“When you worship power, mercy and compassion will look like sins.”
Benjamin Kramer, a Wesleyan pastor and author based in Idaho, Posted this idea Last year I saw it last week and immediately forwarded it to some of my closest friends with a note saying that this phrase captures our political moment. It helps explain America’s moral divide.
Over the past decade, I have seen many of my friends and neighbors make a remarkable change. They have gone from supporting Donald Trump despite hating him to joining in on his aggression.
This is not a new observation. In fact, it’s so obvious that the climb is over. A more interesting question is why? How many Americans seem to have given up any commitment to personal virtues — at least in their political lives — and instead embraced the merciless political battle with such gusto that they believe That if you didn’t join their crusade, you were immoral. If you don’t copy their ways?
This is a question with a multifaceted answer. In December, I wrote a column that specifically examined the question through a religious lens. When a person believes that he has eternal truth, he is tempted to believe that he is entitled to rule.
However, there is a difference between resisting temptation and promoting alternative ethics. And what we’re seeing in the last decade is millions of Americans building a different moral structure. And while it is certainly notable and powerful in Trumpism, it is not unique to Trumpism.
A good way to understand this terrible political morality is to read. Carl Schmidta German political theorist who joined the Nazi Party after Hitler became chancellor. I want to be careful here – I’m not arguing that millions of Americans are suddenly schmucks, the accomplices of one of the fascist regime’s favorite political ideologues. Most Americans don’t know who he is. Nor will they accept all his ideas.
One of his ideas, however, stands out almost entirely for the moment: his description, in a 1932 book, “Concept of political science“Differencing friend and foe.” According to Schmitt, the political sphere is separate from the personal sphere, and has its own contradictions.
Schmidt wrote, “Let us suppose that in the realm of ethics there is between good and evil, in aesthetics the beautiful and the ugly, in economics the profitable and the unprofitable.” However, politics has its own “ultimate distinctions”. In this realm, “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and foe.”
According to Schmitt, one of the flaws of liberalism is its reluctance to distinguish between friend and foe. Failure to pull it off is a fool’s errand. A durable political community can exist only when it achieves this distinction. It is this contrast with outsiders that creates community.
Schmitt was here both descriptive and prescriptive. If the friend-foe distinction is essential to the formation and preservation of political community, then seeking accommodation with one’s political opponents can be disastrous. This is human nature, and it is unwise not to face our essential character.
Schmidt was partially right. The distinction between friend and foe is an aspect of human nature, and we are constantly willing to succumb to it, rationalize it, and indulge it. Instead of resisting it, we want to find some way to correct it, often simply to maintain our notion that we are moral and civilized people.
He also rightly said that the distinction between friend and foe is ultimately incompatible with the liberal democratic project. Pluralism seeks to create a community in which historical enemies can live in peace and flourish side by side. If the distinction between friend and foe is an essential feature of human nature, how can pluralism survive?
There wasn’t much. More aware than the Founders that the American experience is at odds with our basic nature. A century before Schmidt was born, he understood this fact intimately.
Our government is built on this understanding, as James Madison famously put it. Federal No. 51If men were angels, there would be no need for government. If angels ruled over humans, neither external nor internal control over government would be necessary.
The Constitution seeks to improve the will to achieve power—as Madison said in the same essay, “ambition must be made to oppose ambition”—but the Founders also knew that the checks and balances. Our elaborate system of balance is also inadequate. For our system to work, goodness is a necessity.
John Adams wrote in his 1798, “We have no government of such power as to resist the passions of men unbridled by morality and religion.” Letter to the Massachusetts Militia“Greed, ambition, revenge, or heroism, will break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale passes through a net.”
Adams’ New England metaphor is perfect (his readers will know exactly what the whale does with the net): pluralism requires both law and morality to function, and law without morality will fail. .
We forget that the Founders—for all their faults—were focused not just on the forms of American government, but also on personal virtues. One of my favorite books of the past year was “Pursuit of happinessBy Jeffrey Rosen, President of the National Constitution Center.
The book describes how the founders did not envision the pursuit of happiness as the pursuit of happiness or wealth, but as the “pursuit of virtue.” to be Well, rather feeling Good.” For example, Benjamin Franklin listed temperance, quietness, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility as indispensable elements of virtue.
You can immediately see the paradox of Schmitt’s friend-enemy politics. Morality certainly recognizes the existence of enemies, but it still imposes moral obligations on our treatment of our enemies. Franklin’s listed virtues aren’t just how you endear yourself to your political clan. They are universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone.
Demonstrate these qualities, and your enemies can live with dignity and freedom even if they lose the political battle. When your enemies show the same qualities, you can enjoy the good life even in defeat. This is the social contract of pluralism. In a civilized society, no defeat is final defeat, and no victory is final victory. And in all circumstances your basic human rights must be protected.
Conversely, dive too deeply into the friend-foe distinction, and it can become. It is immoral to be kind to one’s enemies if the kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal enemy. In a world of friend-and-foe discrimination, your ultimate virtue lies in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate deputy is betraying you by rejecting the invitation to political warfare.
The friend-foe divide explains why so many Republicans are particularly angry at anti-Trump opponents — especially when they hold conflicting conservative values. In distinguishing between friend and foe, ideology is secondary to loyalty.
You see this principle at work in Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of the January 6 rioters and to revoke Secret Service protections from his former national security adviser, John Bolton, and his former secretary of state, Mike. Pompeo friends can get away with violent crime. Bolton and Pompey In public Criticized Trump, and now they are the enemy who must pay.
While Trumpists are among the most vicious voices in the public square, ruthless aggression is sadly common in the political arena, especially at the extremes. I have seen far-left activists do diabolical things against their opponents. Any deviation from orthodoxy is regarded as evil, and the evil must be eradicated completely.
And there is no humility in repeal culture—regardless of whether it comes from the left or the right.
Since our citizenship depends on our morality, we must teach morality along with civilization. Sadly, we are failing at both, and our basic nature is telling millions of Americans that cruelty is good if it helps us win, and kindness is evil if it undermines our cause. Gives This is the path to destruction. As the prophet Isaiah said“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
Alas for them, yes, but as friend-enemy politics dominates our discourse, tears apart our families and communities and reshapes our national ethos, a dark thought occurs to me.
Pity us all.
