Is the Far Right Channeling German Theorist Carl Schmitt's Divisive Script?

The pro-Nazi political philosopher predicted the crisis of liberal democracy and would have enjoyed watching it struggle

Carl Schmitt, 1930 (Photo: Ullstein Bild)

Dear Readers:

When I launched this publication almost three years ago, I noted in my inaugural essay that an illiberal America would be a disaster for the world. I argued that as the most successful liberal democracy that had delivered economic prosperity while, at the same time, respecting individual liberty, extending political rights, increasing respect for human rights, America had demonstration effects for other countries. So if we couldn’t save liberal democracy here, it would be imperiled everywhere.

But the fact is that America, since its inception, has embodied not one political model, but two. For its first hundred years, it officially handed franchise only to the dominant, white, male establishment. And then for the next hundred years, half of the country made it impossible for anyone besides the dominant, white, male establishment to exercise it.

But the pretense of franchise combined with a commitment to elections actually made it possible for the postbellum south to legitimize its old and brutal racial hierarchies. In other words, the southern model consisted of a form of democracy that made authoritarianism electorally competitive.

This competitive authoritarianism is now, Vox writer, Zack Beauchamp, provocatively argues in his new book, The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, serving as a model for autocratic, illiberal democracies such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, and Narendra Modi’s India and generating political instability.

An early 20th century reactionary, German political theorist by the name of Carl Schmitt maintained such instability would haunt democracies because of a fundamental contradiction at the heart of their political project, namely that despite their pretense of universalism, they can’t extend political rights to everyone. They have to set limits. Draw lines. Therefore, the question of who deserves these rights would always be politically contested—and this, exulted Schmitt, a Nazi-supporter, would make it possible for right-wing reactionaries to make gains.

Beauchamp believes that Schmitt was wrong and democracies can prevail against reactionary politics. But responding to Schmitt requires first understanding and grappling with his ideas. And that is precisely what this lapidary excerpt from Beauchamp’s book attempts to do.

Read it and then read the book.

Shikha Dalmia,
Editor-in-Chief

The American and French revolutions kicked off an existential struggle in Europe, one that would serve as the determining factor in democracy’s future around the world.

This conflict pitted the old-line monarchies backed by landed aristocrats, on the one hand, versus the mass forces of democracy aligned with emerging capitalist new money. This was not just a conflict over whether or not elections should be held, but whether the longstanding European social structure revolving around inherited titles should be preserved, weakened, or even abolished.

Early 19th Century: The European Elites vs. Liberal Democracy

Democracy was revolutionary, in every sense of the word; it is no surprise that European reactionaries rejected it wholesale and vociferously for generations. The years 1815 to 1848, for example, are often termed “the age of reaction”—defined, as they were, by a concerted transnational effort by European elites to repress the rising tide of liberal-democratic uprisings. It was an era defined by what I’ve termed “the reactionary spirit:” the impulse to respond to democratic challenges to traditional social hierarchy by rejecting democracy itself.

The reactionary spirit in Europe’s early democratic age manifested very differently from its twin across the Atlantic. While leading pro-slavery politicians like John C. Calhoun were proclaiming their commitments to the revolutionary ideals of freedom and democracy, their European peers—like Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, architect of the post-1815 European political order—openly declared it an enemy of the traditional order they aimed to protect.

“[Democracy is] a reality in America. In Europe it is a falsehood—and I hate all falsehood,” Metternich told an American journalist in 1836.

The age of Metternichian reaction ended with the revolutions of 1848, a spate of pro-democratic uprisings against nearly every power on the continent. Though many of these revolutions ultimately failed, they proved that the central monarchical principle—the idea that political power flowed from divine and natural grants of power to a chosen elite—was losing its grip on the hearts and minds of the European public. The process of monarchy’s decay, achieved through decades of violence and political struggle, reached its symbolic finale in World War I.

The war was not launched to defend democracy. It was, rather, a largely pointless conflict triggered by arcane alliance agreements. But the Western Allied powers used democracy as an ideological justification for their participation in the conflict. Perhaps unsurprisingly, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was the most insistent on the stakes—famously declaring that an Allied victory would “make the world safe for democracy.” For a moment after the war, it seemed that Wilson may have been right. The leading Central Powers opponents—Wilhelmine Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire—were wracked by domestic democratic and nationalist revolutions. The European continent was now dominated by democratic governments; the age of monarchial rule was over for good.

“The history of political and state theory in the 19th century could be summarized with a single phrase: the triumphal march of democracy,” a young German legal theorist named Carl Schmitt wrote in 1923. “No state in the Western European cultural world withstood the extension of democratic ideals and institutions.”

Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Tension Between Liberalism and Democracy

Schmitt wasn’t celebrating these developments. His comments came in the opening chapter of a book titled The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, in which he advanced an argument that was quite controversial at the time but one that swiftly proved eerily prescient.

A right-wing thinker aligned with German Catholic traditionalists, Schmitt was by no means a natural supporter of democracy. But unlike some other reactionaries of his era, Schmitt did not believe in monarchical restoration—from now on, he argued, politics would take place within the confines of democratic concepts.

Yet as the title of his book suggests, Schmitt did not believe that democracy’s victory meant a stable future for Europe’s new regime. The new crisis of democracy, he argued, stemmed precisely from its victory over monarchy. During that struggle, democracy and liberalism were basically coextensive: to believe in popular sovereignty was to believe in the necessity of the replacement of absolute monarchy with a regime characterized by elections, free public debate, and legal rights. But in Schmitt’s mind, this connection is more historical happenstance than conceptual necessity—and that democracy, properly construed, cannot be seen as requiring rights and even universal suffrage in the way liberals understand them.

A government is “democratic,” Schmitt argues, if it bases its legitimacy on support from the people’s will. But this depends on how you define the “people” and choose to assess their “will.” Every democracy depends on excluding some people, most notably foreigners, from participating in the selection of its leaders; that means, by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before the law. Instead, the idea of “equality” in democracy really means equality amongst the people in a political community that shares a certain identity and core agreements.

“There has never been a democracy that did not recognize the concept ‘foreign’ and that could have realized the equality of all men,” he wrote in a 1926 preface to the second edition of Crisis. “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”

The false notion of universal equality, Schmitt argues, is a liberal concept rather than a democratic one—and “modern mass democracy rests on the confused combination of both.” Politics, for Schmitt, is primarily and essentially about defining who is a “friend” (inside the political community) and who is an “enemy” (outside of it and, thus, a potential target for violence). Democracy is no exception to this general rule, meaning that in practice it will necessarily come into conflict with liberalism—which seeks to supplant conflict and exclusion, the true essences of politics, with impossible attempts at universality. This tension is the source of the “crisis” in his book’s title: though democracy was ideologically triumphant in the interwar period, its ascendancy is forcing its leaders and citizens to grapple with the ways in which actual political life is at odds with its liberal ideals.

“Democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other for a time … but as soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements,” he writes. “The crisis of the modern state arises from the fact that no state can realize a mass democracy, a democracy of mankind.”

American Slave-Drivers: Illiberal Democrats

In this, Schmitt elevated the principles of America’s slave-drivers and segregationists into a universal credo. He wrote a blueprint, adaptable virtually anywhere, for how to engage in reactionary politics while claiming to be upholding democratic ideals.

Where Calhoun argued that American democracy must always keep Blacks in chains, Schmitt claimed that every democracy must always exclude someone in some manner. It did not matter, for Schmitt, what the reasons for that exclusion were. “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy,” he writes in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political.

What matters is not the rationale for exclusion—racial, religious, nationalist, whatever—but the simple fact that the state decides. The political community is created through this act of decision, the drawing of a line between who is inside the polity and who is outside of it. So long as people on the right side of the line provided popular support for the government, it could claim the mantle of democracy. The opinions of those outside the homogenous political community did not matter even if they lived inside the state’s borders. Potentially, they may even be the domestic “enemy”—one that could be legitimately marginalized, warred upon, and even exterminated.

Here you can see the terrible genius of Schmitt’s argument. He has provided a blueprint for engaging in democratic politics that replaces equality, the foundational idea of democracy in its modern iteration, with hierarchy—specifically, the hierarchy of one group over all others. Democratic politics is no longer about expanding the ideal of equality to include all persons, as in the American Declaration of Independence, but rather about asserting the equality of those inside the group relative to each other—and their superiority to those outside of it. “​​In democracy there is only the equality of equals, and the will of those who belong to the equals,” as he puts it in Crisis.

At base, this is the rearticulation of feudal principles of hierarchy in new and more modern language. There are certain groups more deserving of rights and privileges than others, according to Schmitt, and no one can tell them it’s wrong to structure society to favor themselves. But by positioning his argument not as an attack on democracy, but a democratic attack on liberalism, he invented a kind of authoritarian politics that operates fully inside of democracy without ideological contradiction. He has shown how authoritarians can claim the mantle of democracy by basing their legitimacy not on divine right, but on the support of the “true” people against foreigners or others outside of the homogenous polity. It is anti-democratic political style perfectly suited to an era where democratic ideals dominated: a slippery authoritarianism, but an authoritarianism nonetheless.

Schmitt’s writing frequently reveals the autocratic reality behind the democratic veneer. In Crisis, he argues that there is nothing about democracy that requires elections or even parliaments—dictatorships, in his mind, can be perfectly democratic provided that they can find some way to show they have popular approval among a homogenous community.

“The will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken for granted, an obvious and unchallenged presence, than through the statistical apparatus that has been constructed with such meticulousness in the last fifty years,” he writes. “The stronger the power of democratic feeling, the more certain is the awareness that democracy is something other than a registration system for secret ballots.”

For this reason, he argues that both Communism and fascism are “certainly antiliberal but not necessarily antidemocratic.” Even though Schmitt admits that “Italian Fascism seems to place no value on being ‘democratic’” in its rhetoric, it still attempts to appeal to a homogenous group of Italians and build a mass political state—thus for him qualifying as a potentially democratic political movement.

Less than a decade later, Schmitt would apply similar logic to celebrate the new Nazi state. While initially skeptical of Hitler’s party, even to the point where he argued in 1932 that the Weimar state would be justified in using force to crush it, he eventually joined the party and worked, with the patronage of Hermann Goering, to help develop the Third Reich’s legal code. It certainly helped that Schmitt was a lifelong anti-Semite; after the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of citizenship rights were enacted in 1935, Schmitt praised the Nazi regime for freeing German law from the domination of “parasites”—saying that “today the German people has … become the German people again.”

At this point, Schmitt had clearly abandoned any commitment he once had to even the pretense of supporting democracy. In this, he exposed what he always truly stood for. But despite his enthusiasm for Nazism, the Nazis had less enduring enthusiasm for him. In December 1936, the official newspaper of the SS denounced him as (among other things) a Hegelian and false anti-Semite. While never persecuted exactly, he did not play an important role in the Nazi regime in the critical years to come.

Schmitt’s thought was better suited for a more ambiguous time, one where authoritarian politics operated with more subtlety and intellectual finesse than the rank bigotry of Hitler and murderous brawn of the SS. The power of his critique of democracy was not in justifying Nazi viciousness, but in identifying a truly difficult intellectual challenge for liberal democracy—how can you square the credo of universal human rights with the inherently limited nature of national citizenship and borders?—and pushing on it to develop an argument for a seductive brand of authoritarian politics. Schmitt’s chief insight into democracy was seeing how the politics of illiberal groupism, of replacing “all men are created equal” with “friend and enemy,” could justify a brand of authoritarian politics in seemingly democratic terms.

The years after World War II required just such an adaptable authoritarianism. The defeat of the Nazis, and the revelation of what they did to Jews like my grandparents, thoroughly discredited naked right-wing authoritarianism on the European continent. A handful of postwar political parties tried to keep the fascist flame alive, but nearly all of them failed to achieve any electoral success whatsoever. The two remaining fascist-aligned dictatorships on the continent, Spain and Portugal, distanced themselves from the discredited ideology.

Yet the reactionary spirit did not die with Hitler and Mussolini; the postwar order’s push towards greater social equality would always generate resistance from those who preferred that things stay the way that they were. The politics that they developed would bear an eerie resemblance to the one preached by Carl Schmitt; a new style of illiberalism centered on what he termed “the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.” …

After World War II, democracy spread throughout the world with astonishing speed. It also expanded in its heartland, as democratic countries transformed their political systems to bring them more in line with democratic equality. Newly constructed welfare states distributed the benefits of rapid economic growth to the poor like never before. Women became bigger players in society and public life. The LGBT community began asserting its right to exist as a collective and be treated with dignity and respect.

Decolonization and the Rise of the Reactionary Spirit in Modern Nation States

But among these many important moves towards equality, one in particular stands out as relevant to the big democratic picture: the dissolution of European empires and related mass migrations of people around the globe. Examining the effects of decolonization, both on the colonized and the colonizers, reveals how the second half of the 20th century set the stage for the reactionary spirit’s reemergence in the 21st.

In an obvious sense, decolonization created the conditions for the reactionary spirit to rise in more places because it literally created more countries in which elections could be held.

The archetypal European empire was a democracy for its citizens at home uneasily paired with authoritarian systems imposed on the colonies. Western European powers’ claims to be the avatars of democracy during the world wars were always marred by their insistence on governing a population of millions, often far larger than their own, under imperial regimes. Schmitt himself used the British empire as a central piece of evidence that even the most established democracies must exclude some people under its power in practice.

When these regimes ended, often after difficult and bloody struggle against colonial oppression, there were dozens of new countries that had an opportunity to emerge as democratic states—and for the reactionary spirit to emerge as a roadblock in their way. …

The fall of empires also had a significant impact on the colonizers, one that helped give rise to a new form of reactionary politics adapted to the postwar context.

Imperial collapse fundamentally challenged these countries sense of place in the family of nations—forcing Europeans to meet the rest of the world as equals on the world stage for the first time in centuries. What’s more, the flow of persons reversed: where colonial powers used to send their people out to colonies, bringing back non-white citizens only as slaves or servants, former colonial powers faced a labor shortage in the decades after the Second World War that required bringing new workers in to keep the economy growing.

Many of these workers came from the global South, with especially heavy migration flows coming from former colonies whose people spoke the language of their colonizers. Not only were European whites forced to reckon with a loss of imperial power, but they were now increasingly being made to meet non-whites they used to rule over inside of their own societies—seeing economic migrants eventually bring their families and settle in the land of their former colonizers, receiving residence and citizenship rights that forced white Europeans to treat them more like social equals.

Decolonization and migration were powerful forms of egalitarian social change—an existential challenge to the way that the white European majorities understood the social hierarchy both globally and domestically. It was a shattering event akin to the end of slavery in the United States: a longstanding non-democratic political structure (empire) maintained by a democratic government collapsed, fundamentally destabilizing a social hierarchy that had existed for centuries. But how could the reactionary spirit manifest in a continent where far-right politics in general, let alone reactionary authoritarianism, was haunted by the ghost of Hitler?

Xenophobia, the Core of Neo-Fascists

The answer emerged in France, with a man named Jean-Marie Le Pen.

In the 1950s, Le Pen was both a politician and a soldier in the French Foreign Legion, serving in colonial wars in both Vietnam and Algeria. For the next several decades, he would work to build a post-war extreme right party that could be viable in French politics. In 1972, he founded the Front National (FN)—a party that would win 11% of the national vote in European elections within a dozen years, and soon afterwards emerge as one of the most potent forces in French politics. After 2022’s legislative election, where it competed under the name National Rally and the leadership of Le Pen’s daughter Marie, it became the second-largest party in France’s legislature and the leader of the opposition to President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

Le Pen’s chief ideological innovation was a laser-like focus on immigration. During his time in the political wilderness, he realized that the old causes of the European right—like monarchy and fascism—could no longer work in modern France. But by attacking immigrants and their children, under the FN slogan “France is for the French,” he could capture the same reactionary forces that powered previous far-right movements while dodging the toxic “fascist” label. These attacks moved away from the old canards about racial superiority of white Europeans and instead described immigrants as an invading force threatening to destroy European culture. Le Pen and his allies argued that African migrants from France’s former colonies, especially Muslim migrants, could not be assimilated into French culture: they would be unproductive citizens who brought crime and threatened the cohesion of the body politic. Much like Lee Atwater, his contemporary in America, le Pen had developed a way of repurposing old racialized fears in a new package more suited to a more egalitarian cultural context. Much like Schmitt, he emphasized homogeneity as the central foundation of a political society—just using the language of nationality rather than race.

These anti-immigrant arguments were intimately bound up with the sense of loss among many French citizens after decolonization, a belief that their nation had been defeated and lost an essential part of what made it a world power. The extremely violent war to retain its Algerian colony ended in 1962, only a decade before the FN’s founding—so the wound to the French national psyche was fresh. The FN worked hard to link immigration to decolonization, arguing that mass migration from former colonies constituted a form of “reverse colonization” forced on the country by left-wing elites. These elites, according to Le Pen, were further weakening and shaming the nation over a colonial enterprise that was, in his view, essentially just and defensible. It was their white guilt, a product of corrosive left-wing ideology, that led them to overstate colonialism’s crimes and understate its benefits.

To contemporary ears, all of this may sound completely old hat: the standard appeal of European far-right parties that have found success across the continent. But it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when Europe’s extreme right seemed like a spent force in mass politics. There were fringe neo-Nazi groups, including violent terrorist cells, but they were consigned to shadowy corners of European society. Le Pen changed all that. His political innovation, combining xenophobia with an appeal to national greatness and whitewashed history, would rapidly diffuse across the continent—with far-right parties like the Dutch Center Party and Austria’s FPÖ adopting key elements of the FN’s messages on immigration and history. …

The rapid diffusion of such factions in Europe in the 1980s proved that the party’s success was not the result of a unique French political culture. Rather, decolonization and mass migration created a continent-wide cultural shock: a one-two punch threat that established a sense of existential fear that Europe had lost its central place in the world and was changing in a way that made conservatively-minded residents uncomfortable. It’s not a coincidence that the 1980s were the decade when migrant workers started bringing over their families in especially large numbers, making the change to Europe’s racial hierarchy feel real for larger and larger numbers of white native-born Europeans.

One paper, by Swiss scholars Beatrice Brunner and Andreas Kuhn, examined this effect in great detail in Switzerland, looking at results from 40 years of elections beginning in 1970. The researchers found that support for anti-immigrant policies and parties didn’t track immigration, exactly; immigration from nearby European countries who spoke languages used in Switzerland didn’t really matter. Instead, it was immigration from “culturally different” migrants—most notably, non-Europeans—that seem to have been behind rising support for anti-immigrant politics during the period they studied.

“Part of the native population appears to perceive culturally different immigrants as threatening their national identity, i.e. their culture, their language, religion, and their way of life in general,” they conclude. “[In this], Switzerland is by no means a special case with respect to attitudes towards immigration when compared with other European countries.”

The mere fact that far-right parties in Europe succeeded by demonizing immigrants did not, in and of itself, prove that the reactionary spirit was rising again in Europe. The reactionary spirit is more specific than mere right-wing politics; it is the curdling of support for traditional social structures and hierarchies into opposition to democracy itself. The fact that Europe’s social structure was changing, and new parties rose to oppose that, did not guarantee that such factions would come to threaten democracy itself. …

What the new far-right did, undoubtedly, is create a blueprint that anti-democratic factions on the right could use to win power without waging a frontal assault on democracy. The FN had pioneered a way to reintroduce Schmittian politics to Europe by describing non-European immigrants as the internal “enemy,” turning nascent fears about social change among a segment of the European population into a potent political force.

This kind of politics not only attacked democracy’s core political value of equality, but also introduced a way for parties who wanted to attack democracy to do so without discrediting themselves in a political world still living in Nazism’s shadow.

The above essay was excerpted from The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (PublicAffairs, 2024). It is published here with the permission of the author.