Friends and Enemies

Trump has learned

The friend-enemy distinction. Reward your friends, punish your enemies. That’s it.

The friend-enemy distinction is politics 101, something any canny political operator should know—should feel, in their marrow—regardless of whether they’ve read Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, the 1932 book that provided the first detailed exploration of that contrast and its meaning for political behavior writ large.

Here’s how Schmitt himself put it: “The specific political distinction to which all political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” A little bit fancier, yes, but it means the same thing: reward your friends, punish your enemies. If you do that, you’re doing politics well.

Like a lot of Germanics who were writing and… doing stuff in the 1930s and ‘40s, Carl Schmitt is treated with a certain amount of suspicion, justifiable perhaps, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the philosophical baby out with the, err, Nazi bathwater. In fact, I’d go so far as to say we can’t afford to—not if we actually want to win. And I’m hoping at least some of us want to do that.

The friend-enemy distinction, and specifically the inability to understand and implement it, actuates right-wing politics today and explains why right-wingers are, in a real sense, their own worst enemies. Why they keep failing, or have kept failing up to this point.

As I often like to point out on Twitter, conservatives and right-wingers have a serious problem rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies. They just can’t do it, no matter how hard they try.

In many cases, this failure amounts to an excess of mercy, to a clinging to principles in the face of enemies who recognize none themselves save the ruthless getting and wielding of power.

It goes something like this.

Our enemies—the left—aren’t really our enemies: they’re just misguided. If we show them how they’re misguided, and offer them clemency and the chance to reform themselves, they’ll realize the error of their ways and come around to our way of seeing and doing things. Everybody wins!

Right wingers simply refuse to pull the trigger—metaphorical or not—on their enemies, who return the favor by destroying their enemies’ livelihoods with frivolous lawsuits about homosexual cakes, locking them up and, in some cases, physically harming and even killing them.

But this failure also amounts to something else, to another kind of behavior we see all too often. It’s often called “punching right.” You know, right-wingers who are a little closer to the center, perhaps in the public eye, offering up other, more trenchant, right-wingers to their leftist opponents as a kind of sacrificial peace offering. I liken it to the chubby kid who, as the school bully raises his fist, points desperately at the kid next to him and says, “Please, hit him instead!”

We might doubt whether James Lindsay—who loves to punch right, and creates an endless string of new concepts like the “woke right” to justify doing so—ever was right wing in the first place, but it’s also people like Rod Dreher and Sohrab Ahmari and many others who seem to do it as a matter of course, no doubt from a playground instinct for self-preservation.

The left, by contrast, never do this.

Can you imagine AOC giving up the lowliest Portland Antifa member, no matter their crime, to appease Donald Trump or JD Vance or Thomas Massie—or me? Get real.

There’s evidence these damaging quirks are temperamental: that they’re baked in to the conservative character, as such. Personality and social psychology has shown, beyond doubt, that there is such a thing as the conservative character, just as there’s a liberal character. Political preferences are rooted in biology, the structure of the brain, as much as upbringing and education. In studies, conservatives routinely display far greater compassion and understanding towards liberals than vice versa—and this despite the fact that a central aspect of liberal self-definition is compassion and understanding. Liberals think they’re more compassionate and understanding, but their behavior tells another story. But we know that already.

Anyway, forgive this little excursus on right-wing failings—I’m getting to the point. It has to do with Donald Trump’s second term and the remarkable things we’ve witnessed since his inauguration, less than two weeks ago.