The Temptations of Carl Schmitt – by N.S. Lyons
And, given that the obligation of the state is to protect its group from all threats, external and internal, and because this group, by Schmitt s very definition of the political, must be a homogenously unified collective, then: As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide upon the domestic enemy. Which is why, Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy.
And no amount of moralistic hesitancy or liberal obfuscations about a politically neutral state can long delay the need to make this decision, Schmitt says, because everywhere in political history, in foreign as well as domestic politics, the incapacity or the unwillingness to make this distinction is a symptom of the political end. For if a people no longer possess the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.
For the state, and the statesman, The sole remaining question then is always whether such a friend-and-enemy grouping is really at hand, regardless of which human motives [have brought it about]. And, Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. Thus the highest political reality is those moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.
If portions of the American right have today turned to Schmitt as a guide, it may be because they now have plenty of reason to believe the purported procedural neutrality of the liberal technocratic state is nothing but the thinnest of veils covering an existential antagonism; that in truth the crucial political distinction has now already been made for them: they have been identified, in concrete clarity, as the enemies of the state.
See — this is why Schmitt is worth reading. The liberal regime must be a way of preserving some sort of equilibrium so one does not get to this Schmittian end point. This is why we have all the proceduralism.