Experts were shocked, shocked, by the assassination of healthcare executive Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024, for which a certain young white male Luigi Mangione is accused. But then the pollsters got busy and found that, on the Left, there was significant support for assassination. Zack Dulberg and Max Horder wrote all about it in City Journal.
We found that nearly one-third of Americans surveyed — and around half of those identifying as left-of-center — believe that the murder of certain public figures is at least somewhat justified.
Put me down as one who is not surprised. Why? Because I am a student of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his Concept of the Political. Schmitt writes that
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.
He continues:
[The enemy] is just the other, the stranger, and it is sufficient to his nature that he is existentially different and foreign in a particularly intense way, so that in extreme cases conflicts with him are possible.
Curtis Yarvin, who put me on to Carl Schmitt, makes it Real Simple. “There is no politics without an enemy.”
What do you do to an enemy? You assassinate him.
It is the conceit of moderns, according to Schmitt, to believe that if only society is properly ordered according to the right — usually “liberal” — principles, then war and enemies and assassinations will go away: peace. So we talk not of wars but of “pacifications,” and “peacekeeping missions.” Not to mention the war to end all wars.
But nothing has changed. When humans lose the race of economic competition, we often deride the winners as evil. And if that doesn’t do the trick we decide that corporate leaders are the enemy. If a healthcare provider disallows a vital medical procedure, there’s your enemy.
When everything is copacetic, then humans live in the economic world of being useful. But if things go wrong we decide that evil is abroad. And if things really go south then we are talking about enemy action.
brings the receipts on the last eight years of liberal enemy politics, from abuse of the intelligence system to criminalizing protests by the peasants, to “persecuting President Trump, his family, his aides and his supporters” and even raiding Trump’s home, to flooding the country with invaders.
The depth of the problem surfaced last week with three, count ‘em, three judges accused of criminal actions helping illegal aliens avoid the law.
Notice the real problem on the judge front. It is not that there are corrupt Democratic-adjacent judges cynically tipping the scales towards the Democrats. It is that too many Democratic-adjacent judges out there believe — really believe — The Narrative and think they are doing the Lord’s work by helping criminal illegal aliens — helpless undocumented migrants — dodge the law and avoid deportation.
Now, I believe in a better world, in which the eternal politics of warring ruling classes since the Dawn are dialed down to create space for ordinary human cooperation and thriving. But first we have the problem that male humans, like male chimpanzees, are programmed to defend the border and compete for access to females.
The problem was partly solved when agriculture enslaved human males into plowing, because managing a horse and plow is too hard for human females. And the cubicle economy has liberated human females into world-conquering girlbosses. That’s progress, according to the experts. Only, our educated ruling class seems to require world wars to prove its manhood. Think of World War I, World War II, the Cold War, World War COVID, World War Woke, and World War Climate.
Probably, as J.R.R. Tolkien prophesied, the present crisis will require a hero Hobbit like Frodo to capture the Progressive Ring of Power and have Elon Musk transport it to the Sun in Starship Sauron.
The first Starship mission to Occupy Mars will mark the end of the Age of Assassination.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
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