Fake Friends: The Friend-Enemy Distinction in a Deracinated Mass Society

We live in a mass society where people have been shorn of their connections to each other and to the past, even to themselves in favour of absolute personal autonomy. What is friend in this context?

68. Fake Friends: The Friend-Enemy Distinction in a Deracinated Mass Society

One of those ideas that gets thrown around a lot these days very loosely and freely is Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt had a very specific idea in mind when he introduced this concept, which is quite powerful if properly understood and applied. Unfortunately, the idea is very catchy and simple in its formulation, such that it easily gets domesticated, misapplied and overused. The danger is that it is emptied of its power to incisively understand the current situation and what must be done in response.

Of the two words “friend” and “enemy,” the more challenging of the two for us to wrap our heads around in the North American context is that of “friend.” Until you understand properly who your friends are, you cannot properly identify the enemy and the threat he represents. Nor can you properly understand the role that the state should play in the life of a people. Part of what Schmitt is doing in The Concept of the Political is challenging liberal conceptions of how a state is formed and when it is properly constituted. A big question that Schmitt grapples with across multiple books, through differing lines of reasoning, is the legitimacy of modern liberal forms of government. What are the conditions by which a government can make a claim to legitimacy? One of those foundational conditions is the relationship of the governing institutions to the people and the role those institutions play in the life of the people on their behalf.

“The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”

The state and its institutions, properly constituted, emerge out of this reality which Schmitt calls “the political.” You cannot rightly understand the role and purpose of your governing institutions, the state, unless you understand this state of being that Schmitt labels as “the political.” But what is “the political”? Much of the power of this concept flows out of properly understanding these twin ideas of “friend” and “enemy.” One of things that we should try to avoid doing, a pitfall many fall into when discussing this important set of ideas in Schmitt’s writing, is to attempt to merely use the labels to classify the realities we see in our context instead of using them to challenge our thinking about the very foundations of how we are governed. The idea of a “friend” is a very specific notion. The idea and role of “the state” is built on “the political” which flows out of the friend-enemy distinction. His argument is that if your governing institutions are built on another foundation, they lack proper legitimacy. Or, worse, they might not be an actual “state” at all. They may be an “anti-state.” This was Schmitt’s assessment of the United States, that its governing institutions are not in fact a properly constituted “state.” Much of our current troubles are downstream from this reality.

To understand this, we must begin with the “friend.” “Who is friend?”, is the decisive question for understanding “Who is enemy?” A friend is someone with whom you have an existential bond. You are family, a tribe, a people. You share a communal bond that transcends mere practicality, proximity or utility. Economic and transactional relationships do not forge you into a people. Friends have something larger than themselves that grounds the existence of themselves as a people. There is a shared culture. There is likely a shared religious devotion. There are probably family, tribal or ethnic ties. They are bound to a particular place, the land shaping the character of who they are. They understand implicitly in their collective memory of a people all the rules and mechanisms for resolving disputes. This is not an ideological project. You do not have to like all of those who are friend. Your bond to them is unchosen. If you were not born into the group, there was likely some forging experience that fashioned you into a people. It is not something complicated. It is something that you can hold in your hand, and is entirely intuitive. These are a people, like them, love them or despise them, you would not think twice about dying for them or killing for them.

“To the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat.”

There is a profound sense of “us” and “them.” For Schmitt, this grouping, this collective, is the foundation of “the political.” The individual is not the foundational political unit. This does not mean that the person is lost or subsumed within the people and loses the protection of law; rather, it is at the level of “the people” that the concept of the political gains its force. The decisive reality is that the state emerges out of the people’s struggle for survival and well being. Everyone knows exactly who “we” are and is committed to the long-term welfare of “us.”

This creates a challenge in the American context in particular for a number of reasons. Schmitt argues that in the process of the formation of the Union, the primary driver was not first and foremost the people and their shared existential bond; but rather, there was a concern to protect the affairs of the individual from state interference. Because of the process of rebellion and the economic concerns which were a significant driver of the process, there was an emphasis placed on trying to limit the power of the state to negatively impact the private business interests of the citizen. Also, care was taken to try to prevent the accumulation of power into a single hand, using the division of powers to play the ambitions of men off against each other.

This sets up an adversarial relationship between the citizen and the state. The state does not flow out of the needs of the people. It is seen as fundamentally tyrannical in the Aristotelian sense, that is, it not is seen as always possessing the quality of working for its own advantage and not that of the people. Its purpose is not primarily the welfare of “us” against interests that would threaten our welfare, whether they be other people groups or even business interests that would threaten the people. In this sense, because of this fear of tyranny, it seems that the American governing system was destined to become the thing from which it was designed to protect. It is a subtle distinction, but this happens in part because they believed that state does not exist to protect the people; but rather, that the constitutional framework exists, in theory, to protect the people from the state. The state is an entity that exists ontologically independent of the American people, always threatening, always tyrannical. The American state is an entity from which the people must be protected by laws. It is not seen or understood to flow ontologically out of the necessities of the people’s existential struggle for survival. The idea of a non-tyrannical state seems almost alien to the American mindset. It is because of this dynamic, though, that Schmitt called the American form of governance an “anti-state.”