“When you worship power, compassion and mercy will seem like sins.”
Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor and author based in Idaho, posted the idea last year. I saw this last week and immediately passed it on to some of my close friends with a note saying that this line captures our political moment. It helps describe America’s moral abyss.
Over the past decade, I have watched many of my friends and neighbors make a remarkable transformation. They went from supporting Donald Trump despite hating him to being aggressive about him.
This is not a new observation. In fact, it’s so obvious that it verges on the trite. A much more interesting question is why. How it seems that so many Americans seem to have abandoned any commitment to personal virtue – at least in their political lives – and have instead embraced a ruthless political struggle so enthusiastically that they believe you are immoral unless you join their crusade or even If you imitate their methods?
It’s a question with a multifaceted answer. In December I wrote a column Examining the question through a specifically religious lens. When man believes he is eternally right, there is a temptation to believe he has the right to rule.
But there is a difference between spending on temptation and developing an alternative morality. And in the last decade, we’ve seen millions of Americans build a different moral superstructure. And while it’s certainly notable and powerful in Trumpism, it’s not exclusive to Trumpism.
A good way to understand this terrible political morality is to read Carl SchmittGerman political theorist who joined the Nazi Party after Hitler became chancellor. I want to be careful here – I’m not suggesting that millions of Americans are suddenly Schmittians, acolytes of one of the fascist regime’s favorite political theorists. The vast majority of Americans have no idea who he is. They wouldn’t even accept all his thoughts.
However, one of his ideas is almost perfect for the moment: his description in a 1932 book entitled “The concept of political“The ‘Neon Bruising of Friends’ Resolution”. According to Schmitt, the political sphere is distinct from the personal sphere and has its own distinct contrasts.
“Let us suppose,” wrote Schmitt, “that in the domain of morality there are ultimate distinctions between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable.” However, politics has “finite differences of its own”. In this area, “the concrete political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is between friend and foe.”
One of the shortcomings of liberalism, according to Schmitt, is the reluctance to develop a friend distinction. If he can’t draw it, he’s crazy. Lasting political communities can exist only when this distinction engenders. It is the contrast with outsiders that creates community.
Here Schmitt was descriptive and prescriptive. If instrumental distinction is necessary to create and maintain a political community, it can be destructive to seek accommodation with one’s political opponents. This is human nature and it is naive not to surrender our basic character.
Schmitt was partly right. Difference with a friend of friends is an aspect of human nature, and we are constantly tempted to dismiss it, rationalize it, and indulge it. Rather than resisting it, we want to find some way to fix it, often simply to maintain our self-confidence that we are moral and decent people.
He was also right that the friend-with-friend distinction is ultimately incompatible with the liberal democratic project. Pluralism seeks to create a community in which historical enemies can live in peace and flourish side by side. If distinguishing friend from friend is a necessary feature of human nature, how can pluralism survive?
No one was more Aware than the founders that the American experiment is contrary to our basic natures. Centuries before Schmitt’s birth, they understood this reality intimately.
Our government is built with the understanding that, as James Madison famously put it Federalist No. 51“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels governed men, there would be no need for either external or internal government controls. “
The Constitution tries to ameliorate the will to power as best it can—as Madison said in the same essay, “ambition must be received to contend with ambition”—but the Founders also knew that even our elaborate system of checks and balances was inadequate. Virtue is a must for our system to work.
“We have no government armed with power to compete with human passions without morality and religion,” wrote John Adams in his 1798 Massachusetts Militia letter“Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our constitution as the whale passes the net.”
Adams’s New England metaphor is perfect (his readers would absolutely know what a whale would net): pluralism requires both law and ethics to work, and without ethics law fails.
We forget how much the Founders—for all their faults—were focused not only on forms of American government, but also on personal virtue. One of my favorite books from last year was “The pursuit of happinessJeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center.
The book describes how the Founders envisioned the pursuit of happiness not as the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, but rather as “the pursuit of virtue—as being rather good than feeling good.” For example, Benjamin Franklin listed temperance, quiet, order, distinction, modesty, industry, honesty, justice, moderation, purity, tranquility, chastity, and humility as indispensable elements of virtue.
You can immediately see the contrast with Schmitt’s friend politics. Virtue ethics certainly recognizes the existence of enemies, but still imposes moral obligations on our treatment of our enemies. The virtues Franklin lists aren’t just how you like your own political tribe; They are universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone.
Demonstrate these virtues and your enemies can live with dignity and freedom even if they lose the political battle. When your enemies display the same virtues, you can enjoy the good life even if you lose. This is social compact pluralism. In a decent society, no defeat is final defeat and no victory is final victory. And at all times, your basic human rights must be preserved.
On the contrary, dive too deep into the resolution of the device It is immoral to treat one’s enemies with kindness if the kindness weakens the community in the fight against a mortal enemy. In the world of device resolution with a friend, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your party by refusing to call for political warfare.
The friend-to-friend difference explains why so many Republicans are especially furious with anti-Trump dissidents—especially when those dissidents hold conservative values. In distinguishing friend enmity, ideology is secondary to loyalty.
You see this principle at work in Trump’s decision to pardon or commute sentences on January 6 and revoke Secret Service protections from one of his former national security advisers, John Bolton, and from one of his former secretaries of state, Mike Pompeo. Friends can get away with violent crimes. Bolton and Pompeo publicly criticized Trump, and now it’s the enemies who have to pay the price.
While Trumpists are among the most serious voices in the public square, ruthless aggression is unfortunately common across the political spectrum, especially at the extremes. I have seen their opponents completely demonized by activists. Any deviation from Orthodoxy is seen as evil, and evil must be completely eradicated.
And there is no humility in the culture of abolition – whether it comes from the left or the right.
Because our civic citizenship depends on our ethics, we should teach ethics right along with civic citizenship. Unfortunately, we fail at both tasks, and our collateral nature tells millions of Americans that cruelty is good if it helps us win and kindness is bad if it weakens our cause. That is the path of destruction. As the prophet Isaiah said“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
Woe to them, yes, but as the politics of friend enmity dominates, tearing apart our families and communities to shred and reshape our national morale, a darker thought crosses my mind.
Woe to us all.
