Part One: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism

to you the intellectual underpinning of fascism. Right specifically, there's a guy, a single dude who's probably the only genius in the history of like fascist like legal philosophy and theory, who were going to talk about And the basics of this story is when the Nazis started coming to power, you had this guy Hitler who was really charismatic, who was good at drawing in people, and you had, you know, this movement that was clearly on its way to taking power,

and there was not really much beyond that. There wasn't a consistent set of beliefs because a lot of early Nazis, that's why they had the lot of ni idol long knives. There are a lot of disagreements between them, and there was this kind of competition for like who is going to figure out what the political philosophy of fascism is. And the guy we're talking about the day is the dude who won that struggle and he's gone on to influence He's kind of the thinker behind the neo conservative

movement that dominated during the Bush years. He's the thinker behind you know, Putin's rise to power in a lot of ways. He's a very influential guy. So, Blake are you Are you excited to hear about him?

mispronounced that. But August first, I'm going to be in Philadelphia doing stand up, and then in late August I'm going to be in Wilkesbury and then yeah, there'll be more dates popping up on my social media that aren't in Pennsylvania. So yeah, you can find me all those places.

had to work a crowd. That's an intelligence, the same kind of intelligence Donald Trump has, right, Like intelligence isn't an objective thing that people are good at certain things. Stephen Miller has certain kinds of evil intelligence for scheming in certain ways. Karl Schmidt was just an actual genius. And he was a genius in an evil way and

in a way that was like fucked up. But was very broad, and the thing that he figured out before anyone else was how to kill a liberal democracy as like the far right, as like a member of a reactionary party. And it's the same playbook. What the playbook he wrote out in the twenties is exactly what's happened here, right, So that's that is the degree of mind this guy has. And so as much of a fucked up weirdo as he is, he is a legitimately like smart man, which is unfortunate, righty.

I'm not sure if Germany ever did that. Maybe we'd have been better off if they'd gotten really into fucking paper casino bullshit, but trying to put their energy into right right, right, Yeah, getting really into the power ball, right exactly. So one thing right off the bat that separates him from most future reactionaries is that he never loves Imperial Germany or the Kaiser.

I know, it's hard to imagine like Catholics as like a marginal lot, but I mean think about like Ireland, right, Like you know, under the English thumb, right, there's a lot of oppression of Catholics, even as the Catholic Church is also doing horrible things in Ireland, right, You know,

shit's complicated. So the fact that he does not like the Reich at any point in his childhood, it's a product of both his family religion, as I said, Catholicism, and of the origin of his family where they come from geographically, because his family hails from a place called Bossendorff, which is a small village on the Alfbach river in

the Eifel Mountains. This village is about six kilometers from the Mosel, which is mos Elle, which is a major river in Germany, and all his life Schmidt identified primarily as a Mausoleanian. Right now, that probably means nothing to most of you listening, and that probably doesn't mean a whole lot more to the people who have to happen to be German, right, because things are. It means a

different thing now even than it does to like Germans today. Right, Coming from this region in the late eighteen hundreds, when Germany has not been a thing for long, means a

very different thing. This whole part of the country, which biographer Reinhard Mehring just refers to as the Eiffel, is sort of on like the southeast point of Germany, and it's right next to Lorraine, which today is part of France, but had been taken eighteen years earlier from France after the Franco Prussian War ended, and was thus part of

Germany at the time that he's born. So the region he comes into is right next to this traditionally French region, And as a result, Karl and his family don't consider themselves like Germans, certainly not in the way that like

Germans will in a couple of decades. They are French Germans, and they feel both French and German, right, and there's a tension between a lot of his family does live in Lorraine, right, and so there's this tension between his family and the Pan German ideology that suffused the second Riche, which is very anti French. Because they're not anti French, right,

their relatives are French, they feel kind of French. So you're both part of this Catholic minority and you're also like kind of French, so you're just not fully on board with the whole Kaiser thing. Now, obviously, when I say these are marginalized people, it's not nearly in the same way as like even a Jewish person in this period of time is marginalized, but you don't escape bias either. Karl was born in a town called Plettenberg, where his

parents had moved right before having him. This was not far from where he's born, but it was a little bit nearer to the imperial core of Germany. More to the point, it means that Karl grows up in a large town that's developing rapidly because it's industrializing. But he's a distinct religious minority in that town. As by biographer Reinhard Mehering writes in Karl Schmidt a biography, this means belonging to a confessional minority in an intensely evangelical environment,

an environment partly even of Protestant sectarianism. So everyone around him is like a Lutheran and they don't like Catholics very much, right, And people are kind of dicks to him, right.

min komf is my struggle, culture camp, culture struggle. It's not quite culture war, but it basically means that, right, and what the culture comp is is in the late eighteen seventies, right after the Reich is born Otto von Bismarck, who's like he's the architect of Germany, right, he's like the visier whispering into the ear of the Prussian king, and his plots and schemes lead to the culmination of

the Franco Prussian War in the creation of Germany. And Bismarck is kind of dealing with a problem in the early days of Germany that would later be devil Hitler, which is that the Catholic Church isn't just a church, right, not in the way that like, you know, the church down the street from you probably is, assuming it's not a Catholic church, you going to First Baptist or whatever,

that's like a church. It's a discreete organization and it has maybe it's maybe the pastor there is political, maybe he's not. But the church is just a church. Catholicism is both a church and a government, right. There's an actual micro state in the Vatican that they governed, but also they had governed. They had been almost like the

Christian u in for a long time. They'd had armies for long points of time, and even in this period, nearly all social services in Catholic dominated regions of Europe are run through and by the Church, right, so they are still, to a degree in this period involved in governing in a way that impacts people's lives. And Bismarck doesn't like this because he's trying to centralize power within a modern state, and the Catholic Church is an alternate

and perhaps opposing power center right. That might wind up opposing the Kaiser, and that can make things dangerous for the Kaiser and dangerous for the regime. Part of what scares Bismarck is that the Pope is infallible, right, and the Kaiser's just not, you know, like, even though things are very strict, the Kaiser's kind of close to an

absolute monarch. There's not a widespread belief among Germans that the Kaiser can't make mistakes, whereas Catholics are obliged to believe that the pope is infallible and this Bismarck really doesn't trust this, right.

of laws aimed at reducing its influence and authority. These measures included government oversight of Catholic seminaries, restrictions on clergy, and the implementation of civil marriage laws, which removed the Church's traditional role in marriage. Despite these efforts, the Culture comp faced considerable resistance from the Catholic community, leading to

public sympathy among some Protestant Germans. And something kind of like this is going to happen under the Nazis, right, the Nazis have a little war with the Catholic Church. The culture comp does not achieve its goals. Bismarck kind of underestimates, how you know, one thing you got to say, even if you hate it, the Catholic Church has staying power, right.

So it's not a total failure. This conflict has largely passed by the time Karl is born, and in fact, the year of his birth is the same year that Kaiservillehelm the Second takes the throne, which spells the beginning of the end for Bismarck, so he is not going

to be in power much longer. Catholicism has kind of outlasted him, but the hostility Catholics had to the Reich of lingered as a result of this, and Carl's dad is a Catholic activist right He sits in the local parish council and he's always fighting for the rights of Catholics. So before Carl's born, his dad is kind of fighting Bismarck on this thing. Carl later described his father this way.

Throughout his life, he remained faithful to the Catholic cause in a diaspora, which was still very hard at the time, and he really admires his dad for this. He does not like his mom spoilers for a fascist, but mom issues issues with women in general.

politics and morality. And that's kind of where Carl is growing up. He's in this town where he's a minority. It's very cosmopolitan, but he goes to a Catholic school, so he is separated from everyone who's not a Catholic, and he lives in this kind of bubble. He's a good student, very good student, and he's helped along by the fact that his father is a stenographer who teaches

him how to write shorthand at an early age. So Carl's always going to be very good at writing very quickly, which is a real boon if you're going to be an intellectual who's trying to like take advantage of shifting trends when things are moving very quickly, that you can get shit out quickly.

mostly kind of at a similar socioeconomic level. But his dad's got one brother who gets rich by selling land to mining concerns, and so he's kind of like supporting a lot of the family whenever shit's difficult or whenever a kid has like bills that their family can't afford, and he and a lot of the rest of the family pool resources. When they realize how smart Karl is to invest in his education and the education of one

of his brothers. He's got two other brothers. One of them is really smart, so Carl and his smart brother get a lot of money put into them. His smart brother goes on to become a medical doctor. Carl becomes a jurist. His other brother is like, I don't know, he doesn't do anything school related. Yeah, he's just fine. He doesn't become he doesn't become a howling fascist, I don't think. So, you know, he's got that going for him. So we know glaringly little other than this about Carl's

early childhood, which he never discussed at length. He did speak positively about his dad, but he does not speak about his mom.

at this period. Of time anywhere in Europe, which is that he got shipped off to like a boarding school, right where you know, time to leave your family behind and learn how to do whatever it is you're going to do. And this is the same in Germany as it is basically everywhere else. So he leaves this town where he's a member of an outnumbered religious minority for a closed world in which everyone around him is Catholic

as fuck, and he lives there. You know, a large portion of the time, his mom wants him to become a priest, right, she wants him to get into the clergy, and he's not interested in this at all, and she never forgives him for this. Right. It's like your mama wants you to be a doctor or whatever and you fall into some other career and she's just always kind of pissed at him. Now, Carl's grades qualify him for

a scholarship. Eventually he leaves this Catholic school for a prestigious local secular gymnasium in Germany that means high school, which is confusing. You're not talking about going to work out, you're talking about high school.

a secular education than was typical of their kind. Right, So even though his mom has these goals for him, he's allowed to go to a secular school when it's clear that that's what he wants, and that is kind of interesting. It does show that like they are also modernizing, they're not completely stuck in the old way things had been.

And this going to this secular school kind of ends him as a believer, Like he stops believing in God here there's this has a very humanistic curriculum, and he doesn't he doesn't fully fall into like German idealism and all of these kind of like totally secular ideas. There's always a little bit of like belief in the divine uh that he that he holds too, that even influences his ideas on the law, but he stops being a literal believing Catholic as a result of this education.

drugs and eventually getting purged by the Nazis. This is his social circle as a teenager, right, That's.

he believed. He's the father of a school of thought called egoism, which I shouldn't even try to explain here, because any discussion of this man sparks furious arguments about the thirty or so people who know he existed. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's enough for you to know that Sterner is about as fringe and radical a thinker as Germany ever produces, right, And especially the fact that he's reading Sterner at this period of time means that this is a kid who is drawn to

radical ideas and dangerously radical ideas. Like you can get in some shit for reading Sterner in public school at this point in time, right, So he is very drawn to like forbidden intellectual topics in a lot of ways. Now, one reason Schmidt is interested in Sterner is that his writings had contributed to what was called the Vormars, which is a period of what scholar Lawrence Stepplvick describes as

intellectual fermentation. This is happening in the early eighteen hundreds, and Sterner is one of these thinkers who's like radical ideas contribute to this boiling over of intellectual like discontent with the system that contributes to a failed revolution in Germany in eighteen forty eight, and in eighteen forty eight, there's a shitload all over Europe. There's a bunch of failed revolutions. Sterner is a big part of what that period of time, and so that's part of Weischmidt is

interested in him. He's also interested because Sterner is a Hegelian, in other words, an intellectual follower of a guy named Friedrich Hegel. Philosophy is not my strong suit, but from Hegel we get this important concept called the Hegelian dialectic. A dialectic is just a method of philosophical argument that

involves two opposing sides having an intellectual clash. And Hegel's particular style of dialectic broadened the concept of opposing sides from like Plato, literally depicting arguments between like famous dudes who embody different attitudes to and I'm going to quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. Here different definitions of consciousness and of the object that consciousness is aware of

or claims to know. As in Plato's dialogues, a contradictory process between opposing sides and Hegel's dialectic leads to a linear evolution or development from less sophisticated definitions or views to more sophisticated ones later. The dialectical process thus constitutes Hegel's method for arguing against the earlier less sophisticated definitions reviews, and for more sophisticated ones later. Now that doesn't seem and I know this is this is not what people

come here for. That doesn't seem like it's anything that could piss someone off. Right, This seems very like who could be angry about this basic idea?

these reasons, like, you know, reactionary. This is a fairly reactionary state, and so they don't like this guy whose thoughts play a significant role in a revolution that had occurred not all that long ago. But there's other reasons why they're unhappy with this, right, because after Hegel dies in eighteen thirty one, his philosophic school splits into two

opposing sides. There's young Hegelians and there's old Hegelians. And young Hegelians tend to be young people who were convinced of Hegel's logic but also convinced that it led inevitably to a rational argument for socialist revolution against both the Prussian monarchy and against evangelical Lutheranism. Right, and that's not going to be super popular with the state. Right that there's like a chunk of this guy's followers who, in the period of time that Schmidt is reading all this stuff,

are like, we have to overthrow the government. This is radical literature, right. As Laurence Steppovich writes in an article for the Journal of Modern Judaism, the Young Hegelian school suddenly came into being in eighteen thirty five with a brilliant theological study, the Life of Jesus Christ critically examined.

It was written by a young and little known theologian David Friedrich Strauss, who candidly into the shocked embarrassment of the old Hegelians, declared that his work was inspired by Hegel's philosophy. His reduction of the miracles related to the life of Jesus into a collection of mythic tales based upon Old Testament expectations simply destroyed the claim that Hegalienism

and Orthodox evangelical doctrine were compatible. As the Prussian monarchy was supportive of and supported by the Orthodox Church, Strauss's work was even more disturbing than might be expected from a Biblical study. And this is relevant to us because, like Sterner is like the marijuana that gets him dropping acid,

which is reading David Friedrich Strauss. This doesn't sound all that like dangerous or even extreme, but in his time, this is if you get, like if you're a kid in high school who gets caught with a copy of the zine why Break Windows, which is like an anarchist essay about like why it's not just moral but like an astatic act to shatter windows, or something like a beginner's guide to targeted property destruction. Both of what you

can find on crime thinks website. If you're caught with those in high school now, you can get in trouble, right, right, And it's important you look at this book about Jesus that Carl's going to get caught reading this in school. The authorities of his time see this as the same as they would see those scenes today.

of a wild kid. He's like reading you know, revolutionary literature and like breaking the rules to get fucking wasted with his friends. And he gets kicked out a seminary for being too cool actually, which is guy, this is the only top the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's hopping trains. I mean he probably pays. He's not that cool. So as Dolan academic, as this guy appears, he is like pretty radical in this period of time. That said, his

grades remain excellent. Our boy graduates and he gets accepted to the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, which is also just called the University of Berlin, and you know, Yale and like Harvard existed back then. This is the top college. A lot of people would argue the best college in the world of its day. Right, this is

the most because Germany's education system is the best. These are the Germany is the first country to figure out modern universities, and almost anyone would agree this is about the best place you could end up as a young intellectual in this period of time.

the study of the structure and development of language. But he's being supported by his rich uncle who lives nearby, and like he'll crash with him during the holidays and is his main source of support. And his rich uncle's like, you know, philology, the fuck is that shit? No, you're getting a law degree. You're gonna have a couple lawyer

and make money. So he's doing this in Berlin, which is again a very different environment than one he's raised in, and the different biographers I've read give divergent descriptions, somewhat divergent descriptions. Now he felt about it. Balachrishnan describes him as deeply ambivalent to the diversity of the metropolis, noting that in the popular imagination, urban areas in Germany were seen as in some way Jewish as well, and this

all helped harden his identity as an outsider. Balakrishnan concludes that Carl found city life both fascinating and disturbing. And here's how Karl himself describes his feelings at the time. I was an obscure young man of modest descent. Neither the ruling strata nor the opposition included me. That meant I ding entirely in the dark. Out of darkness, looked

into a brightly lit room. The feeling of sadness which filled me made me more distant and awoke in some other's mistrust and antipathy the ruling strata experienced anybody who was not thrilled to be involved with them as heterogeneous. It put before him the choice to adapt or withdraw.

So I remained outside. And this is you know, he's not part of the opposition, he's not part of the ruling class, and so he can see them all better, more accurately than they see themselves, you know, as a result of this position that he has, which is often the case. That's why a lot of our greatest artists are outsiders, you know, in one way or another. Right, and Carl is going to have perspective that gives him a degree of vision that other people lack.

He describes university as a temple of higher intellectuality, and he finds himself almost religiously obsessed with legal study, particularly the Roman origins of Western justice systems. And he likes his Roman law classes because he's a Latin nerd so like, that's the degree of fucking DWEP. This guy is but very smart, and he maintains a sense of superiority towards his peers. Right, he feels because he's smarter than them and because his interests are so much more esoteric, that

he's like a better person. That quote I read earlier of how Carl viewed himself came from a memoir he wrote about his college years, where most of the book is him insulting two of his friends, who like shit, talks constantly about like being less intelligent than he is. And the purpose of that passage where he's talking about him being an outsider is like, look at how much smarter I was than all these dopes.

he continues to socialize with artists and creative types. Right is, these are other people who are kind of on the outside looking in, who he maybe feels a sense of kinship with. He spends his nights out with other people who see themselves that way and feel like we're turning a lins on society and we're thus smarter than everyone else.

Schmidt doesn't quite settle into Berlin yet. He moves to college in Munich the next year, and then he goes to Strasbourg the year after, And these are all bigger cities than he had lived in before marrying. Suspects he moves around so much for financial reasons we don't really know. In any case, he falls in love with Strasburg and that's where he'll stay for the rest of his education. And it's where he meets his mentor, a guy named

Fritz von Kalker, who becomes his doctoral supervisor. Von Kalker is a criminal law professor with a particular interest in how morality impacts punishment under the law, right, what is moral in terms of a punishment, and how is the morality of a society of a society even how does it relate to how they punish people?

He keeps no cops of this guy's work in his library. Yeah, it's a little bit like that, right, And this is you know, he keeps basically every other letter he gets in his life, but he throws out most of the ones to van Kalker, which is interesting because von Kalker literally saves his life at a later point.

a young jew from a prominent family. And Eisler is not only Jewish, he is a Hungarian national who, despite being a Hungarian national, identifies as German, and this whole period is trying to get legal status in Germany. He is trying to get German citizenship, and he wants. Eisler's whole goal in life is a social acceptance as a

citizen of the German Reich. And this is a difficult battle for even a rich young Jewish Man because nearly everybody's incredibly racist, right, So it's interesting that Schmidt isn't in this period right at least not towards Eisler, that he's willing to because Schmidt expresses a degree of like bigotry as well, but never not towards Eisler in this period, which is interesting. It shows that he's got this degree of ability to kind of look past that. So the

two became buds in nineteen oh eight. They get their doctorates in like nineteen ten. Merriing writes that quote through Eisler, Schmidt for the first time came into more intense contact with Jewish people and with judaism, and the difference in the theses that these guys pick for their doctorate is interesting to me. Eisler goes for this very standard topic, like he's analyzing a bunch of defamation lawsuits and is like, what what are the ones that succeed all have in common?

decisions of individuals. Right, And that's a very important realization. Now, this is in keeping with a major trend in German jurisprudence at the time, which is called the free law movement, which stands in opposition to legal positivism, which is a trend that had swept through in the eighteen seventies with the goal of like, we don't want to talk about natural law, about like the natural rights of man and stuff. We want to talk about like what are we saying

are people's rights? What are we saying is legal and illegal?

that the law is always moving closer to representing. And he writes about guilt not as an internal thing, but as a legal category. In other words, he concludes that it doesn't matter if you've done what the state accuses you of.

own asshole friends in college. They make a satire magazine that's mostly about Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Walter Rathanol, like all these German intellectuals that they have issues with that they're just like making fun as like teenagers making fun of these like these great intellectuals that are part of like German culture, and that's the it seems to be

the whole reason for this magazine. Seems to be that all these guys are respected contributors to German culture, and Schmidt wants to take them down a peg to prove he's not like everyone else. And I wonder maybe Eisler, as a Hungarian and as a Jew, maybe feels a similar need right where like these guys aren't any better than I am. Like, yeah, let's let's let's fucking puncture them a little bit.

just an extra level of fuck. In letters to his sister, Carl's sister, who became a teacher in Portugal during this period, Carl showed an obsession and a frustration with his relative poverty, writing that neither of them, either he or his sister, had been careful enough in choosing their parents, and complaining that rich people were conceded so both like, fuck my mom and dad for not making us rich and also fuck rich people.

much money I can make. And that's like, it's kind of fuck that society works that way.

like his in his own mind. His original sin is that this guy just can't stop trying to fuck, Like he is really horny and a bad judgment and is constantly screwing around. He may have actually been kind of a player at one point. It's a little hard to tell. But like his earliest serious fling that we have evidence with is this pair of Jewish sisters, the Bernsteins, who

he's like in a love triangle with. He's like, and it's unclear given the time, is he just flirting with both of them or are they actually like go in at it right? But he wants to marry one of them, Helene, But he's also kind of stringing the other along like he's gotta he's got a he's got a triangle with these two sisters.

at the time. It's like, well, you're an academic, maybe you'll have a career, but right now you literally don't have income. So no, you can't marry my daughter. You have no way of supporting her.

become very black pilled at this point in time. He can't get married. He seems locked out at this point from and so close to being where he needs to be right, but he just can't cross that border because he was born poor.

cops if you come back here again. The good news for him is that within weeks of this, he meets a Spanish dancer at a cabaret. She calls herself Kri and when they strike up a relationship, she tells him her full name is Pauline Carita Maria Isabella von Doretik. Now, if you know German vaughan means someone is a noble, right, Like that's a marker that you are of the nobility. And this woman is claiming to be the daughter of

a noble family. And so as soon as he's like got the interests of this dancer who's like got noble blood, he drops all interest in these sisters he's been pursuing, and he writes to her, his sister, I now have a delightful friendship with a Spanish dancer. Now Carrie is not Spanish, she is also not a noble woman. Every aspect of Carrie's life was fake. She claimed to be the daughter of a Croatian lord who had died, which had forced her to travel to Munich to live with

a cruel aunt, which was basically a Disney fable. She also claimed that she'd been born a week after Karl, when in reality she was five years older than him. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Viennese woman and a Croatian plumber. And for all of his brains, Carl never catches her in her life like not or at least at this point right, he buys in all of her stories of royal life, everything she says about herself. He has completely fallen for this woman and all of

his colleagues because again he's a doctor. At this point right, all of his colleagues are like, man, this chick is not She's lying to you, for one, but this is bullshit.

a whore. That's what a tingle tangle means at this period of time, right, Like, man, you have fallen for this stripper and she is lying about her past. That's what his friends are saying. Right, That's that's the equivalent in modern terms, right. But he doesn't care. He's in love with this woman. He believes her, and he believes her even though they can get married because her dad's dead. There's no one to stop them. He doesn't need to

ask permission. But they can't get married because every time they try to go to a judge, the judge's like, oh, okay, well, where's this woman's papers, you know, to show where her citizenship is and that she is who she and she never has them. And occasionally she'll have papers, but they'll be like, well, these are obviously fake. And Carl doesn't like, doesn't think anything's weird.

quote from Merhring's book again here from October twelfth. The diary contains a passionate love letters and an ecstatic philosophy of love that aims to base love on permanence and enforce faithfulness by idealizing love as devotion to an idea. Schmidt wanted to conceive his love from the perspective of eternity, a perspective in which kri then had no predecessor and no successor. Right, he can't he can't let himself a man again. This woman is an exotic dancer. She has

a relationship history prior to him. She's trying to build this cosmology in which there's never been a before. Right, because then that's he just is not secure enough in that idea.

be objective but that really are not. He starts writing that his past pursuit of the Bernstein sisters was a mistake, but obviously it's their mistake, not him. He writes that he had been quote painfully ambushed by a vain, common, ugly, and arrogant virago who is now in possession of love letters from me. She has foisted herself on me as an address. See thus I spit her out as a whole person. I have no more to do with her.

I wash my hands clean. I took excrement for gold without letting slip from my fingers, the pure gold that I now hold in my hands. And he's like, it's her like, because again, the fact that he had been in love with this woman and had written her letters means that this relationship he's in, even his side of it, isn't as peer as he wants to pretend and it's her fault. Right, she ambushed me, she forced me to write her letters.

to date these Jewish histories. He broke down that democracy, you know, and it's interesting to see how he wants to do it going forward. But yeah, this is this is fascinating so far.

So there's donation links. I know times are tough, but if you could spare anything, that link is in my bio on at Blake Wexler on all social media.