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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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A distinctive mark of fascism is its conception of politics, best captured by Carl Schmitt, an early-20th-century German political theorist whose doctrines legitimized Nazism. Schmitt rejected the Madisonian view of politics as a social negotiation in which different factions, interests, and ideology come to agreement, the core idea of our Constitution. Rather, he saw politics as a state of war between enemies, neither of which can understand the other and both of which feel existentially threatened—and only one of which can win. The aim of Schmittian politics is not to share the country but to dominate or destroy the other side.

This is either ignorance or dishonesty. Schmitt differentiated between "inimicus," the private enemy with whom you disagreed about e.g. tax policy, and "hostis," the public enemy whose way of life is fundamentally incompatible with yours and who threatens your ability to continue your way of life. AIUI he argued that democracies treated both groups as "inimicus" which allowed the "hostis" to undermine the existing culture unopposed. It's actually a pretty anodyne description; I think that outside of a few dogmatic ideologues, people of nearly any political leaning would agree with it.