HANDY 11 POINT SUMMARY
OR WHAT'S ALL THIS PICCONE AND SCHMITT STUFF BEEN GETTING AT?
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 problem in DC - and the US - is a longstanding structural problem. Neither Biden nor Trump set any kind of real policy - and if they try to, they're reined back in and quickly - note how Biden's statements at pressers, and Trump's "twitter explosions" are "walked back" by "staff". We've got two governments - the one at the White House and Capitol Hill, the not-very-dignified government, but elected by the people with the intent and expectation to set policy and run things, which is in some very attenuated form, a route for the "new populism" to take actual power, short of revolution - and the actual "efficient" government of the Administrative State, which is permanent and unelected and largely composed of corporatist neoliberals, and which is the expression of managerial liberalism and globalized corporatism. The Administrative State exists without any Constitutional basis, and has, since its inception. It has subverted Constitutional process since then, and now strives to overtly overthrow Constitutional governance. It is the living embodiment of sedition, and it itself must be overthrown and abolished at all levels.
"The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution. The original New Dealers were aware, at least to some degree, that their vision of the national government's proper role and structure could not be squared with the written Constitution: The Administrative Process, James Landis's classic exposition of the New Deal model of administration, fairly drips with contempt for the idea of a limited national government subject to a formal, tripartite separation of powers. Faced with a choice between the administrative state and the Constitution, the architects of our modern government chose the administrative state, and their choice has stuck. ... The United States Congress today effectively exercises general legislative powers, in contravention of the constitutional principle of limited powers. Moreover, Congress frequently delegates that general legislative authority to administrative agencies, in contravention of Article I. Furthermore, those agencies are not always subject to the direct control of the President, in contravention of Article II. In addition, those agencies sometimes exercise the judicial power, in contravention of Article III. Finally, those agencies typically concentrate legislative, executive, and judicial functions in the same institution, in simultaneous contravention of Articles I, II, and III. In short, the modern administrative state openly flouts almost every important structural precept of the American constitutional order." https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1941 context=faculty_scholarship
Liberal progressivism - which you refer to as managerial liberalism - is the political expression of an aristocratic oligarchy, whereas the new populism is the political expression of the majority of the people not in that aristocratic class. The former class tends to be urban and concentrated in the big cities and their more exclusive suburbs, and in exurban places like, say, the Hamptons. The latter class tends to be more rural, and in the Rust Belt, and places like that. And they are at war - a class war - with each other. And if you think about it, this class war has been ongoing since the beginning of the United States - the aristocratic urban class being the Federalists, Walll Streeters like John Jay and Alexander Hamilton in the lead, and the rural class being the Anti-Federalists, represented by Thomas Jefferson (in hock to his bankers, whose possessions were auctioned off a week after his death to pay his mostly inherited debts) and Patrick Henry. A look at Anti-Federalist #9 is of interest here:
"We the Aristocratic party of the United States, lamenting the many inconveniences to which the late confederation subjected the well-born, the better kind of people, bringing them down to the level of the rabble -- and holding in utter detestation that frontispiece to every bill of rights, "that all men are born equal" -- beg leave (for the purpose of drawing a line between such as we think were ordained to govern, and such as were made to bear the weight of government without having any share in its administration) to submit to our Friends in the first class for their inspection, the following defense of our monarchical, aristocratical democracy... Our friends we find have been assiduous in representing our federal calamities, until at length the people at large -- frightened by the gloomy picture on one side, and allured by the prophecies of some of our fanciful and visionary adherents on the other -- are ready to accept and confirm our proposed government without the delay or forms of examination -- which was the more to be wished, as they are wholly unfit to investigate the principles or pronounce on the merit of so exquisite a system. Impressed with a conviction that this constitution is calculated to restrain the influence and power of the LOWER CLASS -- to draw that discrimination we have so long sought after; to secure to our friends privileges and offices, which were not to be ... [obtained] under the former government, because they were in common; to take the burden of legislation and attendance on public business off the commonalty, who will be much better able thereby to prosecute with effect their private business; to destroy that political thirteen headed monster, the state sovereignties; to check the licentiousness of the people by making it dangerous to speak or publish daring or tumultuary sentiments; to enforce obedience to laws by a strong executive, aided by military pensioners; and finally to promote the public and private interests of the better kind of people -- we submit it to your judgment to take such measures for its adoption as you in your wisdom may think fit.
Signed by unanimous order of the lords spiritual and temporal." http://resources.utulsa.edu/law/classes/rice/Constitutional/AntiFederalist/09.htm "Antifederalist No. 9, A Consolidated Government Is a Tyranny. "Montezuma," regarded as a Pennsylvanian, wrote this essay which showed up in the Independent Gazetteer on October 17, 1787."
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.