How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality

· The friend-enemy distinction is an aspect of human nature, and we are constantly tempted to yield to it, to rationalize it and to indulge it.

[ABS News Service/27.01.2025]

“When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.”

Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor and writer who is based in Idaho, posted that thought last year. I saw it last week and immediately forwarded it to some of my close friends with a note that said that this sentence captures our political moment. It helps describe America’s moral divide.

Over the last decade, I’ve watched many of my friends and neighbors make a remarkable transformation. They’ve gone from supporting Donald Trump in spite of his hatefulness to reveling in his aggression.

A good way to understand this terrible political morality is to read Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who joined the Nazi Party after Hitler became chancellor. I want to be careful here — I am not arguing that millions of Americans are suddenly Schmittians, acolytes of one of the fascist regime’s favorite political theorists. The vast majority of Americans have no idea who he is. Nor would they accept all of his ideas.

One of his ideas, however, is almost perfectly salient to the moment: his description, in a 1932 book called “The Concept of the Political,” of the “friend-enemy distinction.” The political sphere, according to Schmitt, is distinct from the personal sphere, and it has its own distinct contrasts.

“Let us assume,” Schmitt wrote, “that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable.” Politics, however, has “its own ultimate distinctions.” In that realm, “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”

One of liberalism’s deficiencies, according to Schmitt, is a reluctance to draw the friend-enemy distinction. Failing to draw it is a fool’s errand. An enduring political community can exist only when it draws this distinction. It is this contrast with outsiders that creates the community.

Schmitt was being both descriptive and prescriptive here. If the friend-enemy distinction is necessary to the creation and preservation of a political community, then it can be destructive to seek accommodation with your political opponents. This is human nature, and it’s naïve not to yield to our essential character.

Schmitt was partly right. The friend-enemy distinction is an aspect of human nature, and we are constantly tempted to yield to it, to rationalize it and to indulge it. Rather than resist it, we want to find some way to make it right, often simply to preserve our self-conception that we are moral and decent people.

He was also right that the friend-enemy distinction is ultimately incompatible with the liberal democratic project. Pluralism seeks to create a community in which historical enemies can live in peace and flourish side by side. If the friend-enemy distinction is an essential feature of human nature, how can pluralism survive?

We forget how much the founders — for all their faults — were focused not just on the forms of American government, but also on personal virtue. One of my favorite books from last year was “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center.

The book describes how the founders envisioned the pursuit of happiness not as the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, but rather as “the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, listed temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility as indispensable elements of virtue.

Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war.

The friend-enemy distinction explains why so many Republicans are particularly furious at anti-Trump dissenters — especially when those dissenters hold conservative values. In the friend-enemy distinction, ideology is secondary to loyalty.