Part Two: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism

the parents of his rich friends, for money. The Eisler family is his most reliable source of support. His whole goal. He says this often in his diary and when talking to Karrie. He wants to get rich, right, he wants to be wealthy. And the way to do that then, as a public intellectual, just like it is now, is to write a book. Right now today you have to write the worst book ever, which gets harder every year because so many, so many terrible, terrible books are written

by public intellectuals every year. Back at this period of time, your book had to be have a little more depth to it. And the first his first stab at this is a work called Word of the State. And this is that's the English translation. The German phrase that means word of the state is a reference to a concept in like German law of the state, in which the government and its rulers are constrained in what they can do to people by the law.

whether they have rights, that doesn't matter. What matters is that the state spells out what it can and will do when and where somewhere, right, That's the important thing. He includes a line in this work that I find fundamentally chilling. Quote, whatever it is that makes a person is determined by the legal system itself. And that's that's a that's bad. It's going to lead you some dark places, Carl. You're gonna lead us all some very dark places. Right.

But it makes sense if you're coming to this idea that like, yeah, the law determines ethics and reality, and thus the law determines what is a person right and can unperson people, which is sort of the He's not writing about that at this point, but it's kind of the inevitable conclusion. It's like, well, if the law makes a person, the law can stop you from being a person. And when I say that, I think he's there's a

degree of brilliance here. It's not that this is a good way to think about things, but this is accurate to the way states work already. As soon as as long as there have been states. This is how states have functioned, whether you like it or not, even our state, Right, all this bullshit that we have about natural rights and that there's inherent rights, No, you should know right now by watching the news, none of that means anything. The state and the people with guns within it determine what

is treated as a person by the state. Right, That's what Carl's recognizing, Right, And that's what Carl is laying out, and that is accurate, whether or not you like it. Right, individuals, he argues, only gains significance by working for and supporting the state. So again, while he's sort of there's a degree to which, even as an anarchist, you could be like, oh, this guy's right in a lot of ways. But where he differs is he's like, and that's great, it's good

that it works this way. It's cool. It's cool that the state arbitrarily decides what makes a person right. And he argues that this is good because individuals only gain significance when working for and supporting the state. In other words, you mean nothing outside of your place within the state and its power structure. He also argues the law is not based on power. Power is based on law, and

he seems to believe. Again there's this almost spiritual knack order that the law naturally moves to better represent right, which is weird. Now, not long after this Schmidt gets married, or at least he thinks he does. They they have like a wedding, but Kyrie loses her passport and so they can't get it certified.

That's that's on us to decide, And we've decided no because she doesn't have a passport, so she has to They're like heading back to their house to finally be together in like their marital home, and she has to suddenly when like this clerk comes out and I was like wait, wait, wait, the passport's both like she doesn't

have a passport. I can't do this. They have to bundle her off to live with his mom so that they don't live in sin like unlike what's supposed to be their wedding, and Carl starts having panic attacks about the fact that Kari is now living with his family. Quote, she is in the company of my hateful, mean and vicious mother and my spoiled little sister Anna. Only father makes life easy for her. I don't know what will

become of me. She's like, she's gonna leave me because my family sucks and she has to live with him now.

It's the complete opposite, so they don't matter essentially. So it's interesting that he keeps doing this.

And it's like, oh, yeah, okay, so your parents are like also have this problem, right, and they passed it on to you, and you'd think it's just you and your family that you're the only people who have ever thought. Of course you do this period, it's nineteen thirteen. Where would you have read about panic attacks?

doesn't consider her legitimate. Marrying notes that in the wake of these he writes, quote, saw the two Jews Jacobson and Lessing bickering and was glad I no longer have anything to do with Rosenbaum, who's another Jewish friend of his. I don't want contact with Eisler anymore either, So he like sees these two Jewish guys he knows arguing and he's like, Ah, it's just like it's just what those kind of people do. I'm never going to have any contact with them again. Now, this is not going to

be a permanent state. So it shows that bigotry is this thing that he comes back to and discards and comes back to. But it's not a stable state for him. At this point because he and Eisler are going to be dear friends again and for a considerable like he will continue to talk about him well, and others have other Jewish friends after this period. The point is that his racism is a erratic, and it's correlated both with stressful times in his life and also these flights of fantasy.

Right well, he'll write out this anti Semitic screed and then he'll declare to his diary, I'm going to get into politics and become a powerful man. And then the next day he'll write about how he and Kari are going to have a son named Johan and he's going to grow up to be a cardinal. And then like a couple of days later, he's going to be like, I'm still too broke. I can't marry my wife. This

is never We're never going to have our kid. And he's so fucking Catholic that when he becomes convinced he's not going to be able to have a kid with this woman for financial reasons and because of her legal issues, he writes in his diary, I am a murderer. I am destroyed, have turned into nothing and have murdered the soul of a child. Where should I seek refuge in the Catholic Church? But I can't, I might as well go to the great Dalai Lama of Tibet or some

Mexican god. And first off, bro like, even in this period, most Mexicans are Catholic too, Like just as a heads up, like it's the same most of them. It's the same god you're worshiping, right, Like, maybe you haven't read those books.

it's ax. We contains well on some things. Again, he also thinks Mexican people don't aren't Catholic in a large part obviously, Like there's religions in that part of the world that have existed before Catholicism, but at this period of time that's the dominant religion is the same as his. Anyway, he comes to see himself as a gnostic after this point, in other words, someone who believes that there's this like

malicious God that created the world. Right. I think it's he's basically believes like the demiurge is what other people worship as God, and like what these other folks would I always raised to believe is God is actually this evil being that just wants to fuck with us right now, the fact that he comes around to this beliefs heretical belief is entirely centered upon his own financial and career frustrations. Right before the war breaks out, his wife gets caught shoplifting. Again.

This lady, she's always stealing stuff. She's the best, she's the best. She gets caught stealing shit, and it causes like a year worth of problems for him. Is he can't afford to pay the cost, and like he's just trying to keep her out of jail. So it's this whole constant, like stressful issue on him. The fact that his wife got caught shoplifting, his con artist wife.

aren't unique in this period. Now, this is another massive moment for most future German fascists, but not for Carl. Karl is not a German patriot. Hitler is like Hitler is he strong. He's there when the Kaiser announces the start of the war in Berlin. He's part of there's pictures of it, you can find him in the crowd. He's like enraptured. He describes this like religious experience. He's so overjoyed to be going to war on behalf of the fatherland. And Carl's like, fuck this illegal war, this

is Prussian bullshit. The Prussians orchestrated all of this. The rest of us Germans want nothing to do with this. I certainly go to war with the French. My families have French. Fuck these people, fuck all of this. This is illegal as hell, right, So he is not at all, And in fact, he writes in his diary, I hope the French win, and he'll be doing that throughout the war, like I just hope the I just want the enemy to win. So this is done. This is not a

patriot right, absolutely not at all. So it's interesting because he's going to be so influential to the fascist movement. He has the opposite reaction of basically all of these other guys. Now that said, he knows the war is wrong and dumb, but he doesn't protest it, and he's not a conscientious objector. He just doesn't really care about it. One gets the feeling he fought. He thinks that, like the whole conflict, is something that less intelligent people should

care about, like not him. He has a lot of thinking about what law is to do, right. He doesn't volunteer immediately like a lot of people do, like a lot of his friends do, and he seems to be hoping like, maybe the war will end quickly and I just will get to miss out on this. Right now, you can contrast this to his best friend Eisler, right again. Iisler is a Hungarian national who desperately wants to be German. He's othered both because he's Hungarian and because he's Jewish.

And he had tried repeatedly before the war to become a naturalized German citizen, and every time he does it, the authorities are like, nah, we don't need you. And he wants this in part because he's getting his doctorate and he can't actually get confirmed as a PhD or work in law unless he's a naturalized German citizen. He wants to work in the German government, right he wants to be a part of the court system, and he has to be a citizen. And the chief of police.

Before the war, the chief of police in Hamburg denies Eisler's citizenship petition by writing, quote, due to the Hungarian Jewish descent of the applicant and his father's criminal record, that he couldn't approve the application. His dad had done some petty crimes as a younger man. So when the war breaks out, Eisler applies again, and this time the German government is number one. The authorities who had been

like turning him down are in the military now. So it's like people who are younger and maybe a little less bigoted, who are you making that call? And they're like, all right, you want to join the army, we'll let you do that, and we'll make you a citizen. But you have to sign a paper promising you'll never work for the government. Right, You'll never go after a government career, or try to take the state exam to be like

considered a doctor in Germany. Right, if you do those things will make you a citizen and you can join

the army. And Eisler agrees. That's how badly this kid wants to be a German patriot, which is such a bummer, given not only what Germany's going to do to Jewish people not all that far from now, but given what's going to happen to him, Because all this kid wants is to be accepted as German, and he feels like, ah, the military, they can't they can't utter me if I'm in the military, right, they have to respect me as a as a patriotic German citizen if I serve in combat.

So despite the fact that Schmidt had pretty recently written a lot of racist about Eisler, he writes at the time of having great worry for his friend when Isisler joins the army and notes, if only he is not killed in action, the dear old fellow. Unfortunately, Fritz Eisler joins a field artillery unit and he is deployed immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. He is killed by shrapnel

almost immediately, you know his battery is firing. Allied counter battery fire hits nearby and he gets like gutted by a piece of metal. Merroring writes Schmidt was moved by

his untimely death. As a last favorite to his friend, he edited one of Eisler's posthumous papers, and he like goes to Isisler's family to express his concerns to help them deal with his dead friends, like you know, stuff and get He becomes almost immediately very good friends with Fritz's brother George, and the two will remain friends until

nineteen thirty two. Like he kind of switches his best friendship to George Eisler and it will stay that way almost until Hitler rises to power, and he gets actually much closer with the Isslers. After Fritz dies, he stays over at their house and he writes that he's like surprised, Wow, these Jews are like a normal German family. I didn't

think that that was the case with Jewish people. And at the end of this, George's father is like, hey man, how much money do you need to continue until you're able to get to the money making part of your career and writes him a check. So again, even up to this point, this family is treating him like a son, like Karl Schmidt probably doesn't have an academic career without the Isislers backing him up, like they really do take

him in. Now he has to join the military not long after this, because he's a young German Man and they don't have enough of those very quickly. Germany has a lot of young German men ineen late nineteen fourteen, and then a couple months after August a lot less German young men.

try in other ways to delay his service. Bala Chrishnan writes while he was in basic training, he claimed to have sustained a back injury, and the way Balachristian writes it suggests that he doesn't really think this is a real injury, or that, like Schmidt, plays it up to delay things. But once again luck is on his side. Schmidt's first mentor Van Kalker, because he's like a respected gentleman. He joins the army and they're like, well, you're a major.

And obviously he had spent time in the military before, because everyone does. Basically he had done like his period of national service. So when he joins the full time army, he's made a major by virtue of the fact that he is a very very respected professor, and because he's got this position he's able to get Schmidt a place

in the Prince's personal regiment. Now, this is not safe. Actually, if you're in like the Prince's regiment in the German Army, you're going to see heavy combat because the Prince wants glory and he's going to send boys today to do it. A lot of his colleagues get killed. But Van Kalker is like na, na, No, Karl Schmidt is not someone

we want to feed to machine guns. This guy is smart, He's going to be somebody, and he gets him a job in the headquarters section, basically shuff fulling paperwork around, helping to like handle organizational tasks. And as a result, for the entirety of the war, Schmidt is never particularly close to like direct fire. I don't even think he's very close to indirect But he's never in serious danger, right,

you know, like elevated from his civilian life. But he is not fighting, right, And he's not fighting because this mentor again comes in and probably saves his life. Right to be like, Nanna, this guy, we don't want this guy up at the front. It's just a waste.

the family line, right, Like, that's that's the idea. They're really they're rubber stamping a lot of marriage at this stage.

the world works. He describes life in barracks as a hell where he was forced to endure the stink of plebes because he had and you know he had previously he had been like, well, human value depends upon how you are serving the state, And now that he is serving the state as effectively its property, he's like, oh, but that's awful. That sucks. Ass. No, this can't be how things work. Fuck, this is what's serving the states, Like this is invaluable at all. I hate the state.

But no, he writes that he hated quote the god of this world, the law for its destruction of the individual. Interesting. Interesting, this is he's not gonna stay consistent to this, But it is very funny to me that like the moment he's made to live with his beliefs, he's like, oh, well, obviously this is a terrible idea.

that's okay. And Carl's like, what the fuck. That's not what you taught me at all, Like this isn't how it's supposed to work, and he writes he has become unfaithful to himself. It interesting. Schmid's private musings during this period read almost like protest literature quote. I was mad with anger about the Prussians, about militarism. I felt like committing the most ostentatious insubordinations. So he's like, I really wanted to rebel, but he doesn't. Obviously he's not that guy.

As part of his early service, he goes to Dacau, which at that point we know what Daca is going to be later it's a munition's plant at this stage. And he writes and he's talking about like looking at the conditions in these arms factories, and he says, how ghastly for an individual to be sitting in such a prison. And it's interesting to be that, like that's his attitude about Dacau when it's like an arms facility. But he is going to be one of the early. You know

people who helps to fill up concentration camps. Yeah.

the German state. Germany is falling apart as soon as there's like a peace happens, and this whole order, the legal order that his whole life been based on, looks like it's just going to crumble, Like the legal code is going to be gone, the government, the Kaiser's already gone. What the fuck's going to be left? And part of what's happening is that there is a socialist revolution right after peace that like comes pretty close to succeeding in

some areas. Units of demobilized soldiers the Frei Corps cracked down and start massacring leftist intellectuals with the direct endorsement of the right and the tacit support of social democratic politicians who are like, yeah, it's ugly, but we otherwise we won't get to have our democratic state if we don't let you know, if we don't let the right

murder all of these leftists. Schmidt is lecturing at a university by this point, and during the late war years he'd begun to receive pay for his work as an actademic. His office was broken into by what Balakrishnan describes as a band of revolutionaries who are just like, yeah, a bunch of young people who are trying to like overthrow the local government. And while he's at a cafe, an officer sitting next to him at a table gets assassinated,

and he reacts by growing terrified of disorder. It's not just that he's like horrified by these revolutionary moments that are so chaotic and scary. He also recognizes, oh, when things fall apart, you have the chance to dramatically remake society, including the chance to remake the law and the concept of order, maybe in a way that makes more sense.

And that's what he's thinking at the time. And so it's also noteworthy that even though he doesn't like the leftist, you know, kind of uprisings that are happening, they scare him. He's not an obsessive anti Marxist at this point either, And in fact, Balachristian notes that it's there's not really any anti Marxism in his writings from this period, which he describes as quite simply puzzling. It's like, really weird that, given how he felt about this, he didn't go on

any rants about Marxism. It's just kind of an odd fact here, and it may have something to do with the fact that he sees this as more a structural thing of like, well, yeah, it's the left doing it right now, but when things collapse, opportunity is made for people of radical beliefs, and so it's the factor. The reality of collapse is more to blame for than anything, and he's more interested than like ranting about the left. He's more interested in figuring out how to take advantage

of those moments right now. This period of chaos would inspire his first great and truly influential book, Political Romanticism, published in nineteen nineteen. This is a pre fascist work, because again, fascism isn't really off the ground all the way yet. Of what we would call fascist polemics, he's basically listing all of the ideologies that exist in the world at the time, from socialism and monarchism to liberalism, as flawed. He calls them dead romanticism right like these are,

and he calls conservatism that right. Conservatism is just this dead romantic idea right in fact, expresses nothing but contempt for conservative reactionaries who in that period sought the Kaiser's return, So he's like, you're just looking back on a period that was never very good and you're not serious thinkers, right. But he's also looking at the liberals in Weimar and being like, well, you're idolizing this democracy that number one was birthed in blood, and number two isn't going to

succeed in fixing anything. Now. The core of Schmid's rage is reserved not for the political class, but for the kind of bohemian artists and creatives who'd made up his pre war friend and social circle. We might see this as an early attack on the same sort of like shallow Hollywood liberal elites that would become such a hallmark of conservative politics in our era. And I want to quote from an article on the power of Karl Schmidt

by Richard Cohen. Schmidt reduced and attacked all contemporary political art alternatives to fascism, especially liberalism, but also socialism as mere romanticism because of their attachment to free speech, discussion, and hence parliamentarianism, which smidt owing to his decisionism, dismissed

his empty chatter, asking a deeper inability to decide. He labels such politics romantic for the same reason, because the romantics are essentially indecisive esteats, fluttering from one fashion to another, always stimulated and excited, but never committed and engaged. So that's kind of interesting to me that he is he's rejecting all of these different belief systems as based in sorts of fantasies about how things should be and not

a real understanding of how people are right. That's the conclusion he's come to at this point.

stick to it. Like Schmidt, he's kind of got this Walter subcheck from the big Lebowski attitude of like you gotta have an ethos. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you spell it out right.

name on every tongue. Europe begins at slow drive to the brink, and Schmidt is initially distracted by the collapse of his marriage to an extremely obvious KHN woman, and you know, things sour and Carl kind of finds out that car Carrie's been lying to him the whole time. It takes ten years, but in nineteen twenty two he files for an annulment on the grounds of wilful descent.

that fascist today, I'll do. He keeps a diary of every time he comes, like he's like he's charting his ejaculations. His motherfucker would have been no fap so fucking hard or like, I don't know what is their speaker of the house who like talks about when he comes and doesn't with his son, like he's they're all this.

What he does do is increasingly analyze and start to pick out the obvious flaws in the democratic system of Weimar, and he begins to lay out in a book a theory for exactly why liberal democracy is doomed and how the right can take advantage of these fundamental holes in liberal democracy to smash liberalism, gain power and destroy democracy.

In nineteen twenty three, the year that putsch Schmidt writes this about the post war Wilsonian order imposed on Europe, the history of political and state theory in the nineteenth century could be summarized with a single phrase, the triumphal march of democracy. No state in the Western European cultural

world withstood the extension of democratic ideals and institutions. And he writes this in like a mournful way, right that it's almost like you can't stop it, and you know you've got Mussolini by this point in Italy, but Hitler is seen as like an upstart, weirdo discontent, and there is this attitude that like democracy is obviously on the march, and Schmidt he picks out, he's like, looking at this the way fucking the rebels are looking at the death

Star plans. And he finds a vulnerability in liberal democracy that's easy to exploit, and he writes his next book about it. That book is called The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and it comes out alongside economic and social chaos that's gripping Weimar right. And I'm going to quote from Richard Cohen here. The new crisis of democracy, he argued, stem precisely from its victory over monarchy. During that struggle, democracy

and liberalism were basically co extensive. To believe in popular sovereignty was to believe in the necessity of the replacement of absolute monarchy with regime characterized by elections, free public debate, and legal rights. But in Schmid's mind, this connection is far more historical happenstance than conceptual necessity, and that democracy properly construed cannot be seen as requiring rights and even

universal suffrage in the way that liberals understand them. A government is democratic, Schmidt argues, if it bases its legitimacy on support from the people's will. But this depends on how you define the people and choose to assess their will. Every democracy depends on excluding some people, most notably foreigners, from participating in the selection of its leaders. That means, by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before

the law. Instead, the idea of equality and democracy really means equality amongst the people in a political community that shares a certain identity and core agreements. There has never been a democracy that did not recognize the concept foreign and that could have realized the equality of all men, he wrote in a nineteen twenty six preface to the second edition of his book, Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal, but unequals

will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity, and, second, if the need arises, elimination and eradication of heterogenea. Do you see what he's saying here.

with guns, with violence. There's the threat of violence behind building every one of those borders. If you cross this border, or at least cross it in the wrong way, force will be used against you. Every democracy does this, and it does this not just in terms of who can enter the country, but who gets to vote. And so even if you have you're saying nice things in your constitution about these are universal rights of men. These are rights that extend to everyone. These aren't just rights that

extend to people who are citizens in the country. These are universal rights that our society universally recognizes. That doesn't necessarily mean squat because what you do is the reactionary is you find that border wherever it exists, and you start pushing inward. And as you start pushing inward from that border, you will start fracturing the democratic consensus that exists until you can destroy democracy. And that's how you gain power as a reactionary movement within a liberal That's

how you destroy liberalism. You find the border that they placed and you start pushing inwards. Right, that's what Carl realizes, and that's what he lays out, and it works today as well as it did back then.

But we've never tried right. Ultimately, we haven't. The most potent part of Cohen's essay, he described Schmidt's academic work in the late nineteen twenties as creating a blueprint quote adaptable virtually anywhere for using reactionary politics to gain control of a destroyed democracy from the inside while pretending to

be in service of that democracy. Now, elements of this had been discussed by several thinkers, particularly in the context of the US during the era of slavery, but Schmid's big one of his big contributions is that he recognizes race and religion can be used to push that border in. But they don't matter. That's not the only way to delineate the enemy. All the matters that you are delineating an enemy, right and pulling them out of being considered

part of the body politic. They can be Jews, they can be black, they could be trans they can be whoever. But what matters ultimately is that you're picking an enemy, and you are identifying them as not a part of us, right, And that's that's the ballgame, right, and less than or and less than you know, and a danger to us.

concept of the political quote. Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to human beings effectively according to friend

and enemy. So he has first this recognition of that, like liberalism, inherently liberal democracy always draws a border, you start pushing in him from that border, and then he refines us to the idea that, like all politics is about defining friend and enemy right, And that's how you gain power, and that's how you enshrine your power right. And once you have, once you have identified a group of citizens as the enemy and you gain power, you exclude them from the franchise. You turn them into a

domestic enemy, which you can then purge and destroy. And that's how you maintain power. Per an article in The New Statesman by Samuel Earle, that a specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. Schmidt declared his fellow, anti democratic and decorated soldier Ernst Junger described what followed as a mind that silently explodes. For Schmidt, the friend enemy antithesis was integral for politics in three senses. The enemy needed

to be something different in alien. Opposing such an enemy was the essence of identity, and the implicit combat that followed these enemies posed an existential threat. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. Schmid wrote, war was therefore an ever present possibility. And again, the Nazis are doing a lot of this before he writes

about it. But number one, his initial work on sort of this strategy of how to push it on the border influences how the Nazis proceed. But also he is explaining what they're doing in an intellectual way that is accurate, and doing so in a way that's also not ideological, in that he's explaining and describing an ideology, but he's not doing it as a Nazi propagandist. He's doing it as an academic right, and he's doing it in a way that provides a blueprint for other people.

which is this crusade against an enemy. Right that we almost we need this as people. We need to have enemies, which is a fundamental part of fascism. Right, we need enemies in order to be fully human, like an enemy to fight, to destroy, to rally against. Now, Schmidt was not an early Nazi. He was not a particular admirer

of Hitler. In the early nineteen twenties, he described Hitler as a hysteric In nineteen thirty two, the same year he published the Concept of the Political He argued that the Weimar government could and should use the military to destroy Nazism, but as the Nazis began taking power, he changed his tune quickly from a mix of you know, he wants to protect himself, but most importantly because high ranking Nazis start to take him seriously as a thinker.

And he had been doing okay, his books had been doing better. But he really starts to become famous because there's some high up Nazis who like what he has to say. And his particular backer, the guy who's going to make him give him the opportunity to be the rich intellectual he's always wanted to be. Right, who's going to make his life possible is Hermann Gering. Right now, Gering is about to be He's this World War One pilot, like a fighter pilot hero. He literally takes over the

red Baron squadron after he gets like shot down. That's what Garing does in the war. He gets fucked up and horribly injured during the Munich Beer Hall push and addicted to painkillers. Relatable there it is, But when Hitler takes power. He's the Reich's marshal. Right, He's going to lose favor throughout the Third Reich, but he is on paper the guy who, if Hitler dies is supposed to take over. Right. So that's the degree to which like Garring is held in esteem at the start of the Reich,

and he takes a liking to Schmid's work. He's like, this guy, this guy gets it. This guy, and we need to bring this guy in and have him be like our court philosopher. Right, He's kind of become because Nazi intelligencia had been following him for a while. He's a little bit of like a Curtis Jarvin figure, right, where he doesn't really have as clear a goal as Jarvin does. But there are a lot of these guys who become Nazi intelligencia who are following him for a

while and respect him for a while. For his part, Carl's part, once it becomes clear that the Nazis are going to win, and he's like, well, if some of these guys like me, I can get rich and powerful, That's what I've always wanted. So he starts sucking up and he writes that Gering was the right type for these times. As he becomes a darling for the far right, Schmidt continues to live a life well out of line with the stated morals of the movement for which he

is becoming the chief intellectual theoretician. Per the Claremont Review of books, Guilt and eros combined for Schmidt in Carl Theodore Dreer's silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc with an almost sadistic use of close ups, Dreyer depicts the doomed heroine a daughter of God, charged with being a child of the devil as she pleads that she has only fought for God and country. In nineteen twenty eight,

Schmidt watched the film a dozen times. Marring reports that on several occasions in both Berlin and Rome, he picked up a prostitute to watch it with him. It seems that his longing for redemption from his own psychic turmoil fueled a need for a higher absolute obligation, which could only come from a commitment to the law promulgated by

God or by the state. So there's this attitude. Maybe it's because he's got this kind of compulsive sexuality that he can't just be like eh, people just fuck you know. He has to he has to like condemn himself and find absolution in this idea of law or the state as God as representing some higher natural truth in order to gain absolution. It's also just funny that he's constantly watching this Joan of Arc movie while picking up prostitutes, Like you want to go watch jodah Arc. Speaking of

watching silent films, here's and I got nothing. I got nothing. I don't know how to do a fucking ad transition in these episodes. Look, go to Rome, meet somebody nice, watch a movie about a French lady getting tortured, you know, have fun.

of the reich Right and describing them as enemies. Right, And for him, this is a political term, and this is about this one year after he breaks off his friendship with Eisler. But he does write, you as an individual can be friends with someone who is a political enemy, because again that's a political state. You have to treat them as an enemy when doing politics. But it doesn't

mean you can't like them personally. Like we're also accepting that it means killing them at a stage, So maybe you can't, i.

also spoke glowingly of several Jews in his life. Most crucially, he was completely dependent economically upon the kindness of a Jewish family who treated him as a second son. Right, Like that's a big deal in this period of time, is that, like there's these this family that keeps him alive. But now that he was a prominent Nazi academic whose writings were not just cited but were being used to make law under the Third Reich, he starts being critiqued

by like Jewish academics. I mean, but this happens before the Third Reich is established, And this is part of what radicalizes him. Is that in the late twenties, when it becomes clear that he's like writing in favor of elements of fascism, there's several different Jewish academics critique his book, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and he goes on a rant and complains for Jews against one Christian. They attack me and all the journals and no one notices what's

going on. So that's a big part. If you're wondering what's the missing piece here between him like dumping his Jewish friends and going full Nazi, Well, it's because some Jewish professors say mean things about this book. He writes later that year, a Jewish professor was being considered for hiring by his university, and Schmid wrote in to call

his would be colleague a disgusting, craven diletant Jew. So by the mid twenties he's very consistently racist, but he's still friends with Eisler right up until the thirties, and he's still able to make exceptions in his head. Unlike most Nazis. The justification he gives for his animus is not racial, right. He is someone who was like, if I think his belief initially at least is that like, well, Jews can convert in stuff, and then I don't have

to treat them that way. But his issue with them is that they tend to be liberal, right, and so he interprets the battle that is, he's laying out the lions how you win a battle against liberal democracy, and he describes it as a battle against the Jewish spirit. Per an article by Benjamin Ballant for the Claremont Review of Books, his friend enemy distinction now fed into the contrast he drew between the homogeneous German Vulk and the

alien Jew. He hastily severed his friendships and associations with Jews, including his longtime publisher Ludwig Fuchtwanger, and the young scholar of Hobbs and Spinoza Leo Strauss, whom he had recommended to the Rockefeller Foundation for a fellowship that allowed Strauss to leave Germany a year before. By the early thirties, as he moved from scholarship to polemics, Schmidt no longer directed his counter revolutionary fervor against Weimar anarchism, and by anarchism,

the fact that the state doesn't work very well. So he cuts off all of these academic friends, including have you heard of Leo Strauss?

and he becomes a core intellectual mind behind neo conservatism. Right. So again the way in which this guy, even though like obviously there's no love lost between them, once Schmidt goes full Nazi because Strauss is Jewish. Right. So, once the Third Reich gets into power and Schmidt has the chance to actually be making laws, he warps his personal politics in order to fit the regime that's now in place. No longer does he talk about the state working towards

some sort of natural law. Instead, he begins to argue that political sovereignty is constituted in the will of the leader or dictator, who was sovereign and who had no kind of check and could abide no kind of check on his power. Per an article on the power of Karl Schmidt by Richard Cohen, the dictator's will is arbitrary and must be arbitrary. This is not a fault for the fascist, but the highest virtue. The dictator's will is a pure will, unchecked and unregulated by any exterior consideration

beyond itself, like a god. Like the God. Only as such is it a truly sovereign will. The dictator can never be challenged. In other words, because there are no grounds upon which to challenge him. Thus, any challenge, any criticism, no matter how rational, realistic, or goodwilled, is by definition betrayal from the standpoint of all allegedly legitimizing authorities, whether populist, hereditary, religious, esthetic, utilitarian, economic,

or what have you. The dictator's decision is beyond reproach. Force, power and might are the dictator's first and final resort, and submission is the only appropriate response. Rule, call it law or not, is to dictate order and command. Thus the ubiquitous military trappings of fascism, however ludicrous, the dictator wearing battle fatigues or dressed uniforms adorned with metals, the pomp and ceremony, the military parades, and the displays of

weapons in times of quiet, as well as war. Without criteria or standards, the dictator is sovereignty itself, no matter what he says or does, or the reverse, precisely in what he says and does, as he says and does it always at the moment of his willing, so he's gone from the only legitimate states have a constitution that lays out what the rules are, and they follow that constitution and law is always working towards some sort of natural law to the law is whatever the leader says

it is. Right, human will creates law. Right, that the will of a specific human and put in charge of a people creates law. Right. That's where Schmidt has ended. You know, now that democracy has been destroyed, now that Hitler's in power, and he's working backwards to a degree at this point from the fact that Hitler has taken power. Right. But this is again like he's he's kind of describing

what's happening to some extent after the fact. But he's also he comes to understand and justifies sovereignty as a permanent state of emergency or a state of exception. Right, Fascism is like the normalization legalization of arbitrary power. So we even do see some of like his early thinking on like how judges work and the kind of arbitrariness at the center of the legal system. Like this is where he winds up right that this is kind of the ultimate political system. It's great.

is actually perfectly legal. Right. He publishes an article called the Feuror protects the Law, which argues that what Hitler had done was the highest justice available right quote the fewer protects the law against the forms of abuse when in the moment of danger he immediately creates law by force of his character, as fewer as the supreme legal authority. And again, I think we have to look at maybe where we're headed with some of these courts questioning the

decisions being made by Trump. By Dick tot this is already what Trump's people believe Trump creates law by force of his character. Right, And you know, Schmidt has provided a justification for purging people in situations like this, right, because the fewer has to protect the law by carrying out a legal acts of violence. Because he then creates a new law. And so the concept of law fundamentally is protected by the fewer doing this.

He gives a speech where he blames the Jews for hollowing out the German, healthy, Volcish German way of thinking of the state, and he calls for a purification of libraries that includes a separate system of citations for Jewish authors, right, so he is explicitly endorsing book bannings, the purging of books written by friends and colleagues of his, a separate way of classifying them because obviously Jewish law is a danger to good Germans. Right.

all of this. Now, unfortunately for Schmidt, this in nineteen thirty six, this this speech he gives is going to be like the high watermark of his power in the Third Reich, because once the Nazis are running everything, they're like, we don't really need an academic with a mind of his own, right, we got it, We've got it. Now,

we're done thinking. You know, and this guy, he's not really loyal to Hitler, right, So in December of thirty six, the SS newspaper publishes a hit piece on him, accusing him of being a Hegelian, which is basically true and a false anti semi which really isn't he talked to friends about like fleeing Germany. He was like, maybe I need to leave, Maybe this is dangerous, but it's not

something he ever seriously considered. And he does have some defenders who will be like, well, look he thought about leaving, and like, I don't know if that counts to me. Hannah Hannah Arnt would later write about schmidz Ouster from the Nazi Party as a fairly standard move the replacing of sympathetic but skilled people with toadies who are utterly loyal to the system, even if they're not very good at anything. Quote from a rent And this is I

think an important one, especially for right now. Totalitarianism and power invariably replaces all first rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. Nothing familiar there.

But by the time the war ends and the Allies begin to occupy the ruins of the Third Reich, his last public identity had been as a Nazi intellectual who was participating in the purging of intellectuals. And so he gets arrested by the Americans in September of nineteen forty five. He's locked up for like a month or so, and you know, he's trying to put a brave face on it. He tells his wife, like, I'm not going to collapse like some of these other guys who killed themselves or whatever,

Like I'm going to hold up. You know, they'll realize I'm not guilty of anything. And unfortunately he's kind of right, you know, he gets released. He gets arrested again in March and April of nineteen forty seven, and he's brought to Nuremberg, where he gets interrogated by the US Chief Council at Nuremberg Robert Kempner four times over the course of about a month or so, five weeks, and you know, he's basically Kempner's trying to figure out is there anything

we can go after this guy for? Like how much is he responsible for? How many crimes did he directly commit? And Schmidt is like, look, I wasn't trying to support all the horrible things the Nazis, do you know, I'm not a Nazi ever? Really, I'm an intellectual adventurer. That's how he describes himself as, like, look, I was just asking questions. Yeah, he's such a piece of shit. We should have shot this guy in the fucking face.

do not want to talk about that at all. When did you renounce the devil? Kimpner asked nineteen thirty six. And I believe that he didn't like Hitler? Right, because he doesn't. He's never an intellectual respector of Hitler particularly. But this is bullshit, right, Like you participated in purging your colleagues. You were so psyched that people were listening

to you. That's all that matters. You only renounce the devil because the SS got angry at you and you lost your influence, right, Like this man never had a change of heart.

then in an increasingly brazen manner. Schmidt dies in nineteen eighty five, and he lives to see the beginning of his second rise to prominence. And one of them, you've heard of Marine Lapinn over in France. The she just got incarcerated for a bunch of shit, but she's like the leader of their fascist party. Her father founded the party, her father is a Schmidt acolyte. Her father the whole blueprint of the French far right is directly taken from Schmidt.

That's why it's so centered on immigrants and immigration right, Like they are very consciously the French nation, the national party that Lapin leads is their whole blueprint is Schmidt. Schmidt is the guy. Like they are openly citing and

quoting his writings at the very start of that party. Now, more to the point, there's another fella who becomes one of his acolytes, who finds Schmidt's writing and is like, oh, this is a really good blueprint for how to get in power as a reactionary movement and destroy a nascent liberal democracy. And that guy is named Alexander Dugan. Now Dugan is an old nationalist who is seen as the primary political philosopher of the Russian New Right, and he's

often called Putin's court philosopher right. These ideas are also a major backbone of how Putin gets into power, of the strategy he uses, and how a lot of his adherents and the new Russian New Rights see what they're doing. He's in the French far right, he's in the Russian far right. That kind of coalesces around Putin and in the US. The main vehicle for Schmid's ideas getting into the halls of power is through the work of a

thinker who had once been his colleague, Leo Strauss. Strauss, a Jewish scientist, fled to France when Hitler took power on a Rockefeller scholarship, and Karl Schmidt had been his adviser. Here's a very good piece in the website libmd that

traces out the connections here. There are very close ties between the conservative political scientist Patrick denan Catholic University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Strauss adept and winner of the Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation, and Vice President J. D. Vance and he provides a couple of quotes from Schmidt and from Vests. One is, this is a Schmidt quot from nineteen twenty two, authority proves that it does not need to be right in order to be right. And JD.

Vance saying judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. And you might even add in some of those statements that Vance made about like Haitian like literal lies about Haitian refugees, where it's like it doesn't matter what's true, you make it true by having power. Right. There's another quote here from Schmidt in thirty two, the rule of law means nothing other than the legitimization of a certain status. Quote.

These are all very idea. You could hear basically, these fucking quotes being trumpeted, you know, among trumpets among these

like unitary executive theory guys. And that's kind of it's both Schmidt's thinking first starts to influence the American right in a major way, with like the neocons who are kind of influenced by him, partly through Strauss guys like Bill Crystal Right and David Brooks Right, these guys who are very influenced by Strauss, but by the time Trump comes around and things have gotten too extreme for them. The like people like Curtis Jarvitt will just quote Carl Schmidt.

He's a huge fan of Schmidt, Like, he brings him up constantly.

just quote Strauss, you don't have to water it down at all. You can just go pere Schmidt. Baby, yeah, yeah, that's right, right to the source.

nearly as much about his actual education. Was clearly an incredibly intelligent person, right, Just the degree of success he had both as a dictator and as an insurgent leader, presumably like Fidel Castro. Right, that's a smart man, right, Yeah, It's a man who was a great degree of cunning, you know, and understanding. And I do think there are very smart people around. I don't think Peter Thiel's dumb. I think he's nuts, and I think he has some blind spots and a freak, but he understands how to

do certain things very well. There's kinds of intelligence that he has. I think Trump has kinds of intelligence. He's been working at this for twenty something years. So I don't know, like learned I think they I think I guess the answer is they tend to learn the things they need to learn to get where they want to go. Right, They've expertise, right does Donald Trump?

It's that link is in my bio. And I have a stand up comedy special called Daddy Long Legs, which is available for free on YouTube. And this was a blast. I have so much respect for both of you. This is this is I don't I don't know if I've ever said this sentence. Is a great podcast, This is a great show. This is a fantastic show. I know no one, no one does what you do, so I appreciate a.