It's All Our Fault!

No, we're not all Schmitteans now, but what do you expect from the hysterical left

I’m so old I can remember when the New York Times editorial page blamed Leo Strauss for the Iraq War, neoconservatism, teenage angst, and every other bad thing you can think of. The chief culprit back in those days was Brent Staples, a Times editorial page writer who attacked Strauss in the 1990s with a piece that included this howler:

One antidote [to Strauss] is fresh and frequent reading of the Declaration of Independence, the Enlightenment's most profound document, the place where rule by a privileged elite was resoundingly rejected, and the worth of even the lowest born was asserted as a matter of national principle.

I assume Staples has in mind the same Declaration of Independence that Strauss cites approvingly in the opening two pages of his most famous book, Natural Right and History—the passage where Strauss laments that it is doubtful whether modern Americans still revere the teaching of that famous document. That would be the same document that the New York Times’s 1619 Project, midwived by Staples’s successor at the editorial page (Nicole Hannah-Jones), rubbishes because Jefferson . . . well, you know the rest. In any case, it turned out to be doubtful that Staples ever read a page of Strauss’s work, relying instead on third party slurs to inform his own sloppy seconds.

Schmitt & Strauss

Today the New York Times returns to form, blaming Strauss, Carl Schmitt, and the Claremont Institute for bringing us the most anti-neoconservative administration since neoconservatism was a glint in Irving Kristol’s eye. But Damon Linker (who I like to call “the missing Linker”) is up for it, with a long piece making the case about the thinkers who made Trump the all-powerful:

[M]embers of his administration justify Mr. Trump’s instinctual attraction to power by reaching for a longer tradition of right-wing thought that favors explicitly monarchical and even dictatorial rule. . .

The tradition begins with legal theorist Carl Schmitt and can be followed in the work of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, thinkers affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Trump movement, and the contemporary writings of the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule. . .

So we’re in trouble already, as the teaching of Vermeule runs directly counter to the teaching of my fellow Claremonsters, as I explained here on Political Questions some weeks ago. To be sure, Vermeule does explicitly associate his project (which includes a case for the Administrative State) to Schmitt, whereas Claremont most assuredly does not. But let’s hold that point for a moment and continue with Linker’s syllabus of errors:

The Claremont Institute extended this intellectual line in America. Founded in 1979 in California by four students of Harry Jaffa, who studied with Strauss in the 1940s, the institute has cultivated a distinctive account of American history. It begins with veneration for the country’s founding, which institutionalized timeless moral verities. It continues with reverence for Abraham Lincoln’s displays of statesmanship, both before and during the Civil War, which deepened and perfected the American polity by fulfilling the promise of its founding.

So far so good, though I am baffled by what is specifically “distinctive” about Claremont’s view of American history, which I’ve always thought was just . . . American history. Whatever.

Then came the fall: First Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive movement, and then the New Deal during the Great Depression, introduced the notion of a “living Constitution” that evolves to permit the creation of an administrative state staffed by experts.

This form of administrative bureaucratic rule, often aided and abetted by the judicial branch, stifles statesmanship. That’s why Claremont-affiliated scholars have been at the forefront of attempts simultaneously to roll back the administrative state and to consolidate executive power in the office of the president.

Here Linker conflates two separate critiques and gets . . . Hitler. Naturally.

The problem with the Administrative State is not that it ties up the president, but that it rubbishes the separation of powers—a key point entirely omitted from Linker’s account. It combines legislative and executive power in bureaucracies intended to be beyond the effective control of either the president or Congress. Recent examples: the Obama/Biden “Clean Power Plan” cooked up by the EPA contemplated a legal regime that would never have passed Congress. Does Linker disagree with this assessment? And in seeking to gain authority to fire bureaucrats, Trump is seeking the same power that FDR sought to use until being stopped by the Supreme Court in the poorly-reasoned Humphrey’s Executor case.

Linker worries:

The great danger of such a breathtakingly expansive view of executive power is that it threatens to transform the American presidency into a dictatorial office that disregards the separation of powers and seeks unchallenged primacy in its place.

This has the matter exactly backwards. As our occasional contributor John Yoo argued in his terrific 2000 book Defender in Chief, Trump’s actions are trying to effect a restoration of the separation of powers. If Linker and Democrats don’t like Trump’s use of the National Emergencies Act (passed by a heavily Democratic Congress back in the 1970s) how about repealing or amending it? Anyone think Democrats will do so once they regain a majority in Congress or the White House? Of course they won’t.

Simple question for Linker or anyone who reads his article: Should the president have control of the executive branch, or not? And if not the president, then who?

The plain truth is that Trump is merely using the executive powers that Democrats have long wanted, but deplore now because Trump is using it for purposes they don’t like. As John O’Sullivan noted in a different context, what lies behind the left’s new-found constitutional scruples is an impotent rage at the lasting defeat Trump is inflicting on them.

I’ll leave aside Linker’s undeveloped point about how the Administrative State “stifles statesmanship,” as this distinct point requires separate treatment. As it happens, our central European correspondent Clifford Angell Bates wrote a terrific article a few days ago for Miskatonian under the headline “Trump’s Chaos Defies Schmitt’s Doctrine.” With the minor caveat that I don’t think it is right to call Trump’s administration “chaotic,” Cliff’s treatment of the Schmitt question is spot-on. Some excerpts:

In recent years, commentators and scholars have increasingly turned to the work of Carl Schmitt to make sense of Donald Trump’s brand of populist politics. Schmitt, a controversial German legal theorist and critic of liberal democracy, is best known for his assertion that “the political” is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy, and that sovereignty ultimately resides in the ability to decide on the exception. . .

This essay argues that applying Schmittian concepts to Trump’s populism ultimately obscures more than it reveals. Trump’s political strategy is better understood as a form of cultural combat within a functioning democratic framework, not as a manifestation of Schmittian authoritarianism. . .

Donald Trump’s populism, while confrontational and rhetorically aggressive, does not fit neatly into Schmitt’s rigid dichotomy. Trump often engages in performative hostility, but his alliances and enmities are fluid. Unlike Schmitt’s absolutist view of the enemy, Trump shifts targets based on political convenience. His relationships with figures such as Senator Lindsey Graham, Fox News, and even members of the Republican establishment illustrate this volatility. At times, he demonizes these actors, only to reconcile when politically expedient. This lack of consistency undermines any attempt to categorize Trump’s politics within Schmitt’s strict friend-enemy framework. . .

Trump’s populism, however, operates within the spectacle of modern media and social networks, where enemies serve as foils for mobilization rather than as existential threats requiring elimination. His rhetoric against the “fake news media” or the “deep state” is aggressive, yet it does not translate into a systematic purge or restructuring of political institutions.

Attempts to frame Trump within Schmittian concepts fail because Trump’s political style is fundamentally pragmatic and media-driven rather than ideologically rigid. His presidency is better understood through the lens of populism and cultural politics rather than as an application of Schmitt’s authoritarian theories.

Take that Linker!

Read the whole thing, as the saying goes. Meanwhile, I have a great and exclusive piece for us from Cliff on the origins of NGOs coming soon. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, let’s get out with some art: