00:00:00.000All right, before we get into another German creep, let's talk about some American creeps.0.75
00:00:06.100So, Adrienne, you and I are doing a very special live show next Thursday, the 27th of August, here in beautiful San Francisco, California.0.95
00:00:15.080And we are going to be talking about how to become a Silicon Valley creep in 10 easy steps.
00:00:20.140Exactly. If you want to find out how much eugenics you need to be engaging in, how big does a compound need to be?0.90
00:00:26.240Who should sign NDAs? What goes in a green shake?0.98
00:00:29.740We're going to be answering all those questions and many, many more.
00:00:32.880Please join us on August 27th at Swedish American Hall in San Francisco.
00:01:15.160Yes. Today we're going to look into a much requested right-wing thinker, a German thinker with a pretty ignominious career during his lifetime,0.68
00:01:23.800and a kind of uncanny career after his death.0.86
00:01:27.440A guy who managed to, fun fact, feature both in my forthcoming book,0.99
00:01:32.480What Tech Calls Thinking, because like people on the tech right love this fucking guy.0.96
00:01:37.240And of course, in the book version of Project 1933,0.98
00:01:40.540where I found Schmidt actually a pretty useful guide to that year
00:01:46.180and exactly how the right wing elites sort of made common cause with the Nazis.
00:01:50.980Because Schmidt, even though he's often referred to as the crown jurist of the Third Reich, came to the Third Reich kind of late.
00:01:58.020There were, the Nazis had a set of lawyers that had been with the quote-unquote movement for up to 10 years in some cases.
00:03:36.260And really, like, a lot of these Nazi cultural, like, grandees were exceptionally long-lived in some fucked-up, you know, satanic joke of biography.0.67
00:03:46.080I think Gadamer dies at, like, 104 Heideggers in his 80s.0.78
00:03:50.780Like, the Orishan style lived to be over 100.
00:03:53.120Like, these people, oh, Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law and sort of mistress of Bayreuth and, like, most likely lover to Adolf Hitler, sort of sits around Bayreuth.
00:04:03.680Like, basically giving interviews, and every time she does, like, all her children are like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, mama talked again, you know?
00:04:10.780Like, these people who just, like, out of sheer shittiness sort of stuck around are a part of the denazification process and part of its failures, frankly.
00:04:19.240Including, of course, Carl Schmitt, who did not die until 1985.
00:04:32.520So yeah, my God, he was just shy of the full Nazi 100.0.78
00:04:37.720But yeah, the number of these people who just lived shockingly long, Ernst Jünger is another case of this, meaning you had to relate to them in some way, right?0.61
00:04:48.080But it's weird that they were not outcast from polite society, especially as Germany in the post-war era, at least in its posture towards the United States, which was where I'm familiar with them, is very conspicuous about their rejection of the Nazi past and their like sense of, you know, atonement, which rings a little insincere when it turns out that you're keeping Carl Schmitt and Lenny Riefenschall around.
00:05:10.920You know what I mean? There's something about the persistence of these figures in polite society, in these elite institutions that undermines the professed disavowal of authoritarian politics.
00:05:26.580And I think that strain of sort of like sublimated, disavowed, but very conspicuously maintained presence of the authoritarian right in Germany is a nice little metaphor for how far right politics have functioned throughout the West most prominently here in, you know, the land of the free, the United States, where we have now had Carl Schmitt come back to like particular prominence.
00:05:55.640Exactly. We'll get into the German case a little bit more in our series, but you're exactly right that there are a couple of things happening. One is, especially initially, the posture of self-castigation on the part of Germany was less than sincere, let's say. I think it developed a certain degree of sincerity as it went along. And as the people doing the apologizing were not the same people who perpetrated the crimes.
00:06:18.960But the other thing that happened is like there was just a lot of time.
00:06:23.700Like Carl Schmitt just kept being there and eventually had to relate to him one way or the other, right?
00:06:28.100Like they had this like persistence and there's something kind of enervating about that.
00:06:32.680And that's something that I think you're right, that we have in the United States have a long history with by now as well,
00:06:39.060where we just were like, well, we let the other stuff slide and we lived with it
00:06:44.200and invite this person to have a faculty position at Harvard or whatever.
00:06:48.280And so now, what leg do we have to stand on to call out these new things, right?
00:06:52.500Like, there's this kind of enormant that goes on to these kind of malignant and malicious thinkers.0.53
00:06:59.160And I think Schmitt's post-war persistence in Germany is a good indicator of that.
00:07:03.080And his renaissance in places like Silicon Valley is another.
00:07:07.240But yeah, let's talk a little bit about this guy.
00:07:12.020Okay, so Carl Schmitt is somebody who started getting mentioned by people like two or three degrees smarter than me around five or six years ago, right?
00:07:24.800Like when Trumpism as sort of a political tendency in the United States stopped being characterized by this like a shell shock of its ascent, like it was in 2016 and 2017, and began to be understood as something that had, you know, distinct roots in the global far right.
00:07:45.980One of the names that came up as, you know, an intellectual progenitor of Trumpism among American intellectuals was Carl Schmitt.
00:07:53.560So Carl Schmitt was a German political theorist. As I understand it, he was like exactly Hitler's age. They were like the same generation, right?0.93
00:08:01.940And he's best known as like the political philosopher of Nazism, the guy who gave the intellectual scaffolding, such as it was, to the Nazi project.
00:08:12.240And yeah, in the U.S., he's been especially influential for like two little, you know, catchphrases that always come up that alert me to the fact that somebody is referencing Carl Schmitt are one, the state of exception, which is a doctrine he articulated regarding basically who gets to decide when the rules apply and when they don't.
00:08:30.060And the friend-enemy distinction, the sense of the prerogative of the state as defining in-groups and out-groups and applying different standards to each.
00:08:41.080That's kind of what I know about Carl Schmitt, which is, you know, not that much.
00:08:45.960No, I mean, but you're already getting at some of his core ideas and you're getting also at the way those ideas are transmitted.
00:08:52.540It's not an accident that you have these kind of, as you say, these little slogans, right?
00:08:56.560The state of exception, the friend-enemy distinction.
00:08:58.680If you pick up a book of Schmitz, you're going to be shocked by how short they are.
00:09:03.520He specialized after his very early kind of more technical judicial work in these books that are like 60 to 65 pages, basically, maybe 100 if he was feeling frisky, and that carry that brevity into the prose itself.
00:09:20.620It's like these sentences that are like sort of chiseled in marble.
00:10:40.560Likewise, the state of exception is, of course, a thing that is fairly malleable and can be put to many ends,
00:10:46.600even though Schmidt had a very specific way in which he intended it.
00:10:50.200Yeah, but so let's delve into him a little bit.
00:10:52.480And this is going to be a tricky biography.
00:10:54.380Unlike in the case of Nietzsche, our other kind of German right-wing freak that we've spent a lot of time with over the course of this podcast, it's not clear how the life and the thought relate, although I think you'll have some theories as to how it does.
00:11:09.840Schmittians as a whole, I think, sort of tend to just kind of bracket his life and think like the work should live by itself.
00:11:16.420Is he one of these guys where, you know, you can try to read the biography for evidence of, you know, the experiences that suggested certain theories?
00:11:25.120Or has he just sort of, you know, was it Flaubert?
00:11:27.540He's like be provincial and bourgeois and conventional in your habits so that you can be wild in your thought.
00:11:32.580Was his biography just not very interesting?
00:11:34.540There is a little bit of both of that.
00:11:35.900There is a compensatory element and some of it has a gender dimension.
00:11:40.100And there's some of just a reflective element, right?
00:11:42.700So he's born in 1888, as you mentioned, in Plettenberg, that's in the Sauerland, that's in North Rhine-Westphalia, into a Catholic family.
00:12:07.460Yeah, for reasons that we have to get into.
00:12:09.560It's significant to be born in Germany in 1888 and be a Catholic, simply put, especially if you're someone who's thinking about sovereignty.
00:12:16.420Am I correct? My German history is very sketchy here, but I understand Otto von Bismarck, who would have been coming up and trying to unify Germany from Prussia in the decades before Schmidt was born, to have had like real beef with the Catholic Church.
00:12:34.540Yeah, this is the famous Kulturkampf, right? The culture war that we talked about in one of our 1933 episodes. I think this is a July episode because of the Concordat. And you're exactly right. Like the Catholic Church was understood by Bismarck as a obstacle to the new German Reich's sovereignty.
00:12:53.500Like, there are people here who have executive authority, right?
00:12:59.280It's not so much like, oh, we're worried that Catholics are going to, like, fight for the enemy in a war.
00:13:05.200This is a rival institution that's creating its own laws and has its own hierarchies and its own forces of, I don't know, like, money collection, accountability.
00:13:26.800It's weird to have another parallel state-like institution alongside you.
00:13:31.940But also, am I reading Bismarck wrong if I think, like, my impression of this guy is like, oh, he wanted a modern, like, post-Enlightenment state with a concept of, like, natural rights and sort of, like, laws guided by rationality, which is sort of in competition with the Catholic vision of authority in which it's, you know, hierarchical and all guided by revelation.
00:13:54.740I mean, Bismarck was a big aristocrat and liked the fact that aristocrats counted for more, right? So like he's not an egalitarian, but it's true. He framed it whether or not out of expediency because of who his political allies were or whether out of conviction as a modernization effort.
00:14:12.400He said, like, look, we're trying to forge a modern nation with a solitary monarch and a central governing body out of this weird patchwork of principalities.
00:14:24.780Seems to me like having someone in Rome who can appoint pretty high ranking people in our polity that don't have to be approved by us.
00:14:35.240That feels like we're giving off, we're ceding sovereignty and we're kind of damaging our own statehood, right?
00:14:40.780with ceding territory and ceding, you know, being a proper nation.
00:14:45.560Of course, in the Germany after 1871, that was tied up in very uncomfortable ways
00:14:50.500with questions of culture and language and ethnicity, right?
00:15:22.900So all of this is to say that Carl Schmitt is born to a Catholic family in like the decade or so after Bismarck has just had this massive confrontation with the Catholic Church
00:15:34.400Over the question, basically, of who's in charge, of what the state is, of where, like, state authority comes from.
00:16:41.680And then eventually he gets shit-canned by the, well, not the next emperor, but the emperor after that, after the famous year of three emperors, which I think is, in fact, the year Carl Schmitt's born, 1888, right?0.99
00:16:51.700William I dies, Wilhelm I, then Friedrich Wilhelm, his son, takes over, dies immediately,0.50
00:16:57.720and Wilhelm II, right, the guy who's going to start World War I, becomes the boss and
00:17:06.520And so, yeah, this is sort of the background to Schmidt's Catholicism.
00:17:11.840For him, the question of political Catholicism would have been still quite alive.
00:17:15.880Like, I was struck in researching Project 1933, this, how much, like, you know, there are these historical events that people just kind of metabolize, and they're like, cool, that happened, and then they move on, right?
00:17:26.940Like, people are like, oh, shit, that was only 10 years ago, huh?0.61
00:17:45.880Nice. We're just losing Patreon subscribers by the droves now.
00:17:51.820Well, no, but like, you're right. There are some things that people don't understand as changing their worlds that much, or people sort of take in stride, even if it looks from the perspective of a historian, very significant. It's not psychically significant. And then there are things that are profoundly psychically significant, and it's not always reliable which event is going to fall into which category.
00:18:14.080Yeah. And the answer I came to in my 1933 book really was the reason the Kulturkampf proved so enduring was that it like this was an age of nationalism to be a citizen, to be a German was like a big deal. And so the question is like, well, what the fuck does that mean? It's going to be kind of central. Society is going to force it on you again and again.
00:18:32.900And Catholic Germans sort of like understood that connection to be a problem, not one that was unsolvable.0.85
00:18:39.060People found a million different ways of solving it, but they understood it as something like, okay, this is a job I have to do.
00:18:44.920Like, this is an equation I have to solve for myself.
00:18:48.360And this is the context in which Carl Schmitt comes up.
00:18:51.840There's not one kind of Catholic mentality in Germany, but like there is a, you know, to purloin a famous phrase,
00:18:57.260like he knows what it feels like to be a problem, right, for his nationalism to be a problem.
00:19:02.640And in fact, his family, though he himself, I don't think it was ever,
00:19:06.100is very active in the Center Party, which comes out of the Kulturkampf
00:19:08.660as a kind of like a representation of...
00:20:04.500So the center party was sort of trying to guard a safe space for Catholicism in this, like, increasingly integrated national state.
00:20:11.280And even though that national state sort of was implicitly anti-Catholic, even though that abated, obviously, after the Kulturkampf ended, but that's the memory they still have.
00:20:20.040Like, oh, they see us as a problem, and maybe we indeed are.
00:20:23.340And so the big enemy for the center party is the national liberals who entered into this pact with Bismarck.
00:20:29.160And Schmitt, I think, I suspect, retained from his youth a sense of both the contradictions of liberalism, right?
00:20:36.340That it's on the one hand about this kind of forceless force, if you will, of rationalization.
00:20:42.980Like it just makes sense to do it this way, right?
00:20:45.120Like the fact that that actually tends to be a power play and that it contains quite a bit of violence.
00:20:49.940So both the fact that there's a contradiction to it and that there's force inherent in it.
00:20:53.640So I think that like his hatred for a particular kind of liberalism is about these two things,
00:20:58.700like it's inconsistent or ducks the real issues.
00:21:02.500The second point, it doesn't interrogate its own contradictions.
00:21:05.200It thinks it's perfectly logical and consistent when in fact it has these glaring inner contradictions.
00:21:12.320And the third is it acts like there's no force involved, but actually, oh, wait, there's tons of it.
00:23:05.160But yeah, and it's sort of trying to sort of keep apart and stay aside from it, right?
00:23:10.540I think that's where the edgelordy element in his prose comes from.
00:23:14.720I often think that he's looking to upset sort of his colleagues, his social set, his class, but he also very clearly craved their conventional acceptance.0.99
00:23:25.040He's not Nietzsche, who's just like, I'm talking to a horse here, guys, just fuck off for a moment, right?0.94
00:23:30.060Like, yeah, he is someone who seems quite dependent on recognition and on being liked by others and being treated as what he thinks he's worth.0.97
00:23:40.920I should mention that Schmidt kept copious, copious diaries throughout his life, many of which are in the archives.
00:23:46.680But I must admit that I didn't look at many of them because a lot of them are not accessible.
00:23:50.780Luckily for me, in particular, his diaries around 1933 are, we have large parts of them.
00:23:56.940And just the sheer number of like petty enmities that man was able to sustain.
00:24:07.800But he's just like, on the day Hitler becomes chancellor, he's like in this beef with Ludwig Kass, the head of the center party.
00:24:14.080And he's like really worried that Kass's call out is going to like damage his credibility.0.53
00:24:19.180Kass is about to completely get ground up by the Nazi accession to power.0.55
00:24:22.600Like, why are you worried about this?0.60
00:24:24.040But like, he's just constantly in these beefs with people, which like, given the kind of polemical books he writes, like, he's gonna be, right?
00:24:32.380This isn't like someone that was like, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to like here.0.99
00:24:34.900He's always like, Jesus Christ, fuck you, Carl, right?1.00
00:24:42.980And so he's just always unsure of his position, always worried he's getting passed over.
00:24:47.900And it is, in fact, also what I think he'll base his sort of post-war narrative about his eventual dissidence from the Nazi state on, right?
00:24:57.820That he can't be a team player with the Nazis either, thinks he's being passed over, thinks people are intriguing against him, et cetera, et cetera.
00:26:12.260This is what I'm imagining Pavla Dorotek is doing.0.97
00:26:16.880She's just Bugs Bunny in a dress, seduces Carl Schmitt.
00:26:20.720There's very little we know about this.
00:26:22.960And I think his biographers sort of try to not dwell on it because it feels like—
00:26:27.380It's so embarrassing because it's so very embarrassing.
00:26:30.180It's super embarrassing and because you feel like you're being handed a key, right?
00:26:36.520And you're like, oh, does this explain all of Schmidt?
00:26:38.980And you're like, oh, but I don't want to be that guy.
00:26:41.940Well, I mean, this is the kind of thing that would make you think, all right, this guy is going to be very resentful against women, right?0.82
00:26:50.360He's got this humiliation of being swindled by Bugs Bunny in a dress, and he probably feels very stupid, and this is probably a great blow to his ego and to the sense that, you know, his sexual impulse overrode his intellect, and this was a slip for which he must make up with maximalist ongoing discipline.0.88
00:27:11.680Like, I can do the psychoanalytic reading of Bugs Bunny in a dress, like, fooling Elmer Fudd and what that would promote Elmer Fudd to do.
00:27:18.920But, like, what I understand of Carl Schmitt is that his treatment of gender is kind of, like, absent from the actual work, right?
00:27:32.820You know, 2 a.m., thousand-word tweets on X about, you know, women's subordinate and, like, morally corrupt nature.
00:27:42.220But that's not really what Carl Schmitt does.
00:27:43.980If he's wounded and driven to misogyny by this experience where he, like, gets married to the swindler and then I assume gets divorced very quickly or annulled very quickly, it doesn't show up in the work.
00:27:56.260Which is all the more remarkable because it did not get annulled very quickly.
00:28:45.660So in that regard, it's absolutely shocking in some way that gender and sexuality are, as you say, kind of absent from this work, but in a kind of pointed way, right?
00:28:54.840There's a kind of abstraction here that I think itself is a gendered move.
00:28:58.900The remove from the messiness of gendered embodied life seems to be a form of asserting control over it, right?
00:29:06.880I mean, a lot of male political figures, even in our own generation, treat private life, family life, sexual difference, the role of women as sort of like beneath their notice, right?0.80
00:29:22.340There's an averting of the gaze that at times can seem kind of conspicuous to me.
00:29:26.520Some of these guys, like, clearly it doesn't occur to them to think of gender as a political category or a political process.
00:29:31.920But some guys seem like they are turning up their nose and looking in the opposite direction.
00:29:38.660Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be very careful in psychoanalyzing Carl Schmitt here because I think there are others who've done it better.
00:29:43.660But to me, I kind of think about the fact that, like, this experience of these 10 years in this bizarre marriage must have been twofold, right?
00:29:51.500On the one hand, it's a feeling of being out of control.
00:29:53.660And so then his books are all about sovereignty, about being able to decide the state of exception.
00:29:59.240On the other hand, of course, it's also a lesson in the limited sovereignty of the German state, right?
00:30:04.080Like, Carl Schmitt, I think, was a practicing and believing Catholic.0.57
00:30:07.800And the Catholic Church is like, that's nice, buddy, but our laws say you can't come in.
00:33:21.540There's a kind of, the hardness, the crystalline hardness is a gendered affect to some extent.0.70
00:33:27.180At least it's hard to look at the mess of his actual life and not be like, yes, like, to get back to your earlier question,0.52
00:33:33.340like, you're a different man when you're sitting at your typewriter.
00:33:36.800Right. Yeah. A cleaner, more unremitting, more ordered man and biology than you experience yourself to be. Right.
00:33:45.520So am I right that during this period in his 20s and 30s, when he's in this marriage to the scammer, trying to extricate himself from it, but perhaps not trying very hard, going to prostitutes a lot, is this when he's doing his most influential writing? What is he writing during that time?
00:34:01.540So, I mean, he will produce books that are read until today, until I would say the 50s and 60s, but Leitschmidt is sort of, like, that's for the freaks, it's for the real ones, and you don't want to meet the real ones.
00:34:13.360Or for, like, Jacques Derrida to kind of do an interesting deconstruction of, but, like, the stuff that people have encountered in political philosophy seminar comes from this time, you're right.
00:34:22.140He has a professorship in Greifswald in northeastern Germany, 1921, and publishes his first major work, which is on dictatorship.
00:34:30.500He'd written books before, but those were longer,
00:34:32.860and those were mostly, I think, adaptations of his dissertation,
00:34:37.660his second dissertation, which you have to do in Germany, right?
00:35:53.720Yeah. So he's like, I'm snappy and my declarative snappiness, which has very little room for what I would call self-delusion and what other people would call nuance, is part of my swaggering persona. Is that what's going on?
00:36:09.400Exactly. And I mean, at the same time, it's also a kind of bold truth telling over and against the realities of the state around him, right? Like this is kind of a fundamental opposition to the Weimar Republic, right? The Weimar Republic, remember, in 1921 is two years old. The blood is barely dry on all the Soviet republics they had to put down in order to establish it, right?
00:36:32.200Like, it's a troubled construction in 1921 to begin with.
00:36:36.220And this book, two years out from the foundation, 12 years out from the Third Reich, the idea is that, like, well, actually the resources for dictatorship are found within liberal democracy itself, right?
00:36:50.340There's a critique that is made of the U.S. Constitution quite frequently, too.
00:36:53.620It's like, here's a constitutional way to establish a, like, personalist dictatorship is something—that's a game that people are playing at the Heritage Foundation.
00:38:44.880He's like, they clearly wrote so much because this to them is tricky.
00:38:49.020They're wrestling with an important and interesting constitutional problem.
00:38:52.020And I think that even liberal or left-wing jurists at the time would have agreed with him on that and be like, yeah, no, we wanted to have more words rather than less on this one.
00:39:16.840All right, so let's read this article.
00:39:19.040If a state fails to fulfill, so what they mean is a federal state, fails to fulfill the obligations incumbent upon it under the Constitution of the Reich or the laws of the Reich, the president of the Reich may compel it to do so with the aid of the armed forces, right?
00:39:33.060So that would be a supremacy clause, very much like in the United States, right?
00:39:36.880Like if the, like it's sending in the National Guard to Arkansas to integrate, right?
00:39:42.240But like if the state, is he talking, are they talking about like the legislature?
00:40:50.980When a party that said we want to do away with the republic took over individual states, that was not a reason to go in with the army.
00:40:58.900But when the Prussian government was one he didn't like, he did go in, advised by none other than Carl Schmitt.
00:41:07.300So the president has this power. We've established it in practice. It was used very selectively. Then what else does this article say?
00:41:15.040If public safety and order in the German Reich are seriously disturbed or endangered, the president of the Reich may take the measures necessary for the restoration intervening with the aid of the armed forces if required.
00:41:24.360For this purpose, he may temporarily suspend in whole or in part the fundamental rights established in Articles 114.
00:41:30.380So there's certain rights that can be suspended under certain circumstances for the purpose of establishing public order.
00:41:39.040This is written, obviously, under the impression of what was called the German Revolution of like 1918, 1919, where there really were street fights going on.
00:41:46.760And it is what Hindenburg will use in the two decrees on February 4th, I think, and then the Reistach decree after the Reistach burns in late February.
00:41:56.860And that's fully within his authority.
00:41:59.060But that is indeed how people ended up in jail for articles they had written, you know.
00:42:05.700You have all these rights, but I can suspend them if I decree that there's a sufficient emergency.
00:42:11.320Yeah. Note, however, and this is very important for Schmitt's reasoning here too, he may temporarily suspend in whole or in part. And that is sort of the question that Schmitt's grappling with. Like, okay, so the sovereign is he who decides the state of exception. How do you limit the ability to do that if the sovereign can just be like, well, no, sorry, we're still having a state of exception, right?
00:42:32.140What if it's just a permanent exception? And then it's not an exception. It is, in fact, a new rule. And the rule is simply force without bounding limitations of a constitutional law. Yeah, exactly. And this is the kind of thing that he's interested in. He's like, dictatorship is always conceived of as being temporary. And in fact, so Schmidt until right around 1933 will also conceive it that way. Be like, there has to be some kind of mechanism that makes this temporary. But of course, it's very tricky.
00:43:01.160Like, by what authority do you then tell the dictator to stop being a dictator, right?
00:43:06.240Like, moral suasion, but that's not something you can legislate.
00:43:09.700It's not something you can put in a constitution.
00:43:36.700So he's right that there's an interesting problem here.
00:43:39.300But this becomes, and this is very key for Schmidt, he uses these kind of limit cases where, you know, a liberal constitutionalist would say like, well, yeah, like every constitution pushes towards those limits, right?
00:43:50.500What happens if the American people were to amend the constitution in ways that violated the constitution?
00:43:55.980Like, yes, that sets up a really interesting problem, but those are limit cases, right?
00:44:00.320Like, a lot would have to happen for that to be the case.
00:44:03.100And Schmitt says, well, from that limit case, we should examine what the whole is, right?
00:44:06.740That sort of throws a light back on the functioning of what a constitution is in general.
00:44:11.940And that's where I think a lot of his antipodes or his interlocutors and critics in the 20s are like, well, that's just wrong.
00:44:19.140The functioning of a good constitution is that it doesn't come to that, right?
00:44:22.060Like, yes, we can all engage in weird science fiction.
00:44:24.440Like Schmitt will later say this is a form of kind of a question of like divine law or basically sovereignty is akin to the miracle, right?
00:44:32.640Like you suspend the laws of nature in the miracle the same way the sovereign can suspend the normal laws for which he stands in himself.
00:44:41.600But they're like, look, that's like doing physics based on, you know, Jesus multiplying the bread, right?
00:44:48.120It's not super informative, but for Schmidt, his obsession is to read from that limit case back into the regular functioning of jurisprudence and of the administrative state.
00:45:00.480So the next paragraph of the article says,
00:45:02.940The president of the Reich must immediately inform the Reichstag of all measures taken pursuant to paragraph one or paragraph two of this article.
00:45:09.620The measures must be revoked upon the demand of the Reichstag.
00:45:36.260I would have to look up whether the Reichswehr in 1920, in 1919 when this was written, was, the American president is a commander-in-chief.
00:45:45.240I'm not sure that the Reichspräsident was.
00:45:48.820So that's an important distinction, right?
00:45:50.940Like American soldiers, they swore an oath to the Constitution.
00:45:54.240I do not think that a general would have regarded the president as uniquely the commander-in-chief.
00:46:00.760That's a more, it's an American distinction.0.88
00:46:03.560It's something that Hitler will once again recreate, but I think he's resurrecting an old Prussian model where the Prussian king was in fact the commander-in-chief.0.90
00:48:03.640And hopefully it ends up with you on the Place de la Concorde, you know, getting your head chopped off or whatever, right?
00:48:09.360But there is a kind of, there's a moral force to being like, to be clear, you do not get to do this under the Constitution, even if, as Andrew Jackson put it, you know, you can't do anything to enforce it, right?
00:48:21.380So this is the big red button in the middle of the Reichstag Constitution of 1919 that allows the sort of constitutional Republican form of government to be sort of like unzipped.
00:49:23.680Once pushed to the brink, this republic will, which it inevitably will, he thinks, that's what politics is,
00:49:31.780you will end up in a situation where the president will become way more powerful than the individual states, than the parliament, etc., etc.
00:49:41.860So this is where you get to the kind of thinking that leads to his question of who is the sovereign, really.
00:49:49.780But of course, the other reason this is so ominous, as we pointed out, is that this is what would furnish the basis for first for the presidential cabinets of 1930 to 1933.
00:49:58.340So where basically there were no more viable majorities in the Reichstag.
00:50:03.640And so Hindenburg just started appointing people and said, like, I think Article 48 allows me to do this.
00:50:09.000So it would furnish the basis for von Hindenburg naming a series of, like, right-wing freaks as heads of government, culminating, you know, of course, in the ultimate right-wing freak, Adolf Hitler.
00:50:19.340It would then form the basis for these decrees of, you know, February 4th and February 28th, 1933, which basically destroyed the Weimar Republic.
00:50:28.980In all of this, he is assisted by Carl Schmitt, and we'll meet him again there, where he's just like, you know, what is that, sicko's memes, like, ha-ha, yes, ha-ha, the entire time.
00:50:38.080In fact, when the Prussian government, which had been put out to pasture by Hindenburg in 1932 in July, sued before the Supreme Court of Germany and said, like, look, on what basis?
00:50:50.400This is meant in the case of a huge communist uprising, like, some thugs got into a firefight.
00:51:05.940So, yeah, it's hard to imagine that like this guy who's like, oh, there's this interesting red button in the middle of the Weimar Constitution, did not have this in mind, you know, 12 years before or 11 years before he basically uses it to blow up the republic.
00:51:19.520So in 1922, he writes his next important book, though it's originally just, I think, an article.
00:51:24.560It's called Political Theology, which is a phrase that I think he sort of brings into currency.
00:51:29.900I think it had been around before, but he sort of brings it back into fashion.
00:51:33.480And it's worth dwelling on that title because in some way it contains already in Nuche kind of a argument, right?
00:51:41.220Yeah. What does it mean for politics to have a theology?
00:51:44.020Like that implies that there's a religious element.
00:54:36.780Because you could just say, yes, the sovereignty of the American people as expressed through the U.S. Constitution is, right, like the American people get to decide in some way.
00:54:45.920Like, well, in this case, we're not going to apply the Constitution or something like that, or we're going to change the Constitution, right?
00:54:51.640Like, that doesn't seem to be what he's thinking.
00:54:55.200He seems to think that there is a person, right?
00:54:57.800Like, it's not sovereignty expressed in shifting institutions or distributed among various political carriers of popular will.
00:55:05.300He is basically trying to say this is some kind of dictator or some kind of king.
00:55:10.540And the whole theological argument we'll get to in a second is that only makes sense if we assume that sovereignty is kind of kingly, right?
00:55:19.140That it's not, this cannot be distributed.
00:55:21.200He will later say that the liberal state represses this question, right?
00:55:25.580So he's not saying, oh, it solves the question in a very elegant way by dispersing popular sovereignty, right?
00:55:30.720Which would be something that I think a lot of constitutional scholars in our day would say.
00:55:35.020He's saying, no, it represses the question.
00:55:36.960Like someone has to be in charge here.
00:55:38.400That someone has to be someone particular, it seems.1.00
00:55:40.540This might be a stupid question. And like, if it is, forgive me. But where does Schmidt think that like sovereignty or maybe what I really mean is like legitimacy of sovereignty comes from? Because like in Trumpism, right, the 2024 election is seen as bestowing this kind of like limitless authority on Trump's person.0.98
00:55:58.300because winning the election in 2024 supposedly like confirmed that he was the embodiment of the
00:56:05.360popular will, right? He's like the stand-in for the Volk itself. And, you know, in practice,
00:56:09.540as applied by, you know, Trump and his cronies, this is like a deeply cynical and anti-small-D
00:56:15.620democratic move. But in its form, at least, it does contain this like hat tip to the idea that
00:56:22.140legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, right? Schmidt doesn't really seem to be doing
00:56:27.780that? Is that at play in his idea? Is he thinking of sovereignty or, like, legitimacy of the
00:56:33.640sovereign as coming, like, purely from the capacity to commit violence in, like, a Thomas Hobbes
00:56:38.820style understanding? Or is he, like, thinking in, like, old Europe Catholic terms where sovereignty
00:56:44.600and its legitimacy are, like, bestowed by God? Like, I'm wondering where he thinks this comes
00:56:49.040from. It sounds like the sovereign is just, like, kind of appearing as if, like, you know, springing
00:56:53.860from Zeus's head fully formed a little bit here.
00:56:56.320And I'm wondering how he thinks that like somebody gets to say
00:56:58.940that they're the sovereign and what makes that legitimate or not.
00:57:01.560If I'm recalling correctly, he's not trying to address that
00:57:03.880in this book so much, like in the dictatorship book
00:57:06.340where he's just like, let's talk about what a dictator is.
00:57:08.760It's like, let's talk about what sovereignty is
00:57:35.140He very much seems to be a direct democracy kind of guy,
00:57:39.380but in a way that very much squares with Trumpism.
00:57:42.560He basically dislikes a kind of politics
00:57:45.140that does not directly express the will of the people,
00:57:49.000But that's, of course, something he'll accentuate more and more the more he, like, pushes right-wing freaks, including Adolf Hitler later.
00:57:54.740But the idea there is, like, he dislikes things like unelected judges, you know, who, like, substitute their will for that of the people.
00:58:01.820It's like, if the people think this person is guilty, then, like, it's kind of the job of the Constitution to make sure this person gets put away.
00:58:07.920Laws should express the will of the people in this kind of weird way.
00:58:12.380And he then tends to think of institutions as largely falsifying that will rather than expressing it, right?
00:58:16.720So the parliament is not, in fact, expressive of the people's will, if it governs in a way that normal people sort of wouldn't recognize and wouldn't agree to, it goes right down to things like the secrecy of the ballot.
00:58:28.640He's like, no, it should be really public acclamation, right?
00:58:31.920You know who's the sovereign for the fact that people are like shouting their name or like just raising their right hand eventually, right?
00:58:38.540Like, that is how it's done. Not people having these weird, like, 19th century liberal notions that are totally outdated, he thinks, of like, well, who I vote for in the voting booth, that's my business. And, you know, because he's like, this is just there to thwart the popular will in protection of minorities, Jews, you know, that's what he means.
00:58:59.500But this focus on the legitimacy conveying function of the popular will, I don't know, it sounds almost like magic or superstition a little the way you're describing it.0.98
00:59:09.680And I wonder if that's part of what he means by political theology.
00:59:13.680I'm interested in this argument he says that, like, politics is a little bit religious.
00:59:21.960He thinks, this is the second claim this book is famous for, that all political concepts of modernity are actually just secularized versions of theological concepts, right?
00:59:30.900In this case, the fact that the sovereign can make all laws and can then also put those laws in a bane is, like I said, clearly analogous to the way, you know, God can institute laws and then be like, well, today actually different, you know?
00:59:45.400This is sort of Schmitt's ultimate gotcha, and it's not always entirely clear to me why this is so.
00:59:50.460You could say like, oh, well, there was this conception of sovereignty and people like Boudin or Hobbes, et cetera, et cetera.
00:59:56.060And then modernity takes that idea and kind of, yeah, disperses it and checks and balances.
01:00:01.900And it's like, this is actually a little bit of an overly theological way to think about the state.
01:00:07.780He thinks that actually modernity has repressed the question.
01:00:12.260In talking about the Weimar Constitution, he says this.
01:00:14.560This provision corresponds to the development and practice of the liberal constitutional state, which attempts to repress the question of sovereignty by division and mutual control of competences.
01:00:25.400So rather than throwing concepts like sovereignty on the dust heap of history, their persistence actually shows the fundamental legitimacy of modern political thought, right?
01:00:35.380These are just theologians who fooled themselves about the fact that they're doing theology, that they are in the wrong department, he thinks.
01:00:42.400Wow. Tell me how you really feel, Carl.
01:00:44.560Well, I mean, one way to think about this for true and bad with the right heads is that he's kind of using Nietzsche against himself, right?
01:00:50.960Nietzsche would point out that seemingly modern concepts like truth, you know, facticity, et cetera, et cetera, are war and truth metaphysical ones.
01:00:59.700And in the final analysis, theological ones.
01:01:02.380And since God is dead, as Nietzsche also told us, that makes them sort of superannuated, makes them pointless and unmoored.
01:01:08.740He's like, you're just going to keep nailing a pudding to another pudding, right?
01:01:12.500Like, it's not going to—good luck with that, right?
01:01:20.000These are theological concepts, which suggests that any attempt to secularize them just kind of strips them of their essence and destroys them, right?
01:01:28.380Like, without theology, these concepts are nothing.
01:01:30.660That's how they become pudding, right?
01:01:32.300If you want to have something to stand on, well, you return them to their proper sphere, which is theological.
01:01:38.060This is a move that people love to make of sort of accusing progressive and left-leaning or liberal forces of like, oh, this is just religion.
01:03:38.500Or, for instance, profitable and unprofitable.
01:03:42.000So he's saying really what we're doing when we do aesthetics, when we do politics, when we do economics, is make these fundamental distinctions.
01:03:49.720Is it useful to us or is it useless to us?
01:03:51.900And that's just what it is to live a human and embodied life, right?
01:04:59.420Yeah, the state for Schmitt is, quote, an organized political unit, which as a whole makes the friend-enemy decision for itself.
01:05:06.440Meaning the state has to have enemies, right?
01:05:09.400It has to decide which its enemies are and has to draw that line somewhere.
01:05:15.000Which means for him that the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political, right?
01:05:18.920So meaning the kind of pluralism that the center party stood for, which said, like, look, we may not agree on many things, but we can still be civil to each other within the state.
01:05:30.900Yes, this is Schmidt renouncing the pluralism of the center party of his parents and sort of moving to the logical conclusion of the nationalism in which there's an in-group and an out-group and, you know, there's no space between those camps.
01:05:56.380But a state that pretends to be not political in this sense, not knowing friends and not knowing enemies, is not a state at all.
01:06:04.540It's either lying to itself or it is repressing, as he keeps on saying, right, the true question.
01:06:10.440He doesn't have a particular picture of society that subtends this, right?
01:06:13.660And we may leave aside, he says, the question of what the state is in its essence, a machine or an organism, a person or an institution, a society or a community, an enterprise or a beehive, or perhaps even a fundamental procedural series, which would be kind of what a liberal constitution would aspire to.
01:06:28.000But he says, look, in its function, it is political.
01:06:31.000And the political function is to determine who is friend and who is enemy.
01:06:35.940And so that gets us to the part of Schmitt's life where he destroys the Weimar Republic.
01:06:40.160Like, yeah, Schmitz talk about liberal constitution, repressing true politics and so on.0.68
01:06:46.320I'm not, like, shocked that he becomes a fan of the Nazis, you know?
01:06:49.860Yeah, well, I mean, initially he's not.
01:06:51.960Initially he becomes a fan of Kurt von Schleicher, the general and right-wing politician that Hindenburg put in charge in, I think, 1931 and then again in 1932.
01:07:09.420And on the one hand, Schmidt has created this very carefully reasoned and very fundamental critique of the Weimar Constitution, of how to undo it, or how to put it on what he thinks is proper footing, which is accentuating the role of the sovereign.
01:07:26.160But there's also just like a kind of, he wants to tear it all down.
01:07:29.220There's a kind of impatience with the liberal state and what he considers is like endless prevarications.
01:07:35.340He's by now working in the government.
01:07:36.920He's in the Ministry of Justice, sort of trying to figure out how to do these various right-wing creeps bidding.
01:07:43.460But as he puts it, you know, the liberal states, nature is negotiation.
01:07:47.200Hesitant half-measure born of the hope that the definitive confrontation, the bloody decisive battle, might yet be transformed into a parliamentary debate and indefinitely deferred through endless discussion, right?
01:08:02.260He is yearning for the moment when the talk ceases, right?
01:08:05.480And yeah, he was increasingly isolated within German legal academia, but he's close to these right wingers who also don't like the Weimar Republic one bit and think that Schmidt is the guy who can help them justify various versions of a return to sovereignty.
01:08:21.580And this is where the abstraction of Schmitt's concept of sovereignty is so important because a lot of these people clearly thought, oh, we're going to bring back a Kaiser, right?
01:08:31.680And then other people thought like, oh, we're going to bring back a kind of like strong authoritarian parliamentarism, right?
01:08:37.820What we would think of as sort of a soft authoritarianism, right?
01:08:40.700And Carl Schmitt holding a lit stick of dynamite behind his back goes, sure, yeah, that all sounds fine.
01:08:47.000Well, I think he may have been fine with any of these options, right?
01:08:51.100And so he's just like, cool, yeah, I like your version, too, because his main beef is with parliamentary democracy.
01:08:56.880And then basically by the time Hitler comes to power, Schmitt's actually quite concerned for himself.0.98
01:09:01.600He's like, oh, fuck, I think I bet on the wrong horse.0.99
01:09:41.820and really doesn't have a future in legal academia.
01:09:44.320Yeah, really, his future is in this German state, which is rapidly transforming around him.
01:09:50.000And this reminds me a little bit of some like never Trump Republicans who had to switch, right?
01:09:54.040Like these guys were like, well, I don't want a pluralist democracy, but I don't know about this as a solution when Trump comes to power.
01:10:01.100Was there something similar in Schmidt's like initial, I don't know, disquiet with the rise of Hitler where he's like, well, clearly the Weimar model wasn't working.
01:10:12.900I am really hostile to parliamentary democracy in the first place,
01:10:17.060something about this guy doesn't seem like it's going to work?
01:10:19.900Or is he just like, oh, I haven't cuddled up to this guy yet,
01:10:22.040and this is the guy who wound up winning in the post-Weimar struggle?
01:10:24.920So we'll see in the next episode how exactly he does this.
01:10:28.120It takes him about two months to get from point A to point B.
01:10:31.720He's definitely leery on January 30th when Hitler comes to power,
01:10:36.280although there are these notes in his diary,
01:11:34.560it doesn't take a whole lot of readjustment, right?0.99
01:11:37.320And given that, like, a lot of the Nazi lawyers he's dealing with are complete fucking idiots, like, it's easy for him to retcon, like, oh, I meant this all along, even though probably not.0.99
01:11:46.820So, yeah, this is where we leave Carl Schmitt in 1933.0.99
01:11:51.840Those whom the gods wish to punish, they fulfill their wishes.
01:11:54.540Like, here he is getting his most fervent wish.
01:11:56.960The endless talk of Weimar democracy is over.
01:12:00.280And he is sort of sitting between the chairs.0.99
01:12:03.540And he reacts to it with the moral forthrightness and non-groveling strength of character that we've come to expect from this absolute fucking dweeb.
01:12:14.300But yeah, maybe in closing, let me point to two or three aspects of Schmidt's over that I think have made him so enduring, just so that we don't defer that to the final episode of this.0.84
01:12:23.300Schmidt is not a straightforward thinker of the divine right of kings.0.95
01:12:26.580You could go to Hobbes or whatever and get the uncut shit, right?0.94
01:12:31.080Like, he's a critic of liberal democracy and a guide on how to unearth something harder, something less egalitarian, something more hierarchical from inside of liberal democratic constitutions and institutions.0.96
01:12:42.940And that is something that you could describe as the Trumpist project, too.
01:12:46.160This is something that our right-wingers like.0.99
01:12:48.240They want to unearth the brutal, the ass-kicking core underneath that namby-pamby.0.99
01:12:54.980Like, it's, you know, the endless negotiation that defers the decisive bloody battle, right?
01:13:01.120He's also committed, we mentioned this, to a different sense of democracy, right?
01:13:05.240This is a democracy of direct acclamation.
01:13:08.360And we get a lot of that in U.S. politics, right?
01:13:10.460I already mentioned that conservatives often complain, now less so than before, but they used to complain about unelected judges, right?
01:13:16.340Like, and the idea, like, that a judge maybe shouldn't be elected and that a judge should tell people, like, look, I know you hate this guy.
01:13:22.220I don't think this evidence is sufficient.
01:13:25.560Or, like, you know, unelected bureaucrats.
01:13:27.220I mean, we just saw Dr. Fauci getting, you know, yelled at by Rand Paul.
01:13:30.920Like, this is the kind of democracy that Schmidt is in defense of, right?
01:13:35.460The kind of democracy that's just senators showboating for their constituencies, that's just, you know, if it feels wrong to the people at large, it should be punished.
01:13:46.320Like, if it feels wrong to an average person on the street, it should be punished as a crime.0.99
01:13:50.720If it's not on the books, fuck it, come up with one, right?0.98
01:13:53.920That's the sense of democracy that Schmidt gives us.0.99
01:13:55.920And it's one that, frankly, our right wing has embraced on theological grounds very frequently for the last 40 years.
01:14:01.440Like, you don't have to go to Trump for this.
01:14:02.560This is something that, like, Rick Santorum did, that, like, Newt Gingrich did, right?
01:14:05.820We often call it populism, but it really isn't that.
01:14:35.320And with Trump, too, like a direct link between an almost godlike ruler,
01:14:39.880you know, the demented god, emperor of the Warhammer 40k universe,
01:14:43.740and the grunt in the space marines, right?
01:14:46.460Like, there is an idea of, like, you don't need a namby-pamby press or parliament or judges or Justice Department or USAID to negotiate between these two.
01:14:58.960Like, actually, the very top and the very bottom feel the same.
01:15:02.000And when they feel the same, they have this kind of tribunal power.
01:15:04.920And that is something that our tech overall is like.
01:15:07.040And that is something that you can find everywhere in Schmidt.
01:15:08.960It's clearly the picture that that's when his heart starts beating faster, too.0.51
01:15:12.540And these guys, you know, they're not the best readers, but they do sense that, that like this is when Carl Schmitt, you know, that gets him much more hot and bothered than any of his prostitutes, frankly.
01:15:25.900Yeah, I'm excited to dig in a little further and find out about Schmitt's cameos during the Third Reich.0.65
01:15:32.940And as always, I am so grateful that I get to tackle these freaks with you, Adrian, the greatest guide to this world that I can imagine.0.88
01:15:42.920I'm not sure if you're flattered by that.
01:15:45.180I'm also not sure if I'm the greatest guide to Carl Schmitt, but I'm having fun with him.
01:15:49.480And it's someone I've been thinking about a lot over the last year for various reasons.
01:15:53.540A quick reminder that if you want to hear more about him, you can buy my book, What Tech Calls Governing Now, out wherever books are sold.
01:16:02.940You can also pre-order Project 1933, in which, again, like a lot of the stuff that comes up in the next episode will feature quite prominently.
01:16:10.680He is one of those guides through the year that emerged for me after we recorded the podcast and as I was sort of turning it into the book.
01:16:18.060And finally, don't forget that we are having a live show in San Francisco on August 27th.
01:16:24.300Yeah, it's a guide to how to become a Silicon Valley creep.
01:16:29.760We're going to look at the influence of people like Carl Schmitt.
01:16:33.080We're going to look at the influence of apartheid South Africa, about pro-Natalism, about sort of misreadings of various science fiction franchises,
01:16:42.460and the concepts of masculinity and masculine power that is shaping some of the richest and fanciest people running the country right now.
01:16:51.440Yeah, and we're going to do some nootropics, obviously, on stage.
01:16:55.280Nice. Well, we'll see you next time on In Bed With The Right.