It’s Carl Schmitt’s Moment (James Traub, Summer 2025, Democracy)
Yet those, whether of the left or right, who wish to treat Schmitt as a guide need to fully reckon with what he meant by democracy in the absence of liberalism. With his flair for the resonant opening line, Schmitt begins The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy by declaring, “The history of political and state theory of the nineteenth century could be summarized with a single phrase: the triumphal march of democracy.” But by “democracy” Schmitt does not mean the political and civic institutions through which the wishes of voters shape the policy of the state, or even the deep conviction of human equality that Tocqueville regarded as the essence of American democracy. Schmitt means the idea of “the people” as supreme governing force that descends from the French Revolution. For Schmitt, as for Rousseau, the people are not a pluralistic group of individuals, but a single homogeneous mass possessed of a “collective will.” The leader seizes upon that will to guide the state. Democracy is thus incompatible with pluralism, which Schmitt describes as a form of “liberal individualism” that reduces the state to “a revocable service for individuals and their free associations.”
The whole panoply of individual rights set forth in the great democratic documents—and, indeed, individualism as an ethos—belongs, Schmitt argues, to liberalism rather than to democracy. The collective will is not the sum of individual wills individually expressed, but rather the single will of a unified people. That unity must be forged if it does not naturally exist. In one of his most brutal passages, Schmitt writes, “Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity, and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” The “other” must be excluded, he argues, whether by restrictions on immigration or the denial of citizenship.
Democratic homogeneity can in theory be based on any unifying characteristic. But in 1923 one did not have to look far for the deepest sources of identity, which Schmitt saw in “[t]he more naturalistic conceptions of race and descent…the speech, tradition, and consciousness of a shared culture and education.” Homogeneity meant racial identity. Schmitt goes on to ridicule the precept of “absolute human equality” as a meaningless article of liberal hypocrisy. A society that embraces people of every faith, doctrine, and language—that is, a pluralist society—will never cohere around a collective will. Democracy depends on exclusion of the other and of the non-equal. Behind this strange argument is Schmitt’s deep conviction that it is the state that ultimately creates the people rather than the people who create the state. A strong democracy is one in which the state has forged the people into a united force.
He had them at Identitarianism.