Caribbean rhythms episode 136 welcome ladies and gentlemen this episode Carl Schmidt Carl Schmidt of course is Hitler lawyer this right if you remember a media hysteria of the early 2000s this American so-called elite has always been connoisseur of the most lurid conspiracy theories and by argument from Association preferred by Chomsky and his disciples who always did six degrees of separation infographic type argument how does that work the right now by the way since Chomsky was friends with Epstein it looks like this and they were guest friends you know a Homeric tradition Chomsky and Epstein so now can we do the same can we dispense with any arguments about Chomsky and use the association argument on him is he a Mossad mouthpiece of why he attack the Indonesian

government. But anyway, so they always are darkly referred to Karl Schmidt as Hitler's lawyer, usually in the context of trying to smear the neo-nazi Bush White House, Bush II White House, which was supposedly infested by Nazi Straussian neo-cons. And so if you read opinions pieces of the time, it always goes, such-and-such was a follower of the Germans. Sometimes they said Jewish German they clarified that and Shadia Drury went so far as to call him a Jewish Nazi but the German thinker Leo Strauss who was friends with Carl Schmitt who was Hitler's lawyer so you know there it is the association to Hitler and the American media and the media addicted governments that has always preferred theories of this type by the way which is how also they went after

Trump with a Russia thing also don't talk me about conspiracy theories the The biggest conspiracy tards are the crackpot establishment of United States. It's a media academia government complex of yokels who go to Washington, DC and are attracted to this kind of conspiracy thing. But this, what they say, and of course there was no truth to it on any level, because for example, Wolfowitz, who now I hear is a broken man in private, but he was not in fact Straussian even but followed some other thinker who promote modern democratic peace theory and such, saying two democracies never went to war, so America should spread democracy everywhere. And insofar as there were followers of Strauss in that White House, it means maybe they read a book or took a course once.

Paul Gottfried, in any case, if you read his book on these matters on Strauss and he's very much against the Straussians, but he point out how absurd it is to call any members of that school or its orbiters Nazis. He doesn't even think they're right wing of any kind. And he may be right about at least most of them. But regardless, these were the claims at the time and all were intended to smear with Carl Schmidt as the linchpin of the conspiracy Hitler's lawyer is how they refer to him. So that's how most people have come to hear of him. with Strauss, they said, by which is meant they traded a few letters and they wrote a job recommendation or forward for each other or things of this kind. So obviously, you know, it's a dark operational conspiracy to seize power.

In Europe, the situation was always less hysterical. To be fair, maybe because the domain in Europe is more depoliticized, more tamed already, so political establishment feels less threat. But Carl Schmitt has always had a following in Europe, not just among the right wing, but there are left Schmittians too, and he's long been part of intellectual and academic discourse there. He is also increasingly popular in the United States among Catholic conservative thinkers, integralists and so forth. He was himself, you can say, a Catholic thinker on some level, but I think that's probably not true as I intend to show you on this show. To some extent, his influence appears to have, I say, creep also in America since 2010, maybe.

So there are many people now both on the right and left who invoke Carl Schmitt's name, but I think maybe they don't understand him so well. So this is why I say his influence only appears to have been extended. When they treat him favorably, most pundits, even academics and so on, who are supposed to have read him, but I think they haven't, they've read secondary literature on him, but most academics, even, not to speak of pundits, have reduced Carl Schmitt to slogans. He is understood now to be a simple, crude reduction of call to arms, as if you need the permission of a big-name thinker to be a fanatical ideologue. You may have heard friend-enemy distinction idea, but I think maybe Schmitt's intention and using this idea, I mean the friend-enemy distinction

has again been misunderstood. So yes, I'll talk this later in show, but for now, let's look at a week's news. Much has happened. Coronation of Emperor Charles, and he is emperor because he is a king of kings. It was something much beloved, celebrated by English friends to who? I encourage all of you to defer to English nationalists on such a matter. If a hardcore British nationalist or rightist, If he loves this event, maybe don't lecture to them that their country is now left-wing and that they shouldn't celebrate this. The left hated this event. The commie pinkos in England hated it. The woke bastard, you know, with the frizzy hair and the beige complexion, oh, look at how this white male supremacist. So I was glad to see many frogs join in to taunt such people.

Countries are not all one thing. They are divided, still, of undecided character. And this coronation, I think, is a remnant of a good time and a celebration of England and the English. It's one of the silliest things that's happened on the dissident so-called right. In recent years, one of the silliest thing that's happened is this Alex Jones-type conspiracy-tardism about the European royal houses and the British royal house in particular, because, you know, they're vampires, you see. They secretly control the vast portion of the world's property still and they are vampire and Charles loves Transylvania and he likes historical preservation and his interest there actually to preserve some very nice old things and buildings and such and he visits Transylvania often.

There are some nice old Saxon villages hidden in the Carpathians and so you see he must be there for a vampire, he drink children blood. So says Alex Jones. Bram Stoker was secretly writing about the British royal vampire house and of course then you add to this all the new so-called American nationalists who are Mexican and who believe in Spanish Habsburg reconquista of Aztlan and the United States and they join in of course because nefarious Protestant England and the hated Anglo and the line goes the Anglo invented liberalism and capitalism, you see. So, yeah, we are unlearning Anglo neoliberal dehumanization, you know, breakdown of family values through spiritual traumatization by capital, the trad collectivism of the communité. You forced us to eat with forks and use toilets.

It's colonialism, it's unacceptable colonialism that the Anglo taught your ancestor not to eat off the floor. So that's all it comes down to, you see. Sometimes they append this genius genealogy of modernity, you know What a wahakan will blame the anglo for his alienation in modern society or where on the other hand you have a femoid and roasty At 35 years old wants to blame Locke for her not having a husband and thinks that if we only had a thread a traditional theocracy Obviously then she will have had a husband that has nothing to do with her own dithering or her bad choices But look whatever sometimes I tell you they append this genealogy of their Dissatisfaction and it becomes also it they appended it becomes Anglo Jewish and really I think that

formula Anglo Jewish is a slur on Anglos and the English because There is no such thing actually the Dutch the English I guess also the Venetians They gave Jews some tolerance because they weren't threatened by them and could in some cases use their skill as merchant These were merchant states. But for example, in Scotland, Jews found no entry point whatsoever. There's a line from Mark Twain about this, but it's well known in general. And I don't remember if it was Mark Twain or Carnegie who said it, but because of the natural talent of the Scots for commerce and business, it made it impossible for Jews to compete there. But just because they found they could tolerate Jews, I mean the English and so, doesn't make sense to refer to Anglo-Judea

in anything more than a polemical or a joke-like way, Like, you know, if you burst into the Tigray Boat Club outside Buenos Aires, if you were hurt by an Anglo-Argentine girl, and you can make a scene there and rant about this. But after all, you are not a 19th century German or a Nietzschean, you know, I'm just tired of the peasant and the female attacks on the Anglos. The Anglish, yeah, the Anglish. The Anglish sailed ocean, they explore, discover new continents and island. They tamed a wilderness in the New World. They forged frontier spirits. See what Tocqueville says on the contrast between the Quebec settlers and the Anglo-Americans. Even the French, and I love the French, he loved the French, but they did not know how to make use of land in the New World.

Only the Anglo had true frontier and settler spirit, tamed the wilderness, built a civilization from nothing. And meanwhile, you floated to America on a door after your ancestors had lived for centuries dirt floors at serfs and they were loaned out to Jewish tax farmers while the local lord went well eventually they went on trips to Paris and such and they loaned out serfs to Jewish arandator tax farmers and or you invented the potato so of course then you insist that the Anglo too he must have been a plaything of the Jews but such is not the case it's just that you see what I mean how long do you have to listen to these slurs on the Anglo these are slurs born He was born of uncomprehending jealousy at what the English did. So please do not mention Nietzsche in this context to me.

I'll talk Nietzsche attack on the Anglos in this show or I will at least quote him on the English anyway. Yes, he doesn't like the English, but he means something very different. He dislikes England as the birthplace of democratic female and comfort loving shopkeepers ideas, plebeian ideas, but such people as attack Anglos now, the kind of people who attack Anglos now, whether it's from the left or the marxified, dissident so-called right, they attack the English from a plebeian, democratic, and female point of view, even when it's sometimes wrapped up in monarchist or authoritarian sounding pieties and so on. But Nietzsche praised actually England's exploratory and adventurous spirit, and Schopenhauer was an Anglophile, but he too attacked the English, but why did he attack them?

their religiosity, which he called bigotry, something Nietzsche also found loathsome and barbaric in the English, he found that particular kind of poisonous religiosity to be, well anyway, so they disliked the English for reasons entirely different from the communitarian molding Norwoods and malicious Pharisee toads who attack the English. Now, I love England, and the celebration of the reptile Emperor Charles I love. He looked magnificent in that coat and the globe in his hand. Long live the king! Long live Cecil Rhodes! Hail Satan! The year is won! But anyway, I will continue this. The many thing happened this week. There was a train guy, a Marine, who put down crazed Michael Jackson impersonator on New York

subway. I think that's why he did it, by the way. He was offended by the vagrant impersonation of Michael Jackson. Like Michael Jackson the king, right? And he put him down like a mad dog. Let this be a warning. You don't go around aping the divine spirit of Michael Jackson. But really, Usually the whole thing they're trying so hard to cause a Floyd chimp out, but it doesn't look so far that they can do it because even mayor of New York, people of New York that are just tired of this. One thing, when these debates break out that journalists and their monkeys, they like to do this following thing to shame people. They like to say, oh, you yokels, you live in suburbs. You have no right to concern yourself about the supposed fields and lack of safety in big cities. You don't even live here.

None of these things are true. There is no shit on the streets. There are no schizo vagrants and besides the shit on the streets and the vagrants are part of the local scenery and color of the place. Also, it's a matter of social justice for you to tolerate it. So I'm I know you've seen these type of arguments before and it's as bad as it can get in reality. I live part of the year in big cities. I won't say which ones in Europe, but there are others in other parts of world that are are mostly clean, but some of them, I live in a particular one, it's a lot like what you hear about San Francisco. I have to play Frogger on street to not step in such, or to have a grotesque schizo who reeks from half a block away get in my face. It's as bad as you've heard, it's getting worse.

And what I see on street there is the opposite of what's told to you online. In other words, it's always some girl who lives in a compound in a suburb outside town, and I see her coming the evenings where she's doing her daily moral masturbation zoo run, right, to pet the local homeless and to show off her cheap compassion or maybe just show it off even to herself. And meanwhile, I and others who live there, we have to suffer with that every day. She just comes in to pet them. And this, that people like her incentivize, people who actually live in city have to deal with and I don't doubt that yes there are also crazed bitches who live in city themselves and who suffer along with it too but their opinion can be discarded there are a lot of crazed masochistic women who I heard one some

time ago such woman she bragged about how she went to Tbilisi in Georgia she may have had Georgian ancestry I don't know but the country Tbilisi Tiflis to sweep the streets and you know some say some of these girls have a saint complex some some women are like Simone Weil but their willingness to suffer doesn't make their position right or worth considering so anyway more often it's what I'm telling you it's the people who live in cities who have to put up with this and the people who don't who vaunt about it or who only occasionally visit to to pet their zoo animals so really it's a worldwide problem for the last decade or 15 years the degradation of public places in cities and it's caused by leftist control of city councils and such. I love the other facile argument

that it's this also has become a stale talking point in dissident left and right circles for let's say a few months or a year that it's the rich you know it's the rich who are engineering all this for it for their own Machiavellian ends they are profiting it from this somehow they live in an orbital station like you see in Elysium. How are they profiting from it? Well, whether it's the cheap labor or what you see in the recent Batman movies, the Christopher Nolan ones, but there is actually nothing Machiavellian about it. The rich are completely paralyzed because they actually have very little power, very little power in the face of the left and of human rights dogma, even in a place like Brazil, where you have some of the biggest wealth inequality in the world, right?

If neoliberalism, the way that the left, the new left, I guess they're not the new left, the left dissidents, right, and the new dissident right, neoliberalism, if it means anything, it's a kind of plutocracy and oligarchy where the rich have immense power and where they use culture war distractions and such things to misdirect people from their extreme power and they are the cause of mass immigration, they are the cause of homelessness, and many such things. I think almost no truth to that. If it means anything, again, it's protocracy and the biggest wealth disparity you have in a country like Brazil, which is, I think, last I checked, the sixth largest economy in the world, but all of that wealth is concentrated in rather few hands.

So you have rich as the very richest in Europe and poor as the very poorest in Africa in the same country. And yet, those rich are not the ones who hold power. They suffer along with everyone else. They lose their streets, they lose their neighborhoods, they have to move because their daughter gets groped or their mother has her face screamed in and such when buying groceries. It's not Dubai, in other words, where workers are put in barracks and where you don't have these problems on streets, the rich lost control of the streets and their own neighborhoods in all of these cities and in New York itself. And you're crazy if you think the rich in New York enjoys that or planned it. I live in a certain city, I won't say where, not that moment, but in the past, let's say in a nice building.

When I happen to live there, I live in a nice building and there are people who live in that building who are important people in that country, media figures and such. But outside this building, under the awning, you get packs of homeless nogs sleeping. Their building is not spared that. They do not have special dispensation to remove them by the police or anybody else. If you come back late at night, these nogs will yell at you sometime. It's also very unsanitary and there's nothing police can do. Even on behalf of the powerful people who live there, there's nothing that private security can do. There's nothing building stuff. In fact, they would get sent to jail if they tried on account of human rights dogma and such because as I tell you

It is the left that has complete control and sometimes they buy off support of some of the rich Temporarily I tried suggesting to building staff You cannot hose this trash down But what if you know if you pretended there was a leak righteous engineer? I gave them this idea you engineer a kind of leak and you say oh, sorry. We cannot fix it We are trying to just flood the area where this human trash sleeps infest, but no, they all chuckle. They say, well, there go BAP, you know, there go BAP with crazy idea again. But the result of all this, you end up living in global Haiti with no orbital station. And we'll see what happened in New York train clean up crew marine guy. We'll see what happens. But speaking of BAP, let's talk this. You like I talk about myself.

So if I'm in news again, the neo-Reaganites are chimping, every week now there is a new article about Bronze Age pervert, the evil pagan, fascist, eugenicist, he wants to commit genocide and abort black babies. And the abortion thing is the only thing these Pharisees care about. I don't know if you realize, but the Catholic Church itself, I'm not even talking about the Protestant denominations, but the Catholic Church looked the other way at abortion in 1960s and such, it happened all the time. Nurses did it and the church knew and looked away and the way it always has by the way at various kinds of sins When it was a sane institution right like it looked the other way for example when a priest had a maid and you know

He was kind to the maids children the people in the neighborhood noticed this Oh, he has a why is he so kind to her children, right? because it was better to have a straight priest with a maid and and allow all of this under the table as a hypocrisy than to have what happens now in seminaries and so on with Pope Thagat. But the American right entirely blew its social capital on the abortion thing for the last few decades where actually I'm told the Catholic church had a lot of reach in Hollywood before that and they gave almost everything else up to focus on this one issue, abortion, which I'm sorry to tell you but the left is mostly right about what conservatives are in the United States. I'm talking about not regular conservative men. That's a different thing.

I mean conservative activists, intellectual operators in Washington DC, conservative intellectual movement and so on or in the political sphere. Two thirds of Congress is closeted or reformed gay guys who use religion and religious signaling as a cover and who scream and fret about abortion. You know, it's a sorry sight, okay? It's not exactly a win condition when you, but that aside, my point in recent disputes was not even about abortion, which I don't care about. Actually, I think it's good Roe versus Wade got overturned for reasons I said on this show before, but my point was that when Zero H.P. Lovecraft, you all know him, he was on this show, he made a tweet, he made a tweet question regarding a rise in minority birth rates, supposedly on account of the banning of abortion

in some states, and he asked, is this what you wanted, Catholic bros? And whether it was to spite him, or out of genuine conviction, or to show off for others that they are not racist, that this is what I believe, but something like 90% of the responses were yes, we love the increase in our black brothers, and I think this was mostly the weak right bearing their baboon behinds to the left to show their anti-racist credentials, you know? So you know, when I see these articles on me from the neo-Reaganite Christian right, or excuse me, they're not even Christian, the Pharisee right, the American civil religion posing as Christianity right, when I see this, and all they focus on is this one matter, as if the Bible means to them multiply tropical West African life indiscriminately,

feed it fried food, you know, the Bantu-Wahakan cycle. That's the only lesson these people know is 100% true from the Bible, nothing else but this. So I ask why, and when I talk about such thing, my point, as many well know, but they lie about what I say, it's not that I promote genocide as if I had the ability or wish to do such a thing now or in the next century, but to ask, what do you plan to do about the global south when it inevitably reaches point of collapse and starvation? In other words, if 90% of you are so happy to celebrate the multiplication of POC life in the United States, probably in Europe too, for whatever reason you're doing it, what will you do when that happens, when mass starvation in the global south? Because the pieces are already in place

for such an overthrow of civilization. Many factions now talk about climate migration and such thing, and what they mean is that at the first plausible case that can be made that mass starvation looms for the global south. There will be calls made for Europe and America to open its doors to tens of millions, at least. And what do you plan to do then? Because those people are also innocent. Many of them can be propagandized to be, oh, they're your co-religionists, Christ first, right? Well, they're fellow Christians. Are you going to look the other way, Christian man, and watch them die? This is the kind of manipulation, right? Because I think you should let them die. and China and most of Asia will let them die. They will look the other way. Can you look the other way

as possibly tens or hundreds of billions of people perish from inevitable starvation and such thing? This is my question. And I think you know the answer is, things stand now, almost all sectors of American and European society, they will not look away. They will open borders. They will do so with support of, let's say 40% of the population at least who will be for this out of empathy and human rights feeling. And in that terrible answer, the fact as things stand now, it's only me and a few spurgs online who are willing to make the case for looking the other way and who are even bringing attention to this question, I find looming question for the next five to 10 years, maybe 10 to 20 years. Whereas if you start from the assumptions accepted

by the left and the right, you are either for this or you are unwilling to stop it. And maybe Senator Josh Hawley can instead tell a nice story about how an ancient Roman Christian yelled Black Lives Matter at Emperor Julian and everyone clapped. Oh yes, he tells this story. An inspiring and true story, Senator. Maybe you should give another speech on how young men should suck it up and marry whores instead of playing video games. It's all their fault, right? That's in your purview as a senator for the people of, who is it, Missouri? That helps them, right? It's in your purview as a senator for your constituents to give such speeches, is it not? Or are you maybe auditioning so you can have Tucker time slot on Fox News. You see, everyone in America politics wants to be in entertainment,

especially on the GOP side. You know, and then on TV, once you're on TV, Senator Hawley, you can really stick it to us five Nietzschean pagans online for producing the holiness of black bodies. Just doing the work of Jehovah, Mr. Senator Gayface. Very good, I will be right back. Schmidt, great German legal thinker Weimar era 1920s and 30s who in our stupid and polemical time if you've heard of him You've probably just heard friend-enemy distinction and that and the concept of decisionism in political life Maybe only thing most have heard about Schmidt by decisionism is meant I mean in the way it's used now a fancy word for Authoritarianism and for friend-enemy distinction. It's used more as an encouragement to abuse neutral

institutions for the benefit of your side because you know if you respect the objective neutrality of the law or if you are neutral about upholding free speech for example including for opponents this must mean you're a cock who does not understand the political and so surely you will be annihilated if you don't abuse neutral institutions in this way and many such or again you may have heard about Schmidt as Hitler lawyer right in he wrote in defense of of Hitler's Night of the Long Knives. That's when Hitler got rid of the SA and the Strasserites. Who was Ernst Röhm? He had special look, too, in the face, Ernst Röhm. But anyway, that's an event that seems forgotten by many of the national Bolshevist and Duginist variety in our day, right? Hitler was not Strasser, and he offed the SA

because they wanted to effect full socialist revolution. But anyway, that's topic for another time. Maybe I should have Thomas 777 on to talk this. So anyway, the Second City Bureaucrat, again, has excellent introduction to Carl Schmitt. It's in online zine, American Sun, June 10, 2019. It's not paywalled. It's an article named Enough of this Schmitt. I will link it on my account after I put up this episode. But the Bureaucrat knows more about Schmitt than Schmitt professors I've met, and this His excellent simple introduction points out how Schmidt is misused in this kind of crude way by ideologues on all sides now. Because Schmidt himself actually, when he talks about, for example, friend-enemy distinction,

it isn't that he's trying to give a reader license to abuse the law or other neutral institutions for your side. Schmidt is a legal thinker, a bureaucrat and a lawyer, a professional, who is trying to find a proper purview, limits of jurisprudence. not really a political warrior and his point is roughly and I'm great simplifying now but that for jurisprudence to preserve its independent and neutral objective character it needs to be limited only to certain spheres of life and so therefore it must recognize that there are other parts of life outside its proper reach otherwise it become corrupted a plaything of political actors which of course can and does happen anyway but really at center of Schmitt's attempt to preserve the independence of jurisprudence and of its look.

Actually I'll read a little from the article because the bureaucrat puts it so well. He reminds the reader that this most famous concept of Schmitt's, the idea of friend-enemy from his book Concept of the Political, it was actually a lecture given to business students at a business school. It was not a Machiavellian secret teaching given to a philosopher king in a private cabinet meeting. Schmidt was a middle-class professional, a government bureaucrat and legal thinker again, important one because he clearly elucidates the relationship between law, jurisprudence on one hand, and political power on the other, and the way the former law and jurisprudence emerged uniquely in European history because of the terrible wars of religion of the 17th century.

Right, he's not saying that those kinds of wars are a good thing. I think a lot of people miss this. They think that if you describe another opinion in your own words, and if you do it justice and describe it vividly, that it must mean you yourself believe that. But Schmitt sees theological fanatics on one hand and Machiavellian princes on the other as the types of people that neutral law, let's say, neutral law developed after the Thirty Years War. It developed to exist counter and outside the reach of those types. So that for example, if you are a protestant in a catholic state or vice versa, you could no longer be prosecuted without due process and be expropriated and such and actually many libtards forget just this when they make this complaint about how Jews were uniquely mistreated.

They forget that the same apply to protestants or catholics in the states of the other. They were not allowed to own land in many cases but that's beside the point. Do you like king's night by the way? People drink on the street in Holland at night. They wear orange. A friend tells me it's the opposite, the inverse of St. Patrick's Day. It just happened recently. There are a lot of Dutch-descended people in the United States. Why don't they also import this custom from Netherlands? Why doesn't the Roosevelt family lead a king's night parade in orange down the streets of Manhattan? Orange pride. You know, stop asking me to become a believing Christian, please. If I were one, I'd just become a radical Calvinist antinomian such as existed, I hear,

this existed in Puritan land in North East America for a bit, you know, where they reached the conclusion that having been predestined for salvation, you were no longer bound by any obligation to others and you could live completely outside the law. I think Hassan Isabah did something similar for Islam. Is that what you want me to be? Anyway, this here is from Bureaucrats article on Schmidt I'm reading now, and of course his famous lecture, the concept of the political, the great call to action for the writers I'm addressing, he's talking about the ideologues of our time who misuse Schmidt. This lecture was delivered at a business school to business students, not to power brokers at some remote philosopher king's monastery in the mountains.

Most of the writers addressed herein espouse some primitive form of Schmidt's critique of liberal formalism, which points, meaning Schmidt's critique, points to a schizophrenic tendency in modern liberal legal states, permitting groups acting in bad faith to use the neutral machinery of public institutions to gain power and act badly. The writers use this insight to create a sense of urgency that the decision needs to be made before adherence to some neutral procedure causes the self-destruction of the writers' political group, whether it be white people, Catholics, Jews, LGBTQ, etc. whether it be white people, Catholics, Jews, LBGTQ, etc. The Nazi exploitation of weaknesses in the Weimar Constitution to legally gain power

is the classic example that Schmitt explicitly warned against in various pamphlets and books. And then the bureaucrat continues with the discussion of how neutral and independent jurisprudence emerged out of the religious wars in Europe I mentioned, the Thirty Years War and so on. Before saying, and he continues, I'm reading now, Schmitt was concerned that ideology by way of democracy was threatening to undermine neutral law. Liberal constitutions, Schmitt wrote, often contain a sort of existential self-referential paradox whereby they can, under certain interpretations such as Hans Kelsen's positivism, they can provide for the legal destruction of the political unity presupposed by the Constitution itself.

Schmitt observes, for example, that the Reichstag amendment procedure in the Weimar Constitution under a Kelsian interpretation provided a legal means to transform the Reich into a Soviet republic or some other authoritarian form at odds with the political identity of the German nation. Given the emergence of absolutist ideologies like Marxism and National Socialism, it was important for Schmidt that jurists be mindful that dogmatic adherence to the principle of logical validity in interpreting the Constitution could lead to the destruction of the Constitution itself. More specifically, Schmidt criticized liberal constitutions for being filled with dilatory clauses, formalized indecisions on issues that could become political.

In our context, the United States Constitution is dilatory on a number of issues that could escalate into violent conflict. A useful example is the issue of abortion, which was by no means a political issue at the time of the constitutional ratification, but could now easily lead to armed conflict. such dilatory spaces entered apocryphal sources of sovereignty." In other words, political decisions made ostensibly under the color of law by people not otherwise authorized to make sovereign political decisions. For abortion in the United States, the Supreme Court stepped in and made a decision about the political form of existence of the American people. For multiple reasons, Schmitt may have objected to this decision, but this is not the place to discuss.

It's sufficient to say here that he opposed jurisprudence making such decisions in liberal democratic states. So, Schmitt opposed forms of jurisprudence predicated on purely former or logical validity, such as the legal philosophy of Kelsen, because such perspectives could interpret surreptitious political manipulation of the formal law as legal. This is a crucial point, I think, to understand about Schmidt and his meaning and the bureaucrats' point about how he's misused. I repeat last sentence, Schmidt opposed forms of jurisprudence predicated on purely formal or logical validity because such perspectives could interpret surreptitious political manipulation of the formal law as legal. When Schmidt talks of the bifurcation of legality and legitimacy so that jurisprudence countenances

illegitimate but nonetheless legal interpretations, this is what he's referring to. The argument that, because your enemy is willing to use the law or civility or whatever in bad faith, that therefore your political group needs to respond in kind and abandon the duty to neutrality and procedure might be a sound strategy but it does not line up with Schmidt's full position. I am painting with very broad strokes here, the bureaucrat continues. This is a short and not entirely clear or completely accurate explication of his theory but it's sufficient for my purposes here. If you want more context, I recommend reading Schmidt's books and not just the short Weimar pamphlets, or I can email you a memo after I get back from vacation. To conclude, I empathize with the sense of

insecurity Schmidt felt and described in the history of European institutions. I think it's easy to see why someone like that might worry about ideological calls for total annihilation and enmity, even if he agreed with many of the ideologues' presets. It's easy for academics and affluent pundits to talk about abstractions like liberalism, the good and the true, I think, but it's rare that they take into account how their civil war cries affect normal people. Anyway, I ended up reading quite a bit from this article, you should read it yourself and educate yourself, foo, and now I will take a break and when I come back I'll discuss my own reading of Schmid, a book of his, in particular his book, a crisis of parliamentary democracy of when I come right back.

Anyone who has the rare eye for the overall danger that men himself degenerates, anyone who like us fathoms the calamity that lies concealed in the absurd guilelessness and blind confidence of modern ideas and even more in the whole Christian European morality, One such suffers from an anxiety that has passed all comparisons. The overall degeneration of man down to what today appears to the socialist dolts and flatheads as their men of the future, as their ideal, this degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal or as they say, to the man of the free society, this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims is possible, there is no doubt about it. who has once thought through this possibility to the end knows one kind of nausea that other

men don't know, but perhaps also a new task. That's not from Carl Schmitt, it's from Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 203. Welcome back to show. I will have a point to make about Carl Schmitt that may be a little bit different from what I presented to you in previous segment from the bureaucrat. I think Carl Schmitt was a kind of Nietzschean on some level. He was also what the bureaucrat says he was and those I think are his intentions to preserve the neutrality of jurisprudence and neutral institutions of that kind. But I think throughout his work there is a vitalist undercurrent, political vitalism. Everyone uses this word, no one knows what it means. The Bureaucrat, by the way, on related matters, actually, has a recent article talking about the Neo-Reaganites who attack me.

One of them is named, actually I don't remember their names, but you should go to his substack. I will post from it soon on my account. It's not that these articles attacking me are themselves especially important or insightful. It's more what they show about how the conservative intelligentsia like to think. It shows more about their own failures, their intellectual evasions and really also the gaping holes in their knowledge because when I first published book in 2018, the first review was in Swedish and the Swedish right, the European right has always immediately understood what I was doing, what they were trying to do. It's only to the American conservative intellectual right that I am this alien intrusion they don't know what to make of me.

And they always try to reframe things into, are you a good Christian man of the conservative type or are you an evil pagan Nietzschean who is genocidal of this other type and to put people in these partisan camps. This has always been their only reaction. They are unfamiliar actually either with Nietzsche or with the tradition of the European right in which I am talking, the European right themselves don't have this problem, they also do not have the habit of using religion as a pharisaic cover. If you try that in irreligious Europe, especially Scandinavia or Iceland or many such things where people are not actually raised religious at all, if you try that there people laugh at you. The bureaucrat point on these people, I strongly recommend you read, because it's a big difference

between how, let's say, it's not just the right wing in the United States, or let's say the conservative intellectual movement. The left intelligentsia also thinks this way. They think that you have to have some kind of doctrine or teaching, let's say, whether whether it's the Bible or it's Marx or something else, and then that is applied to public life, to policy, or to your own life. And it's actually a very different view of how intellect relates to life and to material biological being, whether you look at Nietzsche, at Mishima, or if I may, at my book or other parts of the European right who have written since 1950 or so. It's very different view of how they think about such things and for clarification, maybe you look at bureaucrat latest articles on this and on his substack.

It's actually quite related to our talk on Carl Schmitt on this episode. But to get to Schmitt, well, Schmitt say liberalism and parliamentary liberal government in his time is weak as two major antagonists. He calls anarcho-syndicalism and radical nationalism from far left and far right. The reason liberalism is vulnerable or in crisis against these two alternatives is because these possess a coherent political theology, whereas liberalism does not. And I know this may sound a little mystical for now, I'll try to clarify in a bit, but as it goes, if you look at liberalism in our time, it's undergone considerable transformations. Nationalism is on its own very compatible with nationalism, by the way. Liberal nationalism is something very real, very much of 19th century.

And in the same way, liberalism can incorporate elements both of democracy and socialism. In fact, it's fused with democracy in the form of liberal democracy, for reasons I will get to in a moment. But also it can incorporate socialism. And by our time, the situation has changed quite a bit because the radical nationalism alternative Schmidt talks about was violently suppressed in World War II, and even now it is censored in all kinds of ways. And as for anarcho-syndicalism, it may not be called this same word now, you can think of it as a radical Marxoid form, but it's simply taken a racialized type. So the expression global Negro communism or GNC, international racial Marxism, with which

Each liberalism has reached considerable compromises by our time, and some say that it's been overtaken internally by this, especially in sort of men-like roles and such. And so I think actually in our day, it's only in places, maybe Japan, maybe partly France, maybe even Russia, that the liberalism of the older kind exists, which makes a casual nods to accommodate national culture and customs of the majority and to embrace liberal neutral institutions and liberal objectivity. But in the West, the spiritual element that Schmitzow liberalism lacked has been almost fully borrowed, let's say, or replaced or borrowed by spiritual content of what he calls anarcho-syndicalism. So we are spiritually Marxoid GNC while still residing in the remnants of liberal institutions

and the two don't quite get along very well. And this is the cause of the woke so-called disturbances of our day, where the calls are actually reasonably made that institutions of liberalism are outdated and must reflect our spiritual commitments to GNC, you know, claims to reject liberalism or what remains of it in the name of a more thorough commitment to the global tenement, the tenement of absolute egalitarianism. These are claims to which liberals, at least in the United States, don't really have many So there is a good poster on Twitter, Plantation Scientist. And he, in response to some other dissident writer who was spewing talking points that you see so often now, who was saying that our problems are caused by liberalism, that

people like Locke and liberal theory and so on are the problem. And Plantation Scientist rightly replied, well, reactionary monarchist and fascist institutions don't actually exist now. people like AOC and Georgia Shaboom, what is her name, Stacy Abrams, they seek actualization of American spiritual commitments to GNC in form of reparations and other expropriations and end of free speech and such. And to achieve this, they seek to do away with what remains of liberalism. That is their antagonist. You're not, you are not, you know, again, no reactionary institution, there are no monarchist institutions to remain whatsoever. So it's very strange, I agree with him, to see some on the right talk and bark like autocrats

and as if they're already dictators, it's very strange that they do not see our powerlessness. The fact that liberal institutions, neutral ones and concepts like freedom of speech, whatever remains of that, these are the only things that barely are there to protect us without them. So anyway, yes, the situation in America now is new opinions in an old house and there There is nice quote by Nietzsche on just this, new opinions in an old house, the overturning of opinions does not immediately follow upon the overturning of institutions. The novel opinions continue rather to live on for a long time in the deserted and by now uncomfortable house of their predecessors and even keep it in good conditions because they have nowhere else to live.

That's from human all to human, a glance at the state, aphorism 466. It is this development, even in his own time, or its first stages, that Schmitt is seeking to explain in this book, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. He tries to analyze parliamentary democracy then in two ways. The first you can call systemic or something like this. And the second is a historical analysis of how its crisis developed. So let's look first at what Schmitt thinks is meaning and function of parliamentary democracy or representative institutions. And to find this, it's in the second chapter of this book. It's called Principles of Parliamentaryism. And here Schmitt sets out straightforward double task. He say to investigate the ultimate intellectual foundations of parliamentaryism itself.

And by the way, that is direct quotation from book, which I won't stop to say everywhere in this episode, but I will liberally pepper it with quotations from Schmitt himself like that. Ultimate intellectual foundations of parliamentaryism itself is what he seeks to find, and also to observe how these and these alone characterize institutions of so-called representative government. Or more fundamentally, he wants to describe the two demands of characteristic of liberal rationalism. He wants to do this with a so-called scientific clarity. But actually, when you read more, the intellectual foundation of parliamentaryism at first seems to be only one alone. It's discussion, not representation. It's a rational deliberation, not democracy, not popular will.

And the view you may hear, often taken people say, well, why don't we have direct democracy? You may hear this. You may hear a view often taken that parliamentary government is democratic government, and that only for expedient purposes in a modern world of mass societies, people say we're not small like ancient Athens, we can't have direct democracy. So then delegate direct participation to a committee of the people. That again is Schmidt quotation. But Schmidt replies to this with sensible claim. If for practical and technical reasons the representatives of the people can decide instead of the people themselves, then certainly a single trusted representative could also decide in the name of the same people. This can be without ceasing to be democratic.

Then the argument would justify an anti-parliamentary Caesarism." So I think that makes sense. That's not the reason that parliamentarism exists. It's not a technical way to mediate democracy. It has a different purpose. And so the real foundation, Schmitt say, the essence of parliamentarism is public deliberation of argument and counter-argument, public debate and public discussion, partly, and all this without taking democracy into account." Many representatives then, as opposed to one representative, are required so that there can be discussion in the first place, in order that such a position of argument can take place. Just as in liberal economics, for example, you need free and lawful competition to produce economic prosperity.

So in liberal representative democracy, competition of opinions is to produce harmony. Only in terms of this general liberal principle are the two main practical demands and hence the main resulting institutions of liberal rationalism or modern representative government. Only in terms of this is to be understood. And the two demands are openness and division of powers. These two demands characterize what is particularly liberal or parliamentary about the form of discussion he wants to consider, because Schmitt claims not every possible kind of deliberation and agreement can be characterized as parliamentaryism. You will see why in a moment. And so the liberal demand for openness, what is it? It consists in Schmitt's quote again, public opinion protected through freedom of speech,

freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and parliamentary immunities. And broadly, this is meant to produce accountable government in, let's say, in our words, but or rather in Schmidt's words, it would be a public opinion that plays the role of an absolute corrective. And yet this corrective, this opinion is to take place through medium of discussion by a representative assembly and the free press, because precisely what public is to directly exercise pressure at the ballot, he say the contradictory demands for secrecy appears. And so the point is then that through these tools, that competition of opinions in which the best opinion wins, his quote is to take place. And it's so that a form of discussion or deliberation is behind all of this demand for openness.

It's not about popular will. And now to the demand for openness, I think you can add a third demand or third principle of Entry arrangements assume a particular concept of discussion and not negotiation or agreement as such. To discussion belong shared convictions as premises, the willingness to be persuaded, independence of party ties, freedom from selfish interests. So then it's a question of rational discussion on a shared understanding of reason and national unity. It's not a conflict of interest similar to that between Christian and Turk, in which the two may reach some compromise, and that's Schmitt's own example. So I quote him again, the universally repeated maxim, for example, that every member of parliament

is a representative not of a party, but of the whole people, and is in no way bound by instructions, which is something that is repeated in Article 21 of the Weimar Constitution, and the recurring guarantees of freedom of speech and public sittings only make sense in terms of a correct understanding of discussion. So you know, he does add that this principle of openness is what is most in line, most consonant with democratic sentiment. But still, it is not really about democracy. The representative gets chosen to engage in discussion. He's again, the phrase in no way bound by instructions, he's not required to do what his constituents decide okay so and so now you look at the second demand of parliamentaryism liberal democracy so-called right the second demand is

division of powers and actually in surprising way Schmidt also says this is about discussion discussion okay so the quotation from Schmidt on just this division of powers here to the idea of competition appears a competition from which the truth will emerge. And then he adds, one part is set against the other. This depends on a way of thinking that creates a multiplicity everywhere so that an equilibrium created from the imminent dynamics of a system of negotiations replaces absolute unity. So now you can stop for a moment and say, well, is this right what Schmitt is saying? Because is actually purpose of division of power is this kind of principled or rational negotiation? Is it about the competition of opinions, and is the outcome of that competition really

supposed to be about the truth? Is it rather what you're used to thinking, division of powers, it's just a system of restraining centralized state power, right? You heard this phrase, checks and balances. So is discussion within parliament between representatives really the same as this, or even analogous as the discussion between branches of government. But Schmidt actually, very rigorous here, he sounds like he's making some kind of sophistic or petty analogy, but he's right, okay, because Schmidt knows very well that the impetus behind division of powers is that the plenitude of state power should not be allowed together at any one point. That's his quote. And so discussion in this case is secondary, at least as a matter of practice, but not let's say metaphysically.

But the original conception of representative government, the role of discussion was itself relative or subservient to the more liberal principle of balance. And so I quote him again on this, since the 16th century, the image of a balance can be found in every aspect of intellectual life, right? The parliamentary function of legislative deliberation, he says, should itself be balanced according to this theory of, it's a kind of moderate rationalism. So to the parliamentary legislative function, where different opinions are useful and necessary, there must be opposed the executive to which belongs a unity of decision. And the entire function of the state should not and cannot be collapsed then to legal deliberation which demands in the manner of an absolute rationalist, he names Condorcet

for this, an absolute rationalist would say that everything concrete is only a case for the application of a general law and that law has ultimate legitimacy because it's formulated by a parliament considering arguments and counter-arguments. So you can think of what I just said now as a kind of absolutist rationalist parliamentarism but Schmitt say it's an exaggeration actually of liberal rationalism. It's an absolute rationalism that leads to the elimination of balance and it leads then to a rational dictatorship. The original, the moderate or prudent liberal rationalism went very far to maintain a balance between the rational and the irrational, this again Schmitt quotation. The principle of balance is actually supreme, not discussion then.

And the principle of balance is understood as a relative, limited compromise between the reasoning parties as well as between that which reasons and that which does not. And what does not reason, it refers to executive decree, decision based on authority and not deliberation, situations that demand energetic action, especially in times of war and disturbance. The principle of deliberative legislation is not, for example, in federalist papers where you have a kind of original, not absolutist, but let's say prudent liberalism, but the principle of deliberative legislation has not been absolutized or rationalized to encompass the whole workings of the state. That is a kind of absolutist parliamentarism that Schmidt says it comes later. Well, you can say, what's wrong with that?

It sounds like he may be like the American presidential system. Could that be a solution to crisis of European parliamentary democracy? I mean, there's this quotation from him. It sounds like he's a little partial. He likes the original liberalism that allowed the balance between the rational and irrational or executive decision elements in government. So let me quote from him. The participation of popular representatives in government, parliamentary government, has proven the most effective means of abolishing the division of powers, and with it the old concept of parliamentaryism. Small and exclusive committees of parties or of party coalitions make their decisions behind closed doors, and what representatives of the big capitalist interest groups agree

to in the smallest committees is more important for the fate of millions of people, perhaps, than any political decision." These kinds of statements, which are repeated throughout, and Schmidt apparent sympathy for the American presidential system, you can say this would amount to criticism only of a certain kind of parliamentary absolutism, of party rule or of corruption. In and of itself, I don't think that would be a radical critique or even especially insightful. It would be something that call for reform, for a return maybe to the original practice of liberal government, of moderate rationalism, and Schmitt himself says that these are long familiar observations. In fact, you may hear such critique today, what the quote I just read from him, you can

read it, of many pundits and ordinary citizens, its argument for which it would be sufficient maybe to write an article in a newspaper, not a book like Schmitt has done here. Maybe in context of 1920s Europe, it might be demand for serious institutional overhaul, But this kind of critique wouldn't as such lead to statements that Schmitt makes in other places. For example, if in the actual circumstances of parliamentary business, openness and discussion have become an empty and trivial formality, then parliament as it developed in the 19th century has also lost its previous foundation and meaning. You know, this very big statement, the analysis of liberal rationalism as government by discussion or organized to a metaphysically ubiquitous principle of balance, can't, on account

of imperfect behavior or temporary corruption, lead to conclusions that the institution itself has lost its moral and intellectual foundation and only remains standing through sheer mechanical perseverance and an empty apparatus." Schmidt adds that even should the most dire practical problems facing parliamentaryism in his day be averted, for example, the threat from Bolshevism and Fascism, the crisis itself would still remain. And this is because, this very important what he is about to say now, the crisis springs from the consequences of modern mass democracy, and in the final analysis from the contradiction of a liberal individualism burdened by moral pathos, and a democratic sentiment governed essentially by political ideals.

And so modern mass democracy of this Schmidt has a very historical understanding. He talks about the triumphal march of democracy in the 19th century against all against which all arguments are historically outmoded. He say democracy is an unavoidable destiny, the dispensation of Providence, a terrible force. He talks of things like the flood of democracy and he speaks of old style aristocratic liberals like Guizot, who Schmidt calls the classical representative of constitutional parliamentaryism, he say, such men hope to tame this terrible historical force of democracy. But they could not. So the crisis of liberal democracy has to do with the historical inability of the first component, the liberal part, to tame or co-opt the second, the democrat part.

And so to understand this final analysis, or what really is the crisis of parliamentary democracy or of liberal democracy. I now will take a break, then come back to this, yes, and I am afraid that Brennan is no longer with me. I have sold him to a Saudi prince and he is now locked in a closet in Riyadh and is being fed the Saudi prince, I cannot repeat to you, this is too terrible to say, but if you have seen the movie Audition, there is woman in that and she keeps a director in a closet and feeds him her own vomit and beer as food is very distasteful and so I take break, I will be right back. My conception of freedom, the value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it but in what one pays for it, what it costs us. I shall give an example.

Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained. Later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are well known enough. They undermine the will to power, they level mountain and valley and call that morality, they make men small, cowardly and hedonistic, every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism, in other words, herd animalization. These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for. Then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which as a war permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom?

That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts for example those of pleasure the human being who has become free and how much more the spirit who has become free spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers Christians cows females Englishmen and other Democrats the free man is a warrior that's from Nietzsche Twilight of the idols skirmishes of an untimely man aphorism 38 what he has to do with

Schmidt I think has a lot to do because Schmidt, a very neat, systemic so-called analysis that I tried to explain on previous segment, gives way in this book Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy to much more significant historical critique of parliamentary liberalism, where he starts to say things like, a century of historical alliance between liberalism and democracy against royal absolutism has obscured the awareness of a fundamental contradiction between the two, constituting a crisis that unfolds today ever more strikingly, and that no cosmopolitan rhetoric can prevent or eliminate. So you know, this distinction between liberalism and democracy is not unique to Schmitt. You can find in Erich von Knuth-Ledding, he has book Liberty or Equality, many of similar points made.

Even Ortega y Gasset, if you look, a revolt of the masses treats some of same issues even middle to some extent. But well, it should read them too. I just think Schmidt has a better understanding of historical development of liberalism and democracy together against royal absolutism. Again, he say this only happened, this alliance between liberalism and democracy only happened because historical circumstance or accident. Leopold von Ranke called the conflict of democracy with the principle of monarchy the dominant current of the century, you're talking about 19th century. But in this, Schmitt points out that democracy was an enemy of the royal part and liberalism was only an enemy of the absolutist part.

Opposition to absolutism led to demands for open government and a system of checks and balances to parliamentaryism as government by, as he puts it, public deliberation without taking democracy into account. So representative government or this kind of liberalism developed as a countermeasure to secretive and irresponsible government by authority and decree. Its emergence was catalyzed by historical circumstances, you can say even accidents It's as concrete and specific as, let's say, St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, where French King massacred Huguenots. It led to widespread outrage in Europe. How can royal power become this? It led to distaste for cabinet decisionist politics carried out in secret. It was, as Schmitt puts it, the rejection of the idea that the plenitude of state power

should be allowed to gather at any one point. And Schmitt adds explicitly that this division of powers is actually antithesis of democratic concept of identity. The democratic movement, unlike the liberal, was essentially the negation of established monarchy but, as the antithesis of the royal principle, Schmitt says it depends on a series of identities. For the definition of democracy, he's saying now, for the definition of democracy, one has a string of identities. The identity of governed and governing, of sovereign and subject, the identity of the subject and object of state authority, the identity of the people with their representatives in parliament and so forth. So democracy then as power to the people is equivalent to what Schmitt calls homogeneity.

There has always been a people that don't need to be exception to the people. You can just have the people. The people becomes then ubiquitous as a democratic principle. The belief that all power comes from the people takes on in a radical democracy, a meaning similar to the belief that all authoritative power comes from God. I was quoting Schmitt just now. And this totality or ubiquity accounts for the homogeneity, which in no way justifies division of powers as in liberalism and not to speak of parliamentary parties or any such thing. So speaking essentially language, democratic principles wanted to ban parties. In fact, in this model of democracy, unanimity of opinion is required. There's nothing really to discuss. Truth is settled. It is the one and indivisible will of the people.

And this, by the way, is why the monarchical principle appears as the principle of difference then as opposed to identity, which is precisely the point monarchist anti-democratic liberals like Cunard, Ledin made. They were saying monarchy, not democracy, is the best protector of liberty or liberalism. You have update of this in Hans Hermann Hoppe and so on. But the crisis of mass democracy is therefore that any limited or mediated democracy can always be rejected in the name of radical democracy. And this is really the crisis of parliamentary democracy or of liberalism. Any kind of mediated indirect democracy not good enough, you can always reject it in the name of more democracy, a minority actually can come to represent the will or true will

of the people better than the majority who might not vote democratically or who are not mature. These are quotations from Schmitt. And who therefore the majority because they're not mature, they have to be taught to express their wills through the right kind of education. These are somewhat Rousseau, but certainly they're French Revolution Jacobin ideas. You will recognize them because they are the essence, maybe, of a left wokeist revolution and the libtards of our time. The qualitative aspect of democracy supersedes the quantitative. I quote him, the consequence of this educational theory is a dictatorship that suspends democracy in the name of a true democracy that is still to be created. It's Jacobinism, it's also Bolshevism, it's also wokeism.

It's the entire program of the left, you can call them progressive and so on. It's very hard to distinguish them from libtards who have been spiritually taken over by them in any case. But so to say, I quote him, theoretically and in critical times also practically, democracy is helpless before the Jacobin argument. And this is the crisis of modern mass democracy. The crisis of the modern state, I quote him, arises from the fact that no state can realize a mass democracy, a democracy of mankind, not even a democratic state. So then, extreme dictatorial forms of democracy pretending to represent the will of the people better than a modern state will always have the upper hand. And therefore, again, the crisis of mass democracy is the crisis of parliamentarism.

I quote him, 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. Compared to a democracy that is direct, not only in the technical sense but also in the vital sense, Parliament appears as an artificial machinery produced by liberal reasoning, while dictatorial and Caesaristic methods not only can produce the acclamation of the people but can also be a direct expression of democratic substance and power. But so then the deeper question becomes about democracy. And precisely when talking about the crisis of democracy, the helplessness of democracy in the face of arguments of radical democracy, so to say, precisely when talking about the

roots of the crisis that interests you in this book, Schmitt refers the reader to another one of his major concepts, and I quote him, a scientific study of democracy must begin with a particular aspect that I have called political theology. So then I will turn to this aspect, a scientific study of democracy is a great undertaking. Maybe Schmidt doesn't even get too much into that. He strangely says at one point that fascism is democratic and at another point that it's the only theory that has managed not to be democratic in our time. But anyway, I take a break now and I come back to discuss what Schmidt just mentioned Now this idea of political theology, the scientific study of democracy must begin with so-called political theology. I will be right back.

Knowledgeable will think they see the hand of God and patiently submit to instructions from above in which concept divine and human government are usually fused, the concept of above. Thus internal civil peace and continuity of development is ensured. The belief in a divine order, in the realm of politics, in a sacred mystery in the existence of the state, is of religious origin. If religion disappears, the state will unavoidably lose its ancient ISIS veil and cease to excite reverence." And that's from Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, aphorism 472, called Religion and Government. And so I ask, is the crisis of parliamentary democracy as Schmitt understands it the same in the end as the crisis of mankind as Nietzsche says?

With Schmidt, like so many other rightists of his time, a Nietzschean vitalist who understands in the left program of economism and depoliticization, he understands in this maybe an incipient and endless tyranny over all mankind, made permanent by the inability to challenge it openly because it presents itself as non-political, and maybe expresses itself as non-political in the form of a masterless herd, man as the dwarf being now able to live finally as a a herd without a master. So you may say maybe I take Schmitt too much in direction of a Nietzschean radical, whereas I think actually Bureaucrat is fundamentally right about meaning of Schmitt's own efforts in legal theories and his theories of state.

In other words, that he is a legal professional seeking to explain and preserve the independence of jurisprudence from, let's say, disingenuous political attempts to corrupt it or to misuse – to misuse neutral institutions like this for non-neutral ends, and to preserve also the independence of the class of legal professionals like himself. But yes, I think that's right, but it's also possible that in discussing these things Schmitt the man was also possessed by these other concerns that were shared by Nietzscheans of his time, and I do think he's a Nietzschean as many of the passages I'm reading to you are from Nietzsche here in particular, the book Human All Too Human. And these passages, as you can maybe see, contain in a nutshell many of Schmitt's

insight also, even if Schmitt turns and extends them sometimes in unexpected directions. But so the crisis of mass democracy and of liberalism has to do ultimately with something that Schmitt calls political theology. So I look at this now. Carl Schmitt had other book called Political Theology, published in 1922, a year before Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. And this book is often said to be centered on idea of decision, or the exception. So if you put simply, it's the idea of first sentence of the book, sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The exception is in a particular crisis situation that demands immediate concrete departure from the legal order or government by law and regulation, and such, let's say, crisis

situation requires actual decision, energetic action, in the scope of which discussion or legal procedure has to be suspended. And then this discussion, this legal procedure, appears dependent on the former, on sovereignty in a radical way. And so sovereignty is the only quality that enables one to decide on what constitutes an exception and what must be done about it. That is constituted as such of political being. Schmitt thinks as sovereign he decides exception and therefore political dimension of life are aspects, these both are aspects of what he called political theology. What means, Schmitt says, I'm quoting, a continuous thread runs through the metaphysical, political and sociological conceptions that postulate the sovereign as a personal unit and primeval creator.

Historical ideas are the basis for historical thinking because in their ubiquity they determine all important aspects of thought for a particular historical era, and in particular they determine all political thought. And Schmitt claims this holds for political as well as unpolitical or antipolitical theological notions because any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision. Some of these are his quotes. So the decision is referred to God or to gods on one hand or to a sovereign in the political manifestation of this ubiquitous program of ideas and practices, to a personal unit and primeval creator. The idea of decision or exception is dependent then on idea of political theology because

the sovereign is an analogue of a god and always interfere in a machinery and reason of state and legal order in the same way as Deus Ex Machina. And this is quotes from Schmitt, the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. That's a very telling quote, I think. So when Schmitt speaks about the crisis of parliamentary democracy as rule by committee and technical regulation that lacks any political decision, and that's a quote itself from the book later that I'm discussing on the show, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, that lacks any political decision. There is a hint here, you must look at this issue of theology, that lacking ability for political decision, parliamentary, excuse me, parliamentarism, lacks a political theology

or at least lacks a coherent political theology. And Schmitt actually says almost this. He say that modern democracy is helpless before the Jacobin argument. And then he mentions the political theology of radical, non-parliamentary democracy and and indicates that any study of democracy must begin with political theology. So in the same way later in the book, in the course of presenting, as I said, the two main contemporary antagonists of parliamentary democracy, meaning anarcho-syndicalism on the left and radical nationalism on the right, Schmitt typifies them by adherence to a vitalist myth. They are dictatorships of no procedure and no discussion, of direct will and decision. And so the problem of liberalism is with its incoherent political theology or lack of political

theology in the face of these challenges. Political theology being a vital and historical element constitutive of the political. It's not suppressible. This quote from Nietzsche touches actually on the same concerns I'm reading now. But what if that quite different conception of government such as is taught in democratic states begins to prevail? If it is regarded as nothing but the instrument of the popular will, not as an above in the relation to a below, but merely as a function of the sole sovereign power, the people. Here, the attitude toward religion adopted by the government can only be the same as that adopted towards it by the people. The interests of tutelary government and the interests of religion go hand in hand together,

so that when the latter begins to die out, the foundations of the state too are undermined. Viewed from close to, the sovereignty of the people serves then to banish the last remnant of magic and superstition from this realm of feeling. Modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the state. I will repeat, modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the state. A later generation will see the state, too, shrink to insignificance in various parts of the earth, a notion many people of the present can hardly contemplate without fear and revulsion. That's from the same, as I read before, human-all-to-human aphorism 472. crisis of parliamentary democracy says, it is essential that liberalism be understood as a consistent, comprehensive metaphysical system.

And in political theology, the book he wrote here earlier, he says, the metaphysical image that defines, excuse me, that the definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. So this also what I just read now, you can see as another straightforward formulation of what he calls political theology, but so what then are the metaphysics of liberalism? I've already talked about how Schmitt thinks the idea of balance is so important in epoch of liberalism thinking, but more fundamental still than balance to liberal, let's say metaphysics or physics, is the influence of the new natural science on European thought in 18th and 19th centuries. And it took first the form of deism.

Schmitt says that the idea of the modern constitutional state triumphs together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the sovereign's intervention in a direct legal order. The rationalism of the Enlightenment rejected the exception in every form. a quotation from his book Political Theology. So in other words, the regularity and lawfulness of the metaphysics that underlines modern science was extended to the realm of the political. Schmitt adds that at the foundation of the identification of the state and legal order

rests the metaphysics that identifies the lawfulness of nature and normative lawfulness. This pattern of thinking is characteristic of the natural sciences. It attempts to banish from the realm of the human mind every exception. That was another quote. And so this deist metaphysics founded, let's say, on the new natural science is itself weak or unstable, the deist metaphysics, because it leads almost casually to its own radicalization. The abandonment, in other words, of the concept of God or the sovereign entirely, their abandonment. He says, the lawfulness of nature applies without exception. The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, has remained the engineer of the great machine, but here he has been radically pushed aside.

The machine now runs itself. And so this is the same as what Schmitt says of the core of parliamentaryism in the crisis of parliamentary democracy. The intellectual core of this thought resides finally in its specific relationship to truth, which becomes a mere function of the eternal competition of opinions. In contrast to the truth, it means renouncing a definite result. That was a quote from Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. So it mimics the endless discursiveness of science. Liberal democracy mimics this. At its core, it's an avoidance of arriving at a definite truth and therefore a definite decision. It replaces these the same as there's natural science, it replaces them with a method or a procedure.

Here is another quote, just as liberalism discusses and negotiates every political detail, so it also wants to dissolve metaphysical truths in a discussion. What goes for liberalism, pure and simple, doubly goes for liberal democracy or the liberal understanding of democracy. In discussing one of notable proponents of this new liberal democratic so-called metaphysics, Schmitz says this, he says, when Kelsen gives the reasons for opting for democracy, he openly reveals the mathematical and natural scientific character of his thinking. Democracy is the expression of a political relativism and scientific orientation that are liberated from miracles and dogmas and based upon human understanding and critical doubt.

And so the political theology of democracy then has something very weird about it when you read it this way, something that makes its actualization next to impossible. Because the necessity by which the people always will what is right is not identical with the rightness that emanated from the commands of the personal sovereign. The unity that a people represents does not possess a decisionist character." That's a quotation from also political theology. In other words, the series of identities that characterize democracy can no more constitute a coherent or stable political theology than can the metaphysics of liberal parliamentarism. Both democracy and liberalism leave the position of sovereignty in question, undefined, maybe intentionally undefined and empty.

And this is so for all types of liberalism, as you can see from Schmitt's full thoughts on this. It must be emphasized, even the original or theistic, what he calls the moderate rationalism as opposed to the absolutist rationalism, but the original or theistic liberalism that had a moderate expression in Jefferson's America, according to Schmitt, also in the end has this problem. Because ultimately what happens in both modern liberalism and modern democracy, which as As you can see from Nietzsche's quotations, I'm using – he understood both of them in the same way – liberalism and democracy as forms of decay of the state, which restated by Schmitt what happens in both liberalism and democracy in their muddling and obscuring

and doing away with the idea of sovereignty is not that they actually totally erase sovereignty and authority from the world, but that they replace its open and free action with a program of total technical and technological administrative tyranny that allows in the end for no political out because it's a tyranny in the name of depoliticization. It's a tyranny that hides itself. And so I think it's in statements like this that I'm about to read for you now that Schmitt's critique reaches its core. I'm reading. Today, nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with.

That's a quotation from political theology book, which is to say, the spirit of liberalism, the ultimate ground of liberalism appears to be at bottom the same as that of atheistic socialism and which consists in precisely what Nietzsche derives as the so-called free society. refers to that in quotation marks a kind of depoliticized realm of the dwarf animal of equal rights living under purely economic administration. Liberalism does not only give the upper hand historically to socialism. Its ultimate metaphysical foundations consist in a program of secularization, an anti-theological vision it shares with radical socialism. The only difference is the frankness and immediacy of socialism. I quote, the radical antithesis forces the anarchist to decide against the decision.

And this results in the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the 19th century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictatorship, the dictator of an anti-dictatorship. And that striking phrase, the dictator of an anti-dictatorship, what means, does it mean the last man? But both liberalism and socialism aim ultimately to avoid just this, the personality of the sovereign. And the sovereign is only the political reflection of a specifically human quality, the exacting moral decision, the human decision. In favor of method, of procedure, these – I mean liberalism and democracy and socialism – work toward the dissolution of humanity into mechanism, so that Moscow and Washington in the manner of Heidegger are the same.

They're not really political systems, they're forms of technology. And in the middle is a Europe that alone can prevent this unstringing of mankind. So in the logical consequence of modern democratic government, the state turns into society, I'm quoting now, the state turns into society on the ethical intellectual side into an ideological humanitarian conception of humanity, and on the other into an economic technical system of production and traffic. A politically united people becomes on one hand a culturally interested public and on the other partially an industrial concern and its employers partially a mass of consumers. The modern state, in other words, is the coldest of all cold monsters. It pretends to represent peoples but it's actually a form of technology that is anti-political.

It saps the being of a people, a people being constituted by its united reverence for one idea. The crisis of parliamentary democracy, or of liberal democracy, or actually both of liberalism and democracy, is the crisis of mankind, and I wonder if, I don't know if Schmitt would agree, or if I, again, if I take it too far, but I wonder if these are just the inevitable political diseases, or rather political expressions of a diseased form of life. If the global tenement, as he refers to it, if actually, accurately represent the desire and spiritual universe of a type of superfluous mankind that has been misbred and overbred and over-multiplied in our time. I hope for a great asteroid. Maybe one of you is this asteroid and nemesis. Very good. Until next time. Bap out.