BERNSTEIN

Evil and the Corruption of Democratic Politics

In my introduction, I claimed that the post-9/11 discourse of good and evil is anti-political and anti-religious. This might seem to be counter-intuitive and perplexing. After all, whether we like it or not, there are frequent references to evil in the speeches of politicians, especially in the United States.¹ And it certainly appears to be extremely politically effective – in arousing deep emotions and political support. Furthermore, Bush and those in sympathy with him, are constantly “justifying” their discourse of good and evil by an appeal to their religious convictions and faith in the Almighty. So, it may well be asked, what does it mean to say that this new appeal to good and evil is anti-religious? I want to argue that when we probe the meaning of both democratic politics and religious faith, we see how the new discourse of good and evil corrupts both politics and religion. In this chapter I will focus on democratic politics, and in the following chapter on religion and faith.

In exploring the meaning of politics, I begin by drawing on the insights of Hannah Arendt. Arendt is now recognized as one of the most perceptive and challenging political theorists of the twentieth century, and I believe that many of her insights must be incorporated in any fully adequate conception of democratic politics.² She once claimed that all thinking “arises out of the actuality of incidents, and incidents of living experience must remain guideposts by which it takes its bearings if it is not to lose itself in the heights to which thinking soars, or in the depths to which it must descend.” The horrendous experience that profoundly shaped her thinking was her encounter with totalitarianism, especially Nazi totalitarianism. In an interview in 1964, Arendt was asked: “Is there a deﬁnite event in your memory that dates your turn to the political?” Without hesitating, she answered: “I would say February 27, 1933, the burning of the Reichstag, and the illegal arrests that followed during the same night.” From that moment on, she “felt responsible.” “That is, I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander” (Arendt 1994: 4). In the following months, Arendt helped others to escape from Nazi Germany. She also aided her Zionist friends. This activity led to the incident that forced her to ﬂee Germany. She was asked by her German Zionist friends to help document Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. Despite the danger, she readily agreed to help. Working in the Prussian State Library in Berlin to gather information, she was apprehended, arrested, and interrogated, but she never admitted what she was doing. Arendt was fortunate. She might have been murdered in the cellars of the Gestapo, but she was released after eight days of interrogation. Shortly afterward, she ﬂed from Germany. Like many German Jews, Arendt made her way to Paris, where, despite being a “stateless person,” she found work with Zionist organizations. In May 1940, “enemy aliens” living in Paris (mainly German Jews) were rounded up to be sent to detention camps. She was separated from her husband and sent to the women’s camp in Gurs. Arendt’s good luck continued. When the Nazis marched on Paris, there was a desperate fear that Gurs would be taken over by the victorious Nazis. But there was a short period of confusion when communication broke down. The quick-witted Arendt escaped from the camp with only her toothbrush. (Many of the women who remained in Gurs were eventually sent to Nazi death camps.) She rejoined her husband in a “safe” region of France. After securing visas to enter the United States, they made the perilous journey from Vichy France through Spain to Lisbon, where they ﬁnally sailed for New York in the spring of 1941.

I have told this story of Arendt’s ﬂight from Germany, from France, and ﬁnally from Europe, for several reasons. We can readily imagine what might have happened had she been interrogated by a less sympathetic German ofﬁcial, had she not escaped from Gurs, had she not received a visa to enter the United States, or had she been turned back at the Spanish border (as was her close friend, Walter Benjamin, who subsequently committed suicide). These contingencies meant the difference between life and death. The radical contingency of events that so deeply marked her own personal experience inﬂuenced all her thinking. Her encounter with Nazi totalitarianism became the central experience for her thinking about politics. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism – a complex book in which she set out to comprehend what had happened with the bursting forth of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism represented a complete break with tradition. Traditional political, moral, and social categories were no longer adequate to understand this new phenomenon, which she sharply distinguished from all previous forms of tyranny and dictatorship. Near the end of her study she explains why she thinks that totalitarianism represents an unprecedented radical or absolute evil.

What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are but laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly “scientiﬁc” standards; it is the concern of all men. Suffering, of which there has been always too much on earth, is not the issue, not is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake. (Arendt 1968: 458–9)

Totalitarianism seeks to make human beings as human beings superﬂuous – to transform them into creatures that are less than fully human.³ In the concentration and extermination camps, there was a systematic attempt to destroy human plurality, spontaneity, individuality and natality, and freedom. More generally, she claims that totalitarianism seeks to make all human beings superﬂuous – perpetrators and victims. This is what she calls absolute or radical evil, which “confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know.” Mass murder, genocide, unbearable large-scale suffering by innocent people, torture, and terror have happened before in history. But it was only with totalitarianism that there was a systematic attempt to obliterate people’s humanity. It is the specter of totalitarianism, in both its Nazi and Stalinist variants, that haunts and informs her understanding of politics. Totalitarianism seeks to eliminate plurality – the human condition that is the basis for action and politics. With totalitarianism there is “a much more radical liquidation of freedom as a political and as a human reality than anything we have ever witnessed before” (Arendt 1994: 408).

In order to understand what Arendt means by politics, we need to explore a network of closely interrelated concepts: debate, action, speech, plurality, natality, public space, tangible freedom, opinion, and judgment. Let me start by reﬂecting on what Arendt considers a truism – a truism that has all sorts of ramiﬁcations once these are teased out. She tells that “debate constitutes the very essence of political life” (Arendt 1977a: 241). We should note that, in what initially appears to be a casual remark, she does not say that the essence of political life is the control of the legitimate forms of violence, or even rulership. Rather, the essence of politics is debate, and we will see that this has a special meaning for Arendt.

Debate itself is a form of action, and “action” is the term that Arendt uses to designate the highest form of the vita activa (the active life). She distinguishes action from labor and work. Labor is the activity grounded in biological necessity, and work is the activity by which we make or fabricate artiﬁcial objects. What Arendt calls action is close to what Aristotle called praxis – the human activity that is involved in leading an ethical and political life. Action itself is intimately related to speech. “Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and speciﬁcally human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?’ This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and deeds” (Arendt 1958: 178). This disclosure of who somebody is takes place in a public space where we appear to each other and debate with each other. The very condition for such action and speech is what Arendt calls plurality. “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world” (Arendt 1958: 7).⁴ We have already encountered the theme of plurality in our analysis of the mentality of pragmatic fallibilism. But Arendt gives plurality a distinctive political meaning. Plurality involves individuality, distinction, and equality. There is distinctiveness about each and every individual who brings to a common world a unique perspective. And this plurality is rooted in our natality, the capacity to begin, to intiate acton spontaneously, “To act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to begin . . . to set something in motion” (Arendt 1958: 177). Human beings possess this capacity by virtue of their birth. Human plurality is the basic condition of action and speech, because they take place in between human beings in their singularity and plurality. Action, then, is, intrinsically, political activity, and it requires the creation of those public spaces within which individuals can encounter each other as equals and reveal who they are.

Drawing on her interpretation of the Greek polis, Arendt tells us that equality – or what the Greeks called isonomy – exists only in the political realm where human beings encounter each other as citizens. It was only in the polis – in the political sphere – “that men met one another as citizens and not as private persons . . . The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth” (Arendt 1963: 23).

Returning to the gloss on the claim that “debate is the very essence of politics,” we can now see why Arendt does not think of politics as primarily involving rulership, where one person, party, or class rules over another. Rather, politics involves collective action grounded in human plurality and the equality of citizens. In this public space, individuals debate and deliberate together; they seek to persuade each other about how to conduct their public affairs. Persuasion involves open debate among equals, in which they mutually seek to clarify, test, and purify their opinions. And persuasion itself is always fallible. Debate can be contentious and agonistic; it does not necessarily result in, or presuppose, consensus. But politics requires a commitment to persuasion – and when we fail to persuade, we must at least agree on fair procedures for making decisions.

We can deepen our understanding of what Arendt means by politics by seeing how she integrates the concepts of public tangible freedom and the type of power that spontaneously emerges when citizens act together. Referring to the philosophes of the Enlightenment, whose importance, she says, lies in their shrewd insight into the public character of freedom, Arendt tells us:

Their public freedom was not an inner realm into which men might escape at will from the pressures of the world, nor was it the liberum arbitrium which makes the will choose between alternatives. Freedom for them could exist only in public; it was a tangible, worldly reality, something created by men to be enjoyed by men rather than a gift or capacity, it was the man-made public space or marketplace which antiquity had known as the area where freedom appears and becomes visible to all. (Arendt 1963: 120–1)

Public freedom must be sharply distinguished from liberty. Liberty is always liberation from something, whether it is liberation from poverty, or from oppressive rulers, tyrants, and dictators. Liberty is a necessary condition for freedom, but not a sufﬁcient condition. Freedom is a positive political achievement of individuals acting together. And this tangible worldly freedom exists only as long as citizens deliberate, debate, and act together. The distinction between liberty and freedom is one of Arendt’s most important, enduring, and relevant political insights. Over and over again – especially after the fall of communism in 1989 – we have to learn the painful lesson that liberation from oppressive leaders is not sufﬁcient to bring about public freedom. One of the greatest disasters of the “political rhetoric” justifying the military invasion of Iraq is the (false) belief that liberation from the tyrannical oppression of Saddam Hussein would immediately initiate public freedom in Iraq and in the entire Middle East. This is a dangerous illusion. Public freedom requires far more than formal elections. It requires the cultivation of those practices such that individuals debate and deliberate together. It is only with the creation of such spaces that worldly freedom ﬂourishes.

Corresponding to this idea of tangible public freedom, Arendt develops her distinctive concept of political power. She criticizes the traditional idea of power, where power is understood as the domination of an individual or a group over other individuals or groups. Power, which she distinguishes from strength, force, authority, and violence, arises and grows spontaneously through participation of citizens. Power is not to be understood in a vertical fashion, where power means control or domination over some individual or group. It is a horizontal concept – power springs up when individuals act together.⁵

[P]ower comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another. Hence binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action. (Arendt 1963: 174)

So power, like public freedom, plurality, natality, action, speech, and debate, is woven into the fabric of Arendt’s understanding of politics.

Before turning to the question of how Arendt integrates her understanding of opinion and judgment into her conception of politics, I want to address an often-repeated criticism of her concept of politics. Some critics argue that Arendt bases her understanding of politics upon an idealized conception of the Greek polis that does not correspond even to the realities of ancient Greek life. Furthermore, whatever the merits of this conception of politics, it is not relevant to the complexities and harsh realities of contemporary politics and mass democratic societies. I think it is false to suggest that Arendt was interested primarily in an imagined “golden era” of the Greek city-state. There is nothing nostalgic or sentimental about her thinking. As I have already insisted, Arendt’s lifelong concern with politics had its roots in her insight that totalitarianism sought to destroy the very possibility of politics, freedom, and, consequently, our humanity. But, what is even more important, Arendt’s primary intention is to reclaim a human potentiality, one that is rooted in our natality and has been manifested at different times in radically different historical circumstances. This is not a fanciful utopian possibility. It has been actualized in different historical settings in the modern age. She calls this “the lost treasure of the revolutionary spirit.”

The history of revolutions – from the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia and the summer of 1789 in Paris to the autumn in Budapest – which politically spells the innermost story of the modern age, and could be told in a parable as a tale of an age-old treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana. (Arendt 1977a: 5)

Arendt’s favorite example of politics – and her most extended analysis – is the American Revolution. In speaking of the American Revolution, she is referring to the events that began in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence and culminated with the writing and adoption of the Constitution. Indeed, it is the deliberation, debates, compromises, and ultimate success in adopting the Constitution that epitomizes the tangible worldly freedom that she describes. This is a historically concrete example of the creation of public spaces in which power arises through collective action of individuals. The Constitution lays the foundation for those institutions that house and preserve this freedom.

[T]he course of the American revolution tells an unforgettable story and is apt to teach a unique lesson: for this revolution did not break out but was made by men in common deliberation and on the strength of mutual pledges. The principle which came to light during those fateful years when foundations were laid – not by the strength of one architect but by the combined power of the many – was the interconnected principle of mutual promise and common deliberation; and the event itself decided indeed, as Hamilton had insisted, that men “are really capable . . . of establishing good government from reﬂection and choice,” that they are not “forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” (Arendt 1963:215)

Arendt’s characterization of politics captures what is vital for a ﬂourishing democratic politics. She warns about the danger of forgetfulness of this treasure. So much of our chatter about democratic politics today is so heavily encrusted with clichés that we too easily forget this vital core. Arendt would be sharply critical of the post-9/11 absolutist discourse of good and evil. Any appeal to absolutes in politics corrupts and destroys politics. When absolutes – whether absolute goodness or absolute evil – enter into politics, they can all too easily and ineluctably lead to violence. And for Arendt, it is violence that destroys politics. This is a lesson that is portrayed with the utmost vividness by poets and novelists. In her discussion of Melville’s Billy Budd and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in On Revolution, she argues that “the absolute spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm” (1963: 79). Arendt agrees with the pragmatists that tough moral and political choices may require choosing the lesser evil. It is the absolutizing of evil that is dangerous. This becomes even clearer in Arendt’s discussion of the role of opinion and judgment in politics.

Forming, testing, and clarifying opinions takes place in political debate. What Arendt means by opinion has little to do what pollsters and politicians call opinions. Individuals do not simply “have” opinions, they form opinions. The formation of opinions requires what Arendt calls “representative thinking.”

I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them . . . The more people’s standpoints that I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my ﬁnal conclusions, my opinion. (Arendt 1977a: 241)

Consequently, the formation of opinion is an achievement that requires political representative thinking. The formation of opinions is not a private activity performed by a solitary thinker. Opinions can be tested and enlarged only when there is a genuine encounter – even a clash – with differing opinions in the public spaces of debate among equals.

Opinions . . . never belong to groups but exclusively to individuals, who “exert their reason coolly and freely,” and no multitude, be it the multitude of a part or of the whole of society, will ever be capable of forming an opinion. Opinions will rise wherever men communicate freely with one another and have the right to make their views public, but these views in their endless variety seem to stand also in need of puriﬁcation and representation. (Arendt 1963: 229)

The formation and reﬁning of opinions through public testing and debate enable us to understand the type of judging that Arendt takes to be essential for politics. “Judging,” Arendt tells us, “is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.” Drawing her inspiration from her interpretation of Kant’s analysis of reﬂective judgment, she tells us that judging requires an “enlarged mentality” that enables one to “think in the place of everybody else.” “The judging person, as Kant says quite beautifully, can only ‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually” (Arendt l977a: 222). This wooing, this persuasion, is essential for politics. There is no guarantee that we will succeed in this wooing, and there is no guarantee that we will come to agreement with our fellow citizens. There may be irreconcilable conﬂicts in the clash of opinions. But participants must be committed to the potential for agreement with others. And if we fail to achieve agreement in our judgments, then we must at least agree on fair procedures for making decisions – procedures that protect the rights of minorities. The key elements of Arendt’s conception of political judgment are summed up in the following passage:

The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but ﬁnds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must ﬁnally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its speciﬁc validity. This means, on the one hand, that such judgment must liberate itself from the “subjective private conditions,” that is, from the idiosyncrasies which naturally determine the outlook of each individual in his privacy and are legitimate as long as they are only privately held opinions, but which are not ﬁt to enter the market place, and lack all validity in the public realm. And this enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its own individual limitations, on the other hand, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose place” it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all. (Arendt 1977a: 220–1)

We can start with any of the strands that are woven into Arendt’s political thinking – debate, action, speech, plurality, natality, public space, tangible public freedom, power, opinion, and judgment – and we discover that they lead to, and reinforce, a compelling vision of what constitutes politics. There is no place for absolutes in politics. The lesson that Arendt teaches us is the same lesson that the pragmatic thinkers sought to teach us in their response to American Civil War – that the mentality that appeals to absolutes and rigid certainties can lead to violence.

Arendt had an acute sense of the powerful tendencies in modern society to undermine, distort, and suppress politics. But she never gave up her belief in the power of the “revolutionary spirit.” In her own lifetime, she saw it manifested in the Budapest uprising of 1956 and in the early Civil Rights movement in the United States. And if she had lived to witness the emergence of the political movements that led to the downfall of communism in Eastern and Central Europe, she would have cited them as further evidence of the power of the revolutionary spirit – the power that springs forth when individuals act together. (Leaders of these movements, such as Adam Michnik in Poland, drew their inspiration from the political writings of Arendt.) Like Jefferson, Arendt emphasized the importance of “elementary republics,” or what she called “councils,” in keeping alive democratic politics.

The councils say: We want to participate, we want to debate, we want to make our voices heard in public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course of our country. Since the country is too big for all of us to come together and determine our fate, we need a number of public spaces within it. The booth in which we deposit our ballots is unquestionably too small, for this booth has room for only one. The parties are completely unsuitable; there we are, most of us, nothing but a manipulated electorate. But if only ten of us are sitting around a table, each expressing his opinion, each hearing the opinion of others, then a rational formation of opinion can take place through the exchange of opinions. (Arendt 1972: 233)

There is a signiﬁcant overlap between Arendt’s conception of politics and the pragmatists’ – especially Dewey’s and Mead’s – conception of democracy. Dewey, like Arendt, sees that one of the most serious threats to democracy is the “eclipse of the public.” Dewey too thought that a healthy democracy, even in complex industrial and technological societies, demands creation of public spaces where individuals can debate together. In response to the criticism that his faith in democracy was utopian, Dewey responded in words that reinforce what we learn from Arendt:

I have been accused more than once and from opposed quarters of an undue, a utopian, faith in intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence. At all events, I did not invent this faith. I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit. For what is the faith in democracy, in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in the formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication? (Dewey 1988: 227)⁶

What Dewey wrote in 1939 is even more urgent today. “We have to re-create by deliberate and determined endeavor the kind of democracy which in its origin one hundred and ﬁfty years ago was largely a product of a fortunate combination of men and circumstances.” And he goes on to declare:

If I emphasize that the task can be accomplished only by inventive effort and creative activity, it is in part because the depth of the present crisis is due in considerable part to the fact that for a long period we acted as if democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically . . . We acted as if democracy were something that took place mainly at Washington or Albany – or some other state capital – under the impetus of what happened when men and women went to the polls once a year or so. . . . We can escape from this external way of thinking only as we realize in thought and act that democracy is a personal way of individual life; that it signiﬁes the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life. (Dewey 1988: 225–6)

The reason why I think that these reﬂections on democratic politics are so important and relevant for us today is because they emphasize what is required to revitalize “really existing” large-scale democratic societies. Neither Arendt nor the pragmatists offer blueprints for what is to be done. And there are many issues concerning the structure and functions of democratic law and institutions that they neglect. Both Arendt and the pragmatists are aware of the subtle and strong forces in modern life that undermine and distort democratic politics. But they remind us of what is vital for the ﬂourishing of democratic politics, and they emphasize that creating those public spaces in which tangible freedom ﬂourishes is always “a task before us.” They teach us that introducing absolutes, alleged moral certainties, and rigid simplistic dichotomies of good and evil corrupt democratic politics.

But still it may be asked how these reﬂections on democratic politics bear on our current situation. What lessons can we learn from them? Let me review some of the points that I have already made – and develop them further. The most important point is to understand why the introduction of absolutes – and especially demonizing one’s enemies as absolutely evil – distorts and corrupts politics. To speak in this way, to speak about the “evil ones,” “the servants of evil,” “the axis of evil” – as Bush frequently does – may be highly successful in playing on people’s fears and anxieties, but it blocks serious deliberation and diplomacy. It is used to “justify” risky military interventions and to trump serious consideration of alternatives in responding to real dangers. It rules out the possibility of the type of democratic discussion wherein dissenting views are respected and carefully evaluated. It stiﬂes serious inquiry about complex issues that need to be carefully analyzed, investigated, and debated. Ron Suskind reports a chilling conversation with Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and a treasury ofﬁcial under the ﬁrst President Bush. Speaking about George W. Bush, Bartlett said: “He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence” (Suskind 2004: 46). Unfortunately, many Christian conservatives do believe that Bush is executing God’s will. Suskind goes on to tell us that already in the summer of 2001 “a cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush’s White House . . .: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you’ll be rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling the boss. He didn’t second-guess himself; why should they?” (Suskind 2004: 49). Paul O’Neill, who was asked to resign as Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, told Suskind: “If you operate in a certain way – by saying this is how I want to justify what I’ve decided to do, and I don’t care how you pull it off – you guarantee that you’ll get faulty, one-sided information” (Suskind 2004: 51). The combination of Bush’s faith-based self-assurance and his appeal to his “gut instincts” is not exactly exemplary of the virtues of democratic deliberation and debate. But Bush’s character and personality are not the primary issue; rather, it is the mentality he exhibits that is so scary.

When Bob Woodward interviewed Bush for his book Bush at War, Bush told Woodward: “There is no doubt in my mind we’re doing the right thing. Not one doubt.” And when Woodward asked him whether he had consulted his father on the war in Iraq, Bush replied, “He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher power I appeal to” (quoted in Schlesinger 2004: 35). One does not have to doubt the sincerity of Bush’s faith or mock his religious beliefs, but such an appeal to the Almighty in making political decisions is antithetical to the spirit of democratic politics, debate, and deliberation. Because the world of political action always involves unforeseen consequences, reasoned doubt is always appropriate when making momentous decisions. But this is a president who doesn’t admit to having made any signiﬁcant mistakes.

Reﬂection on the concrete meaning of democratic politics and public freedom might also forestall reliance on clichés and empty rhetoric. In his Second Inaugural Address and his State of the Union address, Bush reiterated the words “freedom,” “liberty,” and “democracy” over and over again – as if they constituted an incantation or mantra. Such ritual occasions are not ideal opportunities for analytical ﬁnesse. But one can’t help but draw the conclusion that all this talk about our mission to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world is intended to help us forget that the original justiﬁcation of the Iraq war was the presumed “imminent threat” of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The use of such “uplifting” rhetoric suffers from double-edged dangers. It can easily be heard as hypocritical, empty rhetoric or a screen with which to justify new risky military interventions – as we bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the world.

Earlier I mentioned Arendt’s important distinction between liberty and freedom, where liberty means “liberty from,” and freedom means the achievement of public tangible freedom in the public spaces that arise when individuals act and deliberate together. The reason why I believe her distinction to be so relevant today is because much of the administration’s rhetoric about overthrowing Saddam Hussein suggested that liberation from this ruthless dictator would immediately lead to the ﬂourishing of freedom and democracy in Iraq. Many inﬂuential neo-cons spoke as if American soldiers would be embraced as the great liberators of the Iraqi people. And they were convinced that they were right, because this is what they wanted to hear (and were told) by their Iraqi friends. It has become painfully clear that the Bush government had no detailed plans for what to do after the military “victory,” and no expectation of the widespread deadly insurrection that has taken place. The president and his advisors believed that once the Iraqi people were liberated from Saddam Hussein, the transition to democracy would be relatively straightforward and smooth. (And if they did not really believe this, they certainly did not reveal their doubts to the American public.) The president and his cabinet ofﬁcers still refuse to admit that they made any mistakes; that they made fallible judgments that turned out to be wrong.

I also want to emphasize a point that I made earlier when describing the pragmatic mentality. I indicated that reasonable people can and do disagree. Pragmatic fallibilism does not dictate substantive conclusions and decisions; rather, it is primarily concerned with how these decisions are reached, discussed, and debated. Let me illustrate this with reference to some of the public debates that actually took place (outside the administration) before the military intervention in Iraq. Personally, I – like many other Americans – strongly opposed this military intervention. I did not subscribe to the idea of a preemptive or, more accurately, preventive war. I saw this as a radical change in American foreign policy – a change that was unjustiﬁed. I did believe that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons – primarily because he had already used chemical weapons against the Kurds. But I did not think that he posed an “imminent threat” to the United States. I was dubious about the alleged evidence of his possession of nuclear weapons. I favored a strong policy of containment and deterrence – isolating Saddam Hussein. Ironically – although no one knew it at the time – this policy had been working, because he had destroyed whatever weapons of mass destruction he possessed. Even when this became clear, the president and vice-president went on reassuring us that WMD would be discovered. I felt that the unilateral policy that the US was following would have long-range damaging consequences in undermining multilateral cooperation with our allies. I did not think that there was any substantial evidence linking Hussein to Al-Qaeda and the attack on the World Trade Center. Furthermore, given Hussein’s secularism and bin Ladin’s fanatical Islamic fundamentalism, I did not think that it made any sense to link them together in the “War on Terror.” But the primary reason why I opposed the war was because I was convinced that the US government was completely in the dark about what would happen in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. There was no understanding of the chaos and the forces that would be unleashed in Iraq.

But there were other persons whom I respected who argued for military intervention. They argued that Hussein was more than just a ruthless dictator; that he was prepared to commit genocide against his own population, and that he was ruthless in stiﬂing any dissent and in eliminating anyone who opposed him. They argued that no nation should get away with ﬂouting so many United Nations resolutions, and that the US had made an effort to work through the United Nations and to convince its allies to join in a military intervention. But there had come a point when it needed to exercise its decisive leadership. As long as Hussein was in power, there would never be any solution to the problems in the Middle East. Hussein used Scud missiles against Israel in the First Gulf War, and there was no reason to believe that he might not do so again – and with more effectiveness. Some argued that the military intervention was not really a new initiative, but would complete the unﬁnished First Gulf War. And although there were many uncertainties about what would happen after the fall of Hussein, it certainly could not be worse than living under his ruthless dictatorship.

In a democracy, there ought to be ample opportunity for the full expression of opinions pro and con when the nation is considering a momentous decision involving war. Even after the arguments pro and con are aired, there must be fair democratic procedures for making controversial decisions. But responsible defenders of military intervention did not appeal to religious faith, did not appeal to absolutes, did not assert their moral certainty, did not seek to justify the war as an American “crusade” against evil.⁷ Even though I remain convinced that the reasons against the war were far stronger than those offered in support of war, I certainly do not want to deny that many of those who advocated going to war in Iraq offered good reasons to warrant their position. A democracy thrives on the conﬂict of opinions. Pragmatic fallibilism encourages such conﬂict, but it is wary of any attempt to displace the healthy conﬂict of opinions with appeals to absolutes, moral certainty, and stark moralistic dichotomies of good and evil.

In introducing my discussion of democratic politics, I began with Arendt’s declaration that “debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” I did so because drawing out the meaning and consequences of this claim enables us understand why appeals to absolutes about good and evil corrupt democratic politics. But, of course, there are other, competing conceptions of politics. One of the most controversial is Carl Schmitt’s characterization of “the political.” Carl Schmitt was a German jurist and political theorist who died in 1985 at the age of 96. His career spanned the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, and the Second World War. Because he was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler, a vicious anti-Semite, and a relentless critic of liberalism, pluralism, and parliamentary democracy, he has been severely criticized and condemned. But there are a growing number of thinkers – conservatives and even left intellectuals – who claim that Schmitt is one of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century.

Schmitt – especially in his pre-Nazi writings – articulated a view of politics that captures something important about “really existing politics.” The best introduction to Schmitt’s thought is The Concept of the Political. It ﬁrst appeared as a journal article in 1927 (the same year that Dewey published The Public and its Problems) and was expanded as a short book, which he revised several times. Schmitt raises the same question that Arendt asks: What is politics? Or, more accurately, What is the political? In seeking to clarify “the political” (das Politische) he focuses on the criterion for demarcating what is distinctive about politics. He emphatically tells us: “The speciﬁc political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (Schmitt 1995: 26). And by an “enemy” he means a public adversary. Unless there is a clearly deﬁned enemy, unless there is group that we identify as strange and alien, then, strictly speaking, there is no politics. Politics does not shun or seek to avoid conﬂict. It thrives on conﬂict. Unlike Arendt, Schmitt does not think that the violence of war is a threat to politics. “War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a speciﬁcally political behavior” (Schmitt 1995: 34). Those who think that there can be politics without conﬂict, struggle, and even war are naïve. Worse than that, they fail to realize that they are seeking to destroy and eliminate politics. According to Schmitt, liberalism seeks to bring about the end of politics.⁸ Liberalism advances the “ﬁction” that the state is neutral, that its primary function is to protect individual rights and to develop political institutions (e.g., parliaments and congresses) that enable and promote compromises and the peaceful resolution of conﬂicts under the rule of a neutral law. He even claims that there is “absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.” Although Schmitt distinguishes the different domains of morality, religion, aesthetics, and politics, everything is potentially political, because in exceptional circumstances any domain can become political if it is employed to distinguish friend from enemy. We ﬁnd here one of the many disturbing tensions in Schmitt’s thinking. He sharply distinguishes morality, based on the distinction between good and evil, from politics, based on the sharp distinction between friend and enemy. Even though morality can be used to deﬁne the political enemy, Schmitt thoroughly condemns a universalistic moral humanism. When the enemy is subsumed under the universal moral categories of good and evil, the enemy is turned into an inhuman monster that must be totally annihilated. Such a universalistic moralism is hypocritically used to “justify” total war, which demands the complete annihilation of the foe. Schmitt draws a distinction between the enemy as one’s political adversary and the foe – those whom we condemn as morally evil and seek to annihilate. An enemy need not be considered to be morally evil. Consequently, wars against enemies are limited. They are won when the enemy is defeated. Wars against foes are total wars; they are won only when the foe is completely annihilated. Schmitt’s rhetoric about “the political” is saturated with strong moral and religious evaluations. (For his damning critique of the “concept of humanity” in politics, see Schmitt 1995: 54.)

Schmitt draws an extremely important conclusion from this understanding of the political. Every political group requires a sovereign, who has the task of making decisions in exceptional or extreme circumstances. And it is the sovereign who decides whether a situation is exceptional. From Schmitt’s perspective, debate is certainly not the essence of politics. Debate, deliberation, and persuasion obscure what is essential for politics – ﬁrm sovereign decisions for dealing with political enemies. Sovereigns may pretend that they are making fundamental decisions in the name of some “higher principle” or that they are following proper legal and political procedures, but this should not disguise the fact that such decisions are ungrounded; they are solely the sovereign’s decisions. There is no higher appeal than the sovereign’s decision.

With liberalism there is a greater fear of making and carrying out these ﬁrm sovereign decisions than there is of one’s enemies. Liberals fail to acknowledge that political enmity can never be eliminated completely. Enmity is a basic existential feature of human beings, and if we ignore or obscure it, then we will be thoroughly naïve about the essential character of real politics.⁹ There is no way of avoiding sovereign decisions, and no way of eliminating the existential enmity that is the basis for the political distinction between friend and enemy.

One of the lively debates about Schmitt’s conception of the political concerns how, precisely, we are to understand the main thrust of what he is claiming. Is he concerned primarily with developing a realistic conception of how politics actually works? Or is he concerned to tell us what “real” politics ought to be? He seems to want to do both. He argues that the opposition between friend and enemy has always characterized real politics, although – in the past – there have been very “civilized” forms of politics and war. He also claims that the new type of total war that emerged in the twentieth century is a consequence of a false universal humanism. He strongly objects to all those tendencies (e.g. liberalism and technology) in modernity that “depoliticize” politics. Consequently, if we are ruthlessly honest, we ought to avoid liberal hypocrisy, we ought to recognize that the friend/enemy dichotomy deﬁnes “the political,” and we ought to recognize that sovereigns deﬁne those exceptional circumstances that call for ﬁrm decisions. We should not be sentimental about the need for exceptional sovereign decisions. It is the exceptions to so-called normal everyday politics that bring out the true character of politics.

One of the reasons why Schmitt has been receiving so much attention lately is because he appears to have put his ﬁnger on a key feature of modern politics. One can tell a story of politics since the First World War that “ﬁts” Schmitt’s friend/enemy dichotomy. It is grist for Schmitt’s mill that the attempts to create institutions to contain and regulate political enmity and prevent wars (the League of Nations and the United Nations) have failed to do so. With the end of the Cold War, politics in the Schmittian sense seemed to ﬂounder. But with 9/11, the new “War on Terror” created a strong new sense of political identity and purpose – at least for the United States. Now there is presumably a clear sense of political friend and enemy. The president of the United States frequently speaks of those who are with us and those who are against us in the “War on Terror.” Our political identity is sharpened against this new enemy – we are the “lovers and defenders of freedom and democracy.” And we can even see the role of the sovereign decision in exceptional circumstances. After all, it was President Bush who made the sovereign decision to go to war in Iraq. (It should be noted, however, that a “War on Terror” in the name of universal human freedom ﬁts Schmitt’s description of disastrous total war.) Most of the reasons advanced for going to war in Iraq have now been discredited. But from a Schmittian perspective, this is not really relevant, because sovereign decisions are never really justiﬁed by reasons. And the religious and moral talk of good and evil is best understood as a political means for distinguishing ourselves from our enemies.

There is an extremely dark underside to this Schmittian conception of politics. There are, of course, real enemies that nations must ﬁght. There is nothing ﬁctitious about the existence of the Al-Qaeda. But what is really important for Schmitt is the construction of an enemy in order to deﬁne one’s political identity. That is precisely what the United States has done; it has constructed an all-inclusive, threatening enemy – “the servants of Evil.” And in constructing this enemy, it has played on and manipulated people’s fears and anxieties. Manipulating fear is one of the most powerful political weapons for deﬁning the enemy. On the one hand, Schmitt emphasizes the importance for politics of identifying an enemy; on the other hand, he condemns the “hypocritical” moralism of those seeking complete annihilation of the enemy.

Some commentators have thought of Schmitt as a contemporary Thomas Hobbes. Although Schmitt admires Hobbes, he is actually a severe critic of Hobbes, because he claims that Hobbes laid the foundations for modern liberalism. Hobbes, like Schmitt, does think that enmity, or belligerence, is the natural condition of human beings. But Hobbes’s Leviathan is intended to show how this belligerence can be controlled and contained by creating a “mortal god” – a sovereign to guarantee security. But, according to Schmitt, we cannot and should not pacify political enmity. Hobbes, then, is no better than those liberals who claim that the aim of politics is to seek peace and security. Schmitt’s political-theological imperative is “Fight Thy Enemy.”

There is a deep irony in applying Schmittian principles to the current political situation in the United States. We presumably fought the war in Iraq in the name of the liberal democratic principles that Schmitt scorns and ﬁnds contemptible. We keep hearing about the importance of freedom and the need to help Iraq and the Middle East to become genuine democracies. From Schmitt’s perspective this is hypocritical. For Schmitt, the United States represents the worst form of liberalism – a liberalism that pretends to be democratic, universalistic, and humanitarian, but is actually responsible for bringing about total war. William E. Scheuerman notes that Schmitt’s anti-Americanism is so extreme that he claims that the United States – “as that world power which systematically synthesizes awesome military power with liberal universalism . . . now menaces humanity to a greater degree than recent totalitarian dictatorships” (Scheuerman 2004: 545).¹⁰

But I do think that there is an important lesson to be learned from Schmitt – although it is not the lesson he intended. There is a real clash between the democratic politics that I have described and the Schmittian conception of politics. Schmitt claims that liberalism, when unmasked, is really anti-democratic. But Schmitt is no friend of democracy. If we take Schmitt seriously, then debate, deliberation, persuasion, public spaces, and public tangible freedom are not only irrelevant to politics; they obscure the real character of politics. The more we act on Schmittian principles, the more we undermine democratic politics.

The basic issue today is not whether we have real enemies or whether it is necessary to ﬁght these enemies, but rather how we think and act in extreme situations. I have already cited Sidney Hook’s remark: “Realization of the evil men can do and have done to men is integral to any intelligent appraisal of human history.” But we can face these concrete speciﬁc evils, and even make hard choices and decisions, without accepting the Schmittian claim that enmity is the basic existential condition of human beings. And we must be wary of sliding into a mode of thinking and acting that is all too ready to sacriﬁce democratic practices and principles for a specious “tough-minded” political realism. Our task today is to reinvigorate democracy – not to abandon it in the name of Schmittian politics.