that a committed drive toward liberalism would wind up laying the preconditions for what he called the Total State. If the state itself was denied the task of distinguishing between friends and enemies and absorbing the drama of man’s antagonistic nature, such elements of man’s natural being would not simply disappear. As Dr. Paul Gottfried explains in his study of Schmitt, for Schmitt, “liberals [are not merely] destroyers of our political nature, but [are] dangerously neglectful and even contemptuous of it.”

“Schmitt represents a tradition of Western political theory that can best be described as realist; it is realist in the sense that Schmitt was famously disinterested in upholding the myths and ideals that animated Western liberal theorists. Laws and norms can never be the pinnacle of political action, because the political is animated by constant human judgement and determinations about Friends and Enemies.

“For Schmitt, there is always a human actor, or human-controlled institutions, even if we don’t admit it, behind the veil sanctioning the legal order, interpreting it, applying it, determining its meaning, and its exceptions. This what Schmitt meant when he elaborates on the “challenge of the exception.” No matter how brilliantly exposited or constructed, the legal order cannot account for all situations and there is always a human element upholding the order based on judgement, interests, calculations, and a complex network of myriad factors. The legal order is not a machine that works itself out automatically. One can see glimpses of the reality of the political, beneath all the myths, in recent decades and especially during moments like Trump’s trials.

“It is important to emphasize here that Schmitt is not calling on his readers to inject an element of antagonism into their political practices, but rather to step back and recognize that antagonism is the very cause of the political in the first place. The political is an aspect of the human experience which precedes the existence of the state. What then, is the essence of the political?

“For Schmitt, whenever a collectivity of people contains any element that it considers a non-negotiable and intricate component of its own existence, and this collectivity comes into conflict with another collectivity which threatens that non-negotiable, there the political arises. Life is full of many types of disagreements between groups, but such disagreements transform into political phenomena when one group determines the threat against the non-negotiable is such that there is a need to distinguish between friends and enemies. Any cultural, ethnic, “religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis [can] transform into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.”

“Schmitt attempts to make us aware of the danger in ignoring the reality behind everyday politics. Often this is done in an attempt to place a veil over the political with procedure, legislation, rules, and even Constitutions. Such things can be helpful—and a healthy society incorporates them to function well— but they must not be treated as effecting the elimination of the core of the political as the clash of friends and enemies. In the twentieth century there was strong danger, Schmitt declared, to treat legislation and procedures as themselves the final arbiter of political dispute. This significantly ignores the underlying essence of political conflict. As Auron Macintyre explains, “Schmitt sees the friend/enemy distinction as the fundamental organizing principle of politics and says all other distinctions that exist while forming political coalitions are subordinate.”

“This doesn’t mean that there must constantly be an obvious enemy, that political actors must be always in conflict with others. If there were a situation where there was no clash between friend and enemy, the political itself would not be a component of that society. But, Schmitt warns, modern man deludes himself if he refuses to recognize that the political is always possible, lurking beneath the scene. The failure of liberalism was that it pretended that it could do away with this reality of human relations. In doing so, it was unable to see clearly the coming return of the political as the veil of neutrality has completely been torn down. Those who deny the existence of the political will always lose to those who embrace it—which is why Schmitt has for many decades been so popular among the Far Left, especially in Europe.”

Revision date: 12/5/25

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