Party Politics and "The Political" Are Not the Same Thing

An abiding frustration of mine is that so many--even people I like--get the "friend-enemy" distinction wrong, apply it wrongly, muddle it up, and in so doing miss much of the potency of the concept.

I will say it straight out. When Carl Schmitt put forward the “friend-enemy distinction” as the definition of “the political,” he did not mean it in the way that you will most commonly hear it being applied: “reward your friends and punish your enemies.” You will not read Carl Schmitt saying this anywhere in his book The Concept of the Political. Why do people use it in this way? It is kind of cool to say “friend-enemy distinction.” Mostly, they are trying to make sense of today’s complex web of power interests in a way that is simple and straight forward. Well, they want a politics that makes sense and is also morally restrained, and Schmitt’s handy phrase does allow for it to be used as a simplistic heuristic. Unfortunately, to do so really robs the idea of its power.

There is one form of political thinking which asserts that all political activity should be governed by a set of rules, something akin to the “rule of law,” or a “rules based order,” that is, a set of principles which all participants are explicitly or implicitly supposed to follow. There are universal rules that apply always in every circumstance and everyone should abide by these rules. It is an ethical politics. People who think this way struggle when confronted with the complexity and the moral autonomy of the realm of political action, that politics makes it own rules, that is, it is governed by realpolitik. As Jacques Ellul argues in his work The Political Illusion, it was Machiavelli who first pointed this out most clearly. Politics is governed by its own rules and is not subject to normal morality. It must do what is most effective and efficient. Ellul argues that you must deal with the arena of politics as it is, not as you wish it to be.

This idea of rewarding friends and punishing enemies is an attempt to develop a “morality” for the autonomous realm of practical politics. It is an effort to impose a differing set of rules for politics, a different ethic. Instead of everyone being bound by a single unified set of rules — we will treat everyone like individuals and will reward all the same, regardless of political affiliation — what happens in this different ethic is that we no longer treat everyone the same. We hand out patronage benefits to our supporters. It is the way “machine politics” works. It is the way “tribal” politics works. We give our supporters rewards. We refuse those same benefits to our political opponents. More so, we will make things actively difficult for those who oppose us. We will harass them using the mechanisms of power. This will be an effort to force compliance. Once they are on board with our program, they will receive rewards. This is actually a different political ethic and not strictly a manifestation of the “friend-enemy distinction” as Carl Schmitt laid it out in spite of the surface similarities. Schmitt is arguing, perhaps contra Machiavelli, that “the state” is only properly constituted when it emerges from what he calls “the political.” Correctly understood, his is an argument for the proper ethical grounding of the state. He opens The Concept of the Political this way:

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

But before we dive further into examining the friend-enemy distinction in Schmitt and why this matters, we should take a few minutes to grasp Ellul’s assertion that the autonomous nature of politics makes the idea of ethical or religious politics an illusion. Once we understand this, Schmitt’s attempts to show that once the state is given the proper ethical foundation in the friend-enemy distinction, it is then free to act by necessity in support of that ethic.