Fluellen. If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb? in your own conscience, now?  — Shakespeare, Henry V Certain philosophical concepts possess such striking clarity as to be readily comprehended by the common mind. One need not have inhaled the rarified air of an upper-level philosophy seminar to come to grips with cogito ergo sum, Ockham’s Razor, and the Allegory of the Cave, it being entirely feasible at the average epistemic baseline to appreciate how the very act of thinking tends to prove one’s own existence, how the explanation with the fewest assumptions is likely to be true, and how the shadowy, unenlightened world of appearances is very different from the sunlit world of genuine knowledge. These are the sorts of axioms one is likely to encounter in the wild, as it were, in popular literature, podcasts, and casual conversation. Most philosophical propositions resist such simple formulations, and it is a mark of distinction among thinkers to achieve that level of conceptual coherence and public intelligibility. Friend good, enemy bad, and whoever has the heaviest cudgel makes the rules. For better or worse, the German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is noteworthy for having advanced two such notions, now ubiquitous in articles, social media flame-wars, and gladiatorial debate web series, namely the Friend-Enemy Distinction (die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind), and the State of Exception (Ausnahmezustand). Here we have a pair of ideas that could be grasped not just by the average person, but by any of our femur-wielding Cro-Magnon ancestors. Friend good, enemy bad, and whoever has the heaviest cudgel makes the rules. Not exactly aspirational stuff, but modern-day Schmittians will counter that the controversial German political theorist was merely being descriptive. As we do seem to be experiencing something of a “Schmittian Moment” in our democracy, these principles surely warrant further consideration. It is a curious development indeed that Carl Schmitt — the lapsed Catholic, opportunistic Nazi Party member, editor-in-chief of the Nazi legal journal Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, Prussian State Councillor and Reich Professional Group Leader, and author of “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (“The Führer Protects the Law”), who demanded that German law be purged of jüdischem Geist, of “Jewish spirit” —  should be as influential today as he was in the 1930s, if not more so. “Carl Schmitt remains a challenge,” admit Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook to Carl Schmitt, “for in addition to having been an incisive thinker, he was a committed Nazi and lifelong antisemite.” But the Plettenberg-born jurist was not just a thinker, a writer, a theorist. We are not dealing here with someone like Degas or Céline, whose artistic or literary legacy is darkened by the shadow of antisemitism, but a political actor whose conduct had disturbing real-world consequences. Schmitt was instrumental in the collapse of the Weimar Republic, arguing during the 1932 Prussian coup d’état and the Prussia Contra Reich case that followed that legal norms cannot constrain existential political decisions, and thus that the Machtstaat (state of power) takes precedence over the Rechtsstaat (rule of law), thus paving the way for Hitler’s Machtergreifung (seizure of power) not long thereafter. For all his moral failings and catastrophic politico-legal maneuverings, he has nevertheless become a kind of mascot for postliberal public intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and Chad Pecknold. That such prominent American Catholics should be seduced by the writings of Carl Schmitt is an interesting turn of events. The ideology propounded by the so-called “crown jurist of the Third Reich” is quite alien to our own political traditions of democracy, limited government, toleration, civic bargaining, the peaceful transfer of power, and an intricate system of checks and balances. Michael Doran, writing in Tablet, has noted the success of both Eisenhower and Reagan in employing a “broad, nonsectarian language of faith [that] could bind religiously and racially diverse Americans into a single political community,” a credo so different than that of the postliberal critique of the American order articulated by the “Catholic Integralists,” writers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. Their argument — that the liberal founding of the United States carries within it the seeds of its own decay — has become a kind of catechism for alienated young men who believe the system turned against them. Schmitt’s theories are evidently in the ascendant in certain corners of the Information Space, but at the same time, they remain reductionist, authoritarian, utterly lacking in moral constraints, and incompatible with constitutionalism and the rule of law, although for postliberals this is, of course, a feature rather than a bug. Now, an unfamiliar tradition has arrived on the scene, in the form of Schmitt–inspired postliberal thought, like a fox in the ideological henhouse, and what happens next will in no small measure determine conservative statecraft going forward. Phillip Magness and Jack Nicastro, in the pages of Reason, have issued a warning that “America’s ‘radical defense of classical liberalism’ has made the United States exceptional. With Schmittian philosophy resurgent on the New Right, it’s time for conservatives to defend our founding principles from a vicious ideology that seeks to arrogate supreme power to the state and abrogate the natural rights of the individual.” The age-old debate between classical liberals, with their emphasis on individual liberty, free markets, limited government, and natural rights, and conservatives, with their emphasis on tradition, social order, and established institutions, has long shaped the evolving nature of the Right. Now, an unfamiliar tradition has arrived on the scene, in the form of Schmitt–inspired postliberal thought, like a fox in the ideological henhouse, and what happens next will in no small measure determine conservative statecraft going forward. The notion of American Schmittians is strange enough, but the notion of Catholic Schmittians is, if anything, even more surprising. Schmitt himself was a lapsed Catholic, in part due to the canonical consequences of his second marriage, and he described his own Catholicism as “displaced” and “de-totalised.” His conflictual, Manichaean approach to politics, with its emphasis on existential opposition, is hardly in keeping with mainstream Catholic political theology. Reinhard Mehring, Schmitt’s biographer, found that there was “no underlying Catholic theme” in The Concept of the Political, while Raphael Gross held that the German jurist’s philosophy “cannot be reduced to Roman Catholic theology given a political turn. Rather, Schmitt should be understood as carrying an atheistic political-theological tradition to an extreme.” The friend-enemy distinction and the despotic state of exception run counter to long-established Catholic theories of social contract, consent, and subsidiarity, and the supremely conservative Pope Pius XI, in his Quadregesimo Anno of 1931, made it quite clear that “of its very nature the true aim of all social activity should be to help members of the social body, but never to destroy or absorb them.” Christ was even clearer on this point in the Gospel of Matthew: You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this? And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this? Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect. Perhaps Herr Schmitt knew better? Regardless, his theories provide eminently useful rationalizations for tribalism, and so they have made their way to our shores, carried along by the tides of rampant polarization. Not so long ago, it was possible for George Will to employ the quintessentially American sport of baseball as a metaphor for our shared political character: Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience. That means it involves a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf… You know when a season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time, the worst team’s gonna win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games: that middle third. So it’s a game that you can’t like if winning’s everything. And democracy’s that way too. These days, a fractured political landscape has made the idea of “the slow politics of the half-loaf” look positively quaint. With politics treated as a zero-sum competition, all law becomes what Schmitt called “situational law,” and “the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” If only more people were reading Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1948), as opposed to The Concept of the Political, then we might have a better collective handle on the ways in which Power, being parasitic on crises and manipulative of social divisions, accumulates at the expense of intermediate institutions and social buffers like churches, guilds, and other local institutions, eroding both social pluralism and individual liberties in the process. Instead, we are increasingly deferential to the author of “The Führer Protects the Law,” much to our detriment. The result of these sharp partisan cleavages is an almost total lack of grace in the political arena and the public square. Consider some of the more notorious reactions to recent events like the assassinations of Charlie Kirk and Melissa Hortman, the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner, the cancer diagnosis of Ben Sasse, the death of Brigitte Bardot, which I do not care to cite at length here, but which were morally repugnant and ethically indefensible, in situations where it would have been so much easier to issue formulaic, humane statements of sympathy and move on. Treating politics as an existential engagement between Freund und Feind has created an atmosphere of pervasive hostility and generalized conflict, to the point where rival blocs can exist in completely different moral universes, even occupying different realities. This is how two vying camps will view the same three or four angles of the January 7, 2026 shooting of Renee Good by an United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, and conclude either that the 37-year-old mother of three was “was totally innocent, and they murdered her in cold blood,” or that she was a “deranged lunatic woman” and “domestic terrorist” bent on vehicular homicide. This phenomenon has been variously called “value-driven inference,” “motivated cognition,” “outcome-oriented thinking,” or even “cognitive illiberalism,” and taken to extremes, it can serve not just as a symptom, but as a catalyst for further societal division. There are those who revel in the increasingly unsightly spectacle of American public life, and that is certainly their prerogative. No doubt it makes good copy, lifts engagement numbers, increases “unregretted user-seconds” on social media platforms, and reinforces in-group/out-group dynamics. It is not, however, beneficial for the body politic, which risks being reduced to a state of total moral inanition. Already, the converging ends of the political horseshoe, the self-flagellating Third Worldist de-growthers and the juche-style protectionists, have started to embrace geopolitical declinism, but moral declinism presents just as serious a threat. Attempts to collapse the wide range of American political life into a single antagonistic axis (which makes very little sense, with a record-high 45 percent of U.S. adults now identifying as political independents) will result in ever more elaborate and febrile exercises in performative escalation. The result is a republic of endless virtue signaling and vice signaling, of nihilism and resentment, of rage-bait and agit-slop, of systemic paralysis and institutional sclerosis, with the attendant loss of asabiyyah, the shared sense of purpose and belonging that allows us to confront existential threats. Postliberals tend to view America’s Founding Fathers with skepticism and even outright contempt — recall Curtis Yarvin’s assertion that “every legal and political argument for our revolution was a bald-faced lie. A congenital cancer.” But those of us who do not view the origins of our nation in such calumnious terms would do well to return to the sources of our political tradition and draw upon the wisdom of the drafters of our Constitution and the architects of our Republic. It was John Adams, in a letter dated February 3, 1812, who wrote to his former rival Thomas Jefferson with the following eloquent words of warning: Your Memoranda of the past, your Sense of the present and Prospect for the Future Seem to be well founded, as far as I See. But the Latter, i.e the Prospect of the Future, will depend on the Union: and how is that Union to be preserved. Concordia parvae res crescunt, Discordia maximae dilabuntur [In harmony, small things grow; in discord, great things decay]. Our Union is an immense Structure. In Russia I doubt not a Temple or Pallace might be erected of Wood, Brick or Marble, which Should be cemented only with Ice. A Sublime and beautiful Building it might be; Surpassing St. Sophia, St. Peters St. Pauls, Notre Dame or St. Genevieve. But the first Week, if not the first day of the Debacle would melt all the Cement, and Tumble the Glass and Marble the Gold and Silver, the Timber and the Iron into one promiscuous chaotic or anarchic heap. I will not at present point out the precise Years Days and Months when; nor the Names of the Men by whom, this Union has been put in Jeopardy. Your Recollection can be at no more loss than mine. Regardless of one’s position on the political spectrum, it seems impossible to deny that a republic dominated by the Friend-Enemy Distinction, and existing in a perpetual State of Exception, is a fragile edifice cemented only with ice, and liable to be reduced to an anarchic heap. Our forebears understood this all too well, but those who prefer the doctrines of the Crown Jurist of National Socialism must know, and must know that we know, that they have adopted a worldview predicated on domination, not justice, cloaking the most bellicose forms of political control in the ersatz language of legality, and promising all the chaos, moral compromises, and precipitous reversals of fortune that will inevitably follow therefrom. Looking back on Carl Schmitt’s career, it would seem more appropriate to view the disgraced state councillor in Hitler’s Reich as an unsettling object lesson, rather than an exemplar worthy of emulation, but to each his own, I suppose. It would be fitting to give the last word here to another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, who in his First Inaugural Address of 1801 enumerated the “essential principles of our Government,” ranging from “equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political” and “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations” to “the support of the State governments in all their rights” and “the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason,” all of which form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety. A safer course, I should think, than the importation of the alien, authoritarian mind-virus of Schmittianism, and something well worth bearing in mind as we mark the semiquincentennial of our Nation. READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: A Sad Tale’s Best for Winter: Ghost Stories for Christmas Genius Loci: Byung-Chul Han’s In Praise of the Earth The Weary Atlas