Malenkiy Scot, a regular contributor to the comment section of this substack, asked for a clarification of what I think I’ve been getting at these last few posts. Rather than reply there I thought there were likely others who might appreciate a summary of what this has been all about. So, here’s what I’ve been probing these past three posts. This is, by design, a barebones summary; for more detail, you’d have to review the posts. It also only covers the main points. There were others along the way.
1. Whereas, historically, at least in North America since the 19th century, populism has largely focused upon democratic reform, with the consolidation of managerial liberalism the last half century, a new populism has increasingly emerged.
2. This new populism has been at least as much about the restoration of the damaged, in some cases devastated, communities resulting from managerial liberalism and globalized corporatism.
3. The managerial class’s cultural and economic mission entails the social engineering and commodification of those communities.
4. Insofar as the new populism aspires to a restoration of organic community, it finds itself on a collision course with the managerial class. This is a zero-sum game: to the extent that the new populism succeeds, the managerial class is compromised; to the extent that the managerial class succeeds, the new populism fails.
5. Even when they haven’t understood this zero-sum conflict, or the managerial class nature of the opposition, many observers have depicted this populist conflict as having a Schmittian friend-enemy dynamic. This is an accurate depiction, as Schmitt defines the friend-enemy conflict as being based upon existential threat. The new populism’s aspiration to restore organic community is an existential threat to the managerial class; the managerial class’s social engineering and commodification of civil society is an existential threat to the new populism. Communities cannot exist as both organic and socially engineered.
6. Furthermore, Schmitt’s analysis is fruitful to understanding the conditions of the new populism insofar as he criticizes legal positivism, with its failure to distinguish between legitimacy and mere legality. Mere legality lays the ground for super-legality: weaponization of the law against the rulers’ political opposition, precisely as we’re seeing happen in the United States (and saw in Canada, with the use of the Emergencies Act against the truckers).
7. Additionally, severing of legality and legitimacy facilitates the transforming of law into motorized legislation and motorized decree: increasing, centralizing, and insulating such mere legality even further into the weaponized law of super-legality. These are also the legal underpinnings for the rapid expansion of the administrative state, the social engineering instrument par excellence of the managerial class.
8. Schmitt’s work then proves to be highly valuable for understanding the nature and conditions of the existential conflict between the new populism and the managerial class. This association with Schmitt, though, given his decisionism of the early 20s, has allowed many critics of populism (usually, effectively, when not self-consciously, propagandists of the managerial class) to slander populism as inherently authoritarian. Anyone who only understands the friend-enemy dynamic within the context of Schmitt’s work of the 1920s would be understandably persuaded by this smear.
9. However, precisely because the nature of the friend-enemy dynamic is existential, and so must objectively exist separate from any decision supposedly founding the sovereign, in his works of the 1930s, Schmitt shifted to an institutionalist position. The legal order then could not be founded out of the willful act of a strongman but had to be grounded in the concrete order of the real-life experience of organic community.
10. Any attempt to impose abstractly derived legal norms upon such communities would only destroy the traditional institutions in which organic communities are grounded, which is precisely what managerial class social engineering does.
11. Recognizing the Schmittian friend-enemy dynamic at the heart of the conflict between the new populism and the agenda of the managerial class, not only does not validate accusations of intrinsic populist authoritarianism, but rather that dynamic is revealed as having its Schmittian foundations in the very same organic communities, the restoration of which is the raison d'être of the new populism.
Political philosophy has long grappled with the relation between theory and practice. Perhaps most famously, Marx, in his “Theses On Feuerbach” — of which there were, yes, that’s right, 11 — wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” All I do here is theory. I have no mission to change the world, only to try and understand it a little better. But who know, perhaps in a certain way, better understanding is a change in the world. And who knows where any ripple of change across the surface of life may lead. In any event, understanding the relevance of Piccone’s and Schmitt’s thought to this new populism felt important to me. I hope it had some value for you.
The author noted, “All I do here is theory. I have no mission to change the world, only to try and understand it a little better.” Unfortunately, Barack Obama, promised to “transform America.” His communist parents and grandparents taught him well, and an easily manipulated demented man in the White House is furthering that transformation fundamentally.
Seems like current populist movement needs a two pronged offensive 1) focussed on the local community and 2) focussed on the Fed. While the head of the snake (so to speak) is the managerial class built into the Fed, there’s also a managerial class in both the state and local governments. This is really a leviathan-type struggle. Is their any historical precedent that populists could look to for hope, strategy, etc.?