Part Two: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, podcast hosted by who I assume is the new pope based on reading the first two-thirds of an article title that showed up in my phone the other day.

How long is this bit going to go on for is my question? Exactly one more episode, Sophie. I have slightly more bit to do here. I think it's for life, right? Well, yeah, that is how it tends. Well, now that one guy got to quit. The Nazi. That's true.

Nazis, famous quitters. So we are joined once again by Sophie Ray Lichterman and Blake Wessler, our guest for today. Blake, how you doing? I'm doing great. I can't wait to hear more about this guy.

Yeah. Well, I can't wait to figure out my Pope name. I've been thinking about it. What am I going to do? Who am I going to be as Pope? Because every Pope gets to pick a name. You're going to be Pope Sophie.

No, no, no. I think I figured it out. Sophie, I think I'm going to have a lot more fun. If, if my Pope name is just the whole script to be movie, um, just kind of really content, take that bit to its ultimate extent, just destroy the computing systems at the Vatican. The entire Catholic church is like online infrastructure falls apart. Priest with Chromebooks, just lighting on fire and rectories. It's going to be beautiful. Uh,

B-movie, 90% improvised, though. So I don't know how long the script is. Seinfeld did a lot of improv in that. I do know how long the script is because it's been printed on a number of T-shirts at this point. Oh my God, that's amazing. It's an older meme, but it checks out. This is an iHeart Podcast.

Who's holding them?

Enough of that nonsense. Now listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that.

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We're back and we're talking about the life of Carl Schmitt, arch-theoretician of Nazism. Well, of fascism in general, too.

We left things off on the eve of World War I. Our boy Carl is in love with a con artist, but his academic career is slowly starting to pick up steam. The way academic life works at this point is that he's basically locked in a series of unpaid internships and thus constantly begging his uncle and his rich friends, the parents of his rich friends, for money. The Eisler family is his most reliable source of support.

His whole goal, he says this often in his diary and when talking to Kari, he wants to get rich, right? He wants to be wealthy. And the way to do that then as a public intellectual, just like it is now, is to write a book, right? Now today, you have to write the worst book ever, which gets harder every year because so many, so many terrible, terrible books are written by public intellectuals every year.

Back at this period of time, your book had to have a little more depth to it. And his first stab at this is a work called Word of the State.

And this is – that's the English translation. The German phrase that means word of the state is a reference to a concept in like German law of the state in which the government and its rulers are constrained in what they can do to people by the law, right? That's the title of his book. And the purpose of this book is to try to figure out what makes a state legitimate, right? And its laws legitimate, right?

Karl comes to define a legitimate state as a state with a constitution, not a state that does this or that or that treats people a certain way, but a state that has like a set of listed rules that institutionalizes the relationship between power and right. Right. So how individuals are treated, whether they have rights, that doesn't matter. What matters is that the state spells out what it can and will do when and where somewhere. Right. That's the important thing.

He includes a line in this work that I find fundamentally chilling. Quote, whatever it is that makes a person is determined by the legal system itself. And that's, that's a, that's bad. It's going to lead you some dark places, Carl. It's going to lead us all some very dark places, right? But it makes sense if you're coming to this idea that like,

Yeah, the law determines ethics and reality, and thus the law determines what is a person, right, and can unperson people, which is sort of the – he's not writing about that at this point, but it's kind of the inevitable conclusion. It's like, well, if the law makes a person, the law can stop you from being a person. And when I say that I think there's a degree of brilliance here, it's not that this is a good way to think about things, but this is accurate to the way states work already, right?

As soon as, as long as there have been states, this is how states have functioned, whether you like it or not, even our state, right? All this bullshit that we have about natural rights and that there's inherent rights. No, you should know right now by watching the news, none of that means anything. The state and the people with guns within it determine what is treated as a person by the state, right? That's what Carl's recognizing, right? And that's what Carl was laying out. And that is accurate, whether or not you like it, right?

Individuals, he argues, only gain significance by working for and supporting the state. So again, while he's sort of – there's a degree to which even as an anarchist, you could be like, oh, this guy's right in a lot of ways. But where he differs is he's like, and that's great. It's good that it works this way. It's cool. It's cool that the state arbitrarily decides what makes a person, right? Yeah.

And he argues that this is good because individuals only gain significance when working for and supporting the state. In other words, you mean nothing outside of your place within the state and its power structure. He also argues the law is not based on power. Power is based on law. And he seems to believe, again, there's this almost spiritual natural order that the law naturally moves to better represent, right? Which is weird, right?

Now, not long after this, Schmidt gets married, or at least he thinks he does. They have like a wedding, but Kari loses her passport, and so they can't get it certified. It's these documents with Kari. It's these fucking documents. These damn pieces of paper. And again, it is weirdly like this proof that there's something fundamentally accurate about his conception of the state, because much as he's like, no, Kari's my wife, the state's like, no, she's not. Yeah.

That's on us to decide, and we've decided no, because she doesn't have a passport. So she has to, they're like heading back to their house to finally be together in like their marital home. And she has to suddenly, when like this clerk comes out and is like, wait, wait, wait, the passport's, like she doesn't have a passport. I can't do this. They have to bundle her off to live with his mom so that they don't live in sin.

Oh my God. Like, unlike what's supposed to be their wedding day. And Carl starts having panic attacks about the fact that Kari is now living with his family. Quote, she is in the company of my hateful, mean, and vicious mother and my spoiled little sister, Anna. Only father makes life easy for her. I don't know what will become of me. She's like, she's going to leave me because my family sucks and she has to live with them now. Yeah.

I don't know what will become of it. It all comes back to him, too. Yeah, it's always about him. He wasn't talking about, what is it going to become of me? Yeah, what's going to become of my wife? Right. Yeah. I also do love that, like, yeah, it's good. Like, the state determines what a person is. And, like, this is good. And our only value comes from the role that we play within the state. And also, oh, the thing that I want more than anything isn't possible because the state has decided my wife isn't a real person. Right.

I obviously don't know exactly how. I mean, I have an idea of how this story ends, obviously, like that's been established. But it is interesting that it seems like he turns on the people closest to him where, obviously, because of how his ideologies was adopted by Nazis, his best friend, who is a Jew, that doesn't end well. And then also a lot of this does.

No, no, it doesn't. A lot of his friends were these artists and artists do not work for the state. It's the complete opposite. So they don't matter, essentially. So it's interesting that he keeps doing this. Yes, yes. It really is like. Yeah. So through the end of 1913, he's having constant panic attacks and we can surmise his parents. This is like a family trait, right? Because basically.

when he, he describes them in his diary in a way that like a modern reader is like, oh, that man, that motherfucker is having a panic attack. Right. But he calls them Schmidt effects. Right. As in like, this is like a Schmidt family characteristic that we have these freak outs and it's like, oh yeah. Okay. So your, your parents are, are like also have this problem with,

right? And they passed it on to you and you'd think it's just you and your family that you're the only people who have ever felt. Of course you do. At this period, it's 1913. Where would you have read about panic attacks? No, we just have heart attacks all the time. When we get nervous, we all have heart attacks. It's a Schmidt thing. It's a high cholesterol. Yeah. We're the only ones who do this.

So he writes about this in his diaries and Merring notes that in the wake of these, he expresses the bulk of his anti-Semitic opinions, right? That while he's kind of like dealing with this really stressful period of I can't marry this woman that I love, the state doesn't consider her legitimate. Merring notes that in the wake of these, he writes, quote,

So he, like, sees these two Jewish guys he knows arguing, and he's like, ah, it's just, like, it's just what those kind of people do. I'm never going to have any contact with them again. Now...

This is not going to be a permanent state. So it shows that bigotry is this thing that he comes back to and discards and comes back to, but it's not a stable state for him at this point, because he and Eisler are going to be dear friends again, and for a considerable, like, he will continue to talk about him well and have other Jewish friends after this period.

The point is that his racism is erratic, and it's correlated both with stressful times in his life and also these flights of fantasy, right? Well, he'll write out this anti-Semitic screed, and then he'll declare to his diary, I'm going to get into politics and become a powerful man.

And the next day he'll write about how he and Kari are going to have a son named Johan, and he's going to grow up to be a cardinal. And then like a couple of days later, he's going to be like, I'm still too broke. I can't marry my wife. This is never, we're never going to have our kid. And, uh,

He's so fucking Catholic that when he becomes convinced he's not going to be able to have a kid with this woman for financial reasons and because of her legal issues, he writes in his diary, I am a murderer. I am destroyed, have turned into nothing, and have murdered the soul of a child. Where should I seek refuge? In the Catholic Church? But I can't. I might as well go to the great Dalai Lama of Tibet or some Mexican god.

And first off, bro, like, even in this period, most Mexicans are Catholic too. Like, just as a heads up, like, it's the same. Most of them, it's the same God you're worshiping, right? Like, maybe you haven't read those books. This guy's so conservative. Yeah. That he believes life begins before you have sex with the person. Life begins when you and your... Before documentation. Just anything but going to therapy. And I know it's a sign of the times, but my God. My God.

My God, sir. Life begins when you and your con artist wife declare that you're going to have a son who becomes a cardinal. I am destroyed. Yeah. We killed this boy. This boy, Johan, little Johan. Little Johan's dead now. This is essentially an abortion.

I guess I am kind of impressed that he knows who the Dalai Lama is in this period of time. So I don't know, you know, it's a mix. Well read. We contain more. Well, on some things, again, he also thinks Mexican people don't, aren't Catholic in large part. Obviously, like there's religions in that part of the world that have existed before Catholicism. But at this period of time, that's the dominant religion is the same as his.

Anyway, he comes to see himself as a Gnostic after this point. In other words, someone who believes that there's this like malicious God that created the world, right? I think it's, he's basically believes like the Demiurge is what other people worship as God.

And like what these other folks, what I was raised to believe as God is actually this evil being that just wants to fuck with us, right? Now, the fact that he comes around to this heretical belief is entirely centered upon his own financial and career frustrations.

Right before the war breaks out, his wife gets caught shoplifting. Again, this lady, she's always stealing stuff. She's the best. She's the best. She gets caught stealing shit and it causes like a year worth of problems for him because he can't afford to pay the cut. And like, he's just trying to keep her out of jail.

So it's this whole constant, like, stressful issue on him. The fact that his wife got caught shoplifting his con artist wife. What was that horrible phrase? Tingle tangle? Tingle tangle girl. Yes. Right. Right. Yes. His wife, the burlesque dancing con artist, is caught shoplifting and it just fucks him up.

And then while he's trying to deal with all of this, Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets shot in Sarajevo and World War I starts winding up. Karl is 26 at the time that it becomes inevitable that Germany is going to, you know, make some really bad decisions along with everyone else. To be fair, Germany's bad decisions aren't unique in this period. Yeah.

Now, this is another massive moment for most future German fascists, but not for Karl. Karl is not a German patriot. Hitler is like... Hitler is the strong... He's there when the Kaiser announces the start of the war in Berlin. He's part of... There's pictures of him. You can find him in the crowd. And he's like enraptured. He describes this like religious experience. He's so overjoyed to be going to war on behalf of the fatherland. And Karl's like...

fuck this illegal war. This is Prussian bullshit. The Prussians orchestrated all of this. The rest of us Germans want nothing to do with this. I certainly go to war with the French. My family's half French. Fuck these people. Fuck all of this. This is illegal as hell. Right? So he is not at all. And in fact, he writes in his diary, I hope the French win. And he'll be doing that throughout the war. Like if the, I just hope the, I just want the enemy to win. So this is done. This is,

This is not a patriot, right? Absolutely not at all. So it's interesting because he's going to be so influential to the fascist movement. He has the opposite reaction of basically all of these other guys. Now, that said, he knows the war is wrong and dumb, but he doesn't protest it. And he's not a conscientious objector. He just doesn't really care about it. One gets the feeling he thinks that like the whole conflict is

is something that less intelligent people should care about. Like, not him. He has a lot of thinking about what law is to do, right? He doesn't volunteer immediately like a lot of people do, like a lot of his friends do. And he seems to be hoping, like, maybe the war will end quickly and I just will get to miss out on this, right? Now, you can contrast this to his best friend, Eisler, right? Again, Eisler is a Hungarian national.

who desperately wants to be German. He's othered both because he's Hungarian and because he's Jewish. And he had tried repeatedly before the war to become a naturalized German citizen. And every time he does it, the authorities are like, nah, we don't need you. And he wants this in part because he's...

getting his doctorate and he can't actually get confirmed as a PhD or work in law unless he's a naturalized German citizen. He wants to work in the German government, right? He wants to be a part of the court system and he has to be a citizen. And the chief of police before the war, the chief of police in Hamburg denies Eisler's citizenship petition by writing, quote, due to the Hungarian Jewish descent of the applicant and

And his father's criminal record that he couldn't approve the application. His dad had done some petty crimes as a younger man. So when the war breaks out, Eisler applies again. And this time, the German government is, number one, the authorities who had been like turning him down are in the military now. So it's like people who are younger and maybe a little less bigoted who are, you know, making that call. And they're like, all right.

You want to join the army. We'll let you do that and we'll make you a citizen. But you have to sign a paper promising you'll never work for the government. Right. You'll never go after a government career or try to take the state exam to be like considered a doctor in Germany. Right. If you do those things, we'll make you a citizen and you can join the army. And Eisler agrees. That's how badly this kid wants to be a German patriot. Right.

Which is such a bummer, given not only what Germany's going to do to Jewish people not all that far from now, but given what's going to happen to him. Because all this kid wants is to be accepted as German. And he feels like, ah, the military. They can't other me if I'm in the military, right? They have to respect me as a patriotic German citizen if I serve in combat. Right.

So despite the fact that Schmidt had pretty recently written a lot of racist shit about Eisler, he writes at the time of having great worry for his friend when Eisler joins the army and notes, if only he is not killed in action, the dear old fellow.

Unfortunately, Fritz Eisler joins a field artillery unit, and he is deployed immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. He is killed by shrapnel almost immediately. You know, his battery is firing, allied counter-battery fire hits nearby, and he gets, like, gutted by a piece of metal. Mering writes,

And he goes to Eisler's family to express his concerns, to help them deal with his dead friends like, you know, stuff. And he becomes almost immediately very good friends with Fritz's brother, George. And the two will remain friends until 1932. Like he kind of switches his best friendship to George Eisler. And it will stay that way almost until Hitler rises to power.

And he gets actually much closer with the Eislers after Fritz dies. He stays over at their house and he writes that he's like surprised. Wow, these Jews are like a normal German family. I didn't think that that was the case with Jewish people. And at the end of this, George's father is like, hey, man, how much money do you need to continue until you're able to get to the money-making part of your career? And writes him a check. So again, even up to this point, this family is treating him like a son.

Like, Carl Schmitt probably doesn't have an academic career without the Eislers backing him up. Like, they really do take him in.

Now, he has to join the military not long after this because he's a young German man and they don't have enough of those very quickly. Germany has a lot of young German men in late 1914. And then a couple of months after August, a lot less German young men. So they're really- Where do they keep going? Where do these German men keep going? They're just kind of feeding them into French machine guns. Now, the French are doing the same thing, right? Everybody's-

How fast can we get rid of our young men? Turns out very. So he joins a reserve infantry unit, right? Which the fact that he does this suggests he's trying to keep himself out of combat again in the hope that the war might end quickly. Now,

Most of the reserve units in 1914 wind up on the front line because it's just that kind of war. But he's going to try in other ways to delay his service. Balakrishnan writes, while he was in basic training, he claimed to have sustained a back injury. And the way Balakrishnan writes it suggests that he doesn't really think this is a real injury or that like Schmidt plays it up to delay things.

But once again, luck is on his side. Schmidt's first mentor, Van Kalker, because he's like a high, a respected gentleman, he joins the army and they're like, well, you're a major. And obviously he had spent time in the military before because everyone does. Basically, he had done like his period of national service. So when he joins the full time army, he's made a major by virtue of the fact that he is a very, very respected professor.

And because he's got this position, he's able to get Schmidt a place in the prince's personal regiment. Now, this is not safe, actually. If you're in like the prince's regiment in the German army, you're going to see heavy combat because the prince wants glory and he's going to send boys to die to do it. A lot of his colleagues get killed.

But Van Kalker is like, no, no, no. Carl Schmitt is not someone we want to feed to machine guns. This guy is smart. He's going to be somebody. And he gets him a job in the headquarters section, basically shuffling paperwork around, helping to like handle organizational tasks. And as a result, for the entirety of the war, Schmitt is never particularly close to like direct fire. I don't even think he's very close to indirect. He's never in serious danger. Right.

you know, like elevated from his civilian life, but he is not fighting. Right. And he's not fighting because this mentor again comes in and probably saves his life. Right. To be like, no, no, no, this guy, we don't want this guy up at the front. It's just a waste. A mentor. He turns on. Yeah. Well, he doesn't, he just stopped. He just kind of abandons him at a certain point. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

Now, after training, but before he deploys, Carl takes one last stab at Mary and Kari. And this time, the whole system works differently because there's a war on. The officials who'd held up on naturalizing her were either deployed or had decided like, look, this boy's probably going to die like everybody. Give him a chance to get this girl pregnant.

and continue the family line, right? Like, that's the idea. They're really, they're rubber stamping a lot of marriages at this stage. We're going to send these babies to the front line. These men are getting younger and younger. We're going to need more German boys very soon. Now, her birth certificate's obviously fake, and she's got pending shoplifting charges, but they managed to, like, brute force this through, and the two finally get married legally. Yeah.

Carl is immediately deployed, and he fucking hates it. He hates the army. For the first time and only time in his life, because of how much he hates being in the army, he radically revises his entire legal and philosophical theory about how the world works.

He describes life in barracks as a hell, where he was forced to endure the stink of plebs. Previously, he had been like, well, human value depends upon how you are serving the state. And now that he is serving the state as effectively its property, he's like, oh, but that's awful. That sucks ass. No, this can't be how things work. Fuck. Fuck.

This is what serving the state's like? This isn't valuable at all. I hate the state. But no, he writes that he hated, quote, the God of this world, the law, for its destruction of the individual. Interesting. Interesting. He's not going to stay consistent to this, but it is very funny to me that like the moment he's made to live with his beliefs, he's like, oh, well, obviously this is a terrible idea. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, he began even to dislike his mentor, Van Kalker, in this time. This is kind of when the break with him begins, because Van Kalker...

is a smart man. He was not an advocate for war, but he serves and he serves enthusiastically and without great disgust. And he even tell, they have an argument at one point. And Van Kalker's like, look, if the state has to break, commit some minor illegality in order to win the war, that's okay. And Carl's like, what the fuck? That's not what you taught me at all. Like this isn't how it's supposed to work. And he writes, he has become unfaithful to himself. And,

And it's interesting, Schmitt's private musings during this period read almost like protest literature. Quote, I was mad with anger about the Prussians, about militarism. I felt like committing the most ostentatious insubordinations. So he's like, I really wanted to rebel. But he doesn't, obviously. He's not that guy.

As part of his early service, he goes to Dachau, which at that point, we know what Dachau is going to be later. It's a munitions plant at this stage. And he writes and he's talking about like looking at the conditions in these arms factories. And he says, how ghastly for an individual to be sitting in such a prison.

And it's interesting to me that like, that's his attitude about Dachau when it's like an arms facility, but he is going to be one of the early, you know, people who helps to fill up concentration camps. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

And that means that he had the skill set to do that. Yes. And the personality to do it. Yes. Wild. But also the ability to understand that something considerably less awful than Dachau, the concentration camp, is still bad. So theoretically, the ability to understand what he was doing and helping to put people in Dachau was wrong. Anyway.

Speaking of... Nope. Nope. Ads. Jesus Christ. We're not doing good with the ad transition today, people. It's kind of hard on a subject like this. Yeah. This is my favorite producer on-air host dynamic, by the way, I've ever seen. Just bummed. This is just us in real life. Anyway, enough about concentration camps. Here's some word from The Gap. Are you wearing...

From Baby Gap. Ah, The Gap. I do wish it was The Gap. How funny would that be? I do wish it was The Gap, but it's going to be something so much worse that we're not even aware of. I don't know. Is there anything worse than The Gap? Yes, probably. All the things we're about to talk about.

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Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, what is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. I'm a Capricorn rising. So that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable.

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

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So the war ends in 1918 and Schmidt's relief is tempered by what appeared to be like the dissolution of the German state. Germany is falling apart as soon as there's like a peace happens. And this whole order, the legal order that his whole life had been based on looks like it's just going to crumble. Like the legal code is going to be gone. The government, the Kaiser is already gone. What the fuck's going to be left?

And part of what's happening is that there is a socialist revolution right after peace that like comes pretty close to succeeding in some areas. Units of demobilized soldiers, the Freikorps, crack down and start massacring leftist intellectuals with the direct endorsement of the right and the tacit support of social democratic politicians who are like, yeah, it's ugly, but we otherwise we won't get to have our democratic state if we don't let, you know, if we don't let the right murder all of these leftists.

Schmidt is lecturing at a university by this point, and during the late war years, he'd begun to receive pay for his work as an academic. His office was broken into by what Balakrishnan describes as a band of revolutionaries who were just like, yeah, a bunch of young people who were trying to, like, overthrow the local government. And while he's at a cafe, an officer sitting next to him at a table gets assassinated.

And he reacts by growing terrified of disorder. It's not just that he's horrified by these revolutionary moments that are so chaotic and scary. He also recognizes, oh, when things fall apart, you have the chance to dramatically remake society, including the chance to remake the law and the concept of order, maybe in a way that makes more sense. And that's what he's thinking at the time. And so it's also noteworthy that even though he doesn't like –

leftist, you know, kind of uprisings that are happening. They scare him. He's not an obsessive anti-Marxist at this point either. And in fact, Balakrishnan notes that there's not really any anti-Marxism in his writings from this period, which he describes as quite simply puzzling. It's like really weird that given how he felt about this, he didn't like go on any rants about Marxism. It's kind of an odd fact here.

And it may have something to do with the fact that he sees this as more a structural thing of like, well, yeah, it's the left doing it right now. But when things collapse, opportunity is made for people of radical beliefs. And so it's the factor, the reality of collapse is more to blame for it than anything. And he's more interested than like ranting about the left. He's more interested in figuring out how to take advantage of those moments, right? Now,

This period of chaos would inspire his first great and truly influential book, Political Romanticism, published in 1919.

This is a pre-fascist work because, again, fascism isn't really off the ground all the way yet of what we would call fascist polemics. He's basically listing all of the ideologies that exist in the world at the time from socialism and monarchism to like liberalism as flawed. He calls them dead romanticism, right? And he calls conservatism that, right? Conservatism is just this dead romantic idea, right?

He, in fact, expresses nothing but contempt for conservative reactionaries who in that period sought the Kaiser's return. So he's like, you're just looking back on a period that was never very good and you're not serious thinkers, right? But he's also looking at the liberals in Weimar and being like, well, you're idolizing this democracy that number one was birthed in blood and number two isn't going to succeed in fixing anything, right?

Now, the core of Schmitt's rage is reserved not for the political class, but for the kind of bohemian artists and creatives who'd made up his pre-war friend and social circle. We might see this as an early attack on the same sort of like shallow Hollywood liberal elites that would become such a hallmark of conservative politics in our era. And I want to quote from an article on The Power of Carl Schmitt by Richard Cohen.

Schmitt reduced and attacked all contemporary political alternatives to fascism, especially liberalism, but also socialism as mere romanticism because of their attachment to free speech, discussion, and hence parliamentarianism, which Schmitt, owing to his decisionism, dismissed as empty chatter masking a deeper inability to decide. He labels such politics romantic for the same reason, because the romantics are essentially indecisive estates, fluttering from one fashion to another, always stimulated and excited, but never committed and engaged."

So that's kind of interesting to me that he is he's rejecting all of these different belief systems as based in sorts of fantasies about how things should be and not a real understanding of how people are. Right. That's the conclusion he's come to at this point. Yeah.

He is a fantasizer himself. It's so interesting. We're like, how prone he, I don't know. He's not the first fascist who's prone to fantasy. And no, no, it is interesting. The contradictions with him. Oh yeah. Oh, like everything has to be rule of law. You know, like you are not a productive member of society unless you're serving the state. Also, you know, like my wife is a, you know, like she's not, she's Croatian, but she's, yeah, she's a countess. She's a countess. Countess is,

Yeah. It's also interesting. He has this experience of like, ah, all that matters is what you do as part of the state. And then it's like, oh, wait, that sucks ass. And it's like, yeah, because you had a romantic view of what that meant that was proven wrong. And he's still attacking his enemies for being like romantics, but unable to see that strain in himself.

And he's like a professor. Like that's not, he's not serving the state either, you know, like, so yeah, it's interesting. No, but again, he is always looking at people. He always, he's always seeing real problems, like among this class of like artists and celebrities in Berlin. Uh, he, he sees how kind of hollow they're, they're signaling at these democratic values are and concludes the most important source of political vitality is the belief in justice and an indignation over injustice. Uh,

He notes that what's important is not like how either of them are defined, but that they have a definition and stick to it.

Like Schmidt, he's kind of got this Walter Sobchak from the Big Lebowski attitude of like, you got to have an ethos. It doesn't matter what it is as long as you spell it out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just write it down. As long as it's written down, it can be whatever the hell you want. As long as it's written down, right. Yeah. This book marks the last time in his career that Schmidt centered ethics in any way. For the remainder of his decades as a jurist and legal philosopher, he is interested only in power.

And as the post-war years become the 20s, Mussolini marches on Rome and fascism becomes the name on every tongue. Europe begins its slow drive to the brink and Schmidt is initially distracted by the collapse of his marriage to an extremely obvious con woman. And, you know, things sour and Carl kind of finds out that Carrie's been lying to him the whole time.

It takes 10 years, but in 1922, he files for an annulment on the grounds of willful dissent. It took 10 years? 10 years. It takes 10 years to realize that he's been had. Carl. She's the hero of this, by the way. She is. She's amazing. Yeah, she's the best. I hope she has a good life after this. Me too. Carl, 10 years, my guy? 10 years. Yeah. Carl, sweetheart. Sweetheart. Oh, boy. Carl, babe, what's going on?

My love, Carl. Ten years of like, sorry, I left my real passport in my other skirt or whatever.

So the Catholic Church is not thrilled with his annulment. And Carl proves his fundamental messiness. Yeah, it's the Catholic Church. While he's getting annulled, while they're having divorce proceedings in court, he meets this 19-year-old Serbian girl named Duska, who's like the translator, who's like translating for his wife in court. This classic story. And he starts dating her. Yeah.

Or is this an episode of Sex and the City? Come on, Carl. I've heard this before. Yeah.

So Mering describes Carl as living in a, quote, erotic state of exception, during which he continued to cheat with his second wife on multiple women, right? Like he's writing about the law. He's writing about like the importance of spelling out who you are and what you do and not deviating from it. And he is cheating on his second wife. And he keeps a diary. Again, this is another thing that fascists today all do. He keeps a diary of every time he comes. Right.

Like, he's like, he's charting his ejaculations. This motherfucker would have been nofap so fucking hard. Or like, I don't know, what is it? Our speaker of the house who like talks about when he comes and doesn't with his son. Like, they're all this guy. Don't do that.

Don't do that. You don't need that data. No. Maybe if you were busy or paying attention to what was going on, Carl, it wouldn't have taken you 10 years. God. Stop. Just... Stop. Just stop. Yeah, I was going to go on a longer rant, but I remembered stop as a complete sentence. You can stop. Stop.

So he's gotten his marriage annulled to the con artist. He's dating a teenager. He's writing in a journal every time he comes. He's just living his best life. Jesus Christ. That journal may have sold better than that satire magazine. It's got to be in his letters. I mean, because it gets referenced by Maring. I really wish he just included an extensive quotation from it. Here's an excerpt. Yeah. As someone who washes their hands a lot, I hope he did because ew.

Nah, they didn't believe in that back then. I have terrible news. I guarantee you he didn't. That journal is... Yeah, sticky pages. Unfortunately, that was my first thought. So Schmidt, while this is all happening, after he gets divorced, he's watching the early days of the Nazi party, right? 22 is when he gets divorced. 23 is the beer hall putsch, which fails. And a lot of people think, well, that's it for them Nazis.

And Carl is not initially interested in joining or supporting the movement. He's like, these people seem like yahoos.

What he does do is increasingly analyze and start to pick out the obvious flaws in the democratic system of Weimar. And he begins to lay out in a book a theory for exactly why liberal democracy is doomed and how the right can take advantage of these fundamental holes in liberal democracy to smash liberalism, gain power, and destroy democracy.

In 1923, the year of that putsch, Schmitt writes this about the post-war Wilsonian order imposed on Europe. The history of political and state theory in the 19th century could be summarized with a single phrase, the triumphal march of democracy. No state in the Western European cultural world withstood the extension of democratic ideals and institutions. And he writes this in like a mournful way, right? That it's almost like you can't stop it.

And, you know, you've got Mussolini by this point in Italy, but Hitler is seen as like an upstart weirdo discontent. And there's this there is this attitude that like democracy is obviously on the march. And Schmidt, he picks out he's like looking at this the way fucking the rebels are looking at the Death Star plans. And he finds a vulnerability in liberal democracy that's easy to exploit.

And he writes his next book about it. That book is called The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. And it comes out alongside economic and social chaos that's gripping Weimar, right? And I'm going to quote from Richard Cohen here.

here. The new crisis of democracy, he argued, stemmed precisely from its victory over monarchy. During that struggle, democracy and liberalism were basically coextensive. To believe in popular sovereignty was to believe in the necessity of the replacement of absolute monarchy with a regime characterized by elections, free public debate, and legal rights

But in Schmitt's mind, this connection is far more historical happenstance than conceptual necessity, and that democracy, properly construed, cannot be seen as requiring rights and even universal suffrage in the way that liberals understand them. A government is democratic, Schmitt argues, if it bases its legitimacy on support from the people's will. But this depends on how you define the people and choose to assess their will. Every democracy depends on excluding some people, most notably foreigners,

from participating in the selection of its leaders. That means, by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before the law. Instead, the idea of equality and democracy really means equality amongst the people in a political community that shares a certain identity and core agreements.

There has never been a democracy that did not recognize the concept foreign and that could have realized the equality of all men, he wrote in a 1926 preface to the second edition of his book. Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal, but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second, if the need arises, elimination and eradication of heterogeneity.

Do you see what he's saying here? Son of a bitch. Yeah, right? Son of a bitch. Right? A couple things are fascinating to me. Number one,

With the exception of the fact that he endorses this, this is essentially how anarchists talk about borders, right? The maintenance of every border implies violence. And this is both physical borders, like the border between us and Mexico, and like what you're seeing right now with the attempt to legislate, like what counts as a woman with all these anti-trans things? Both of those borders are maintained by men with guns, with violence.

There's the threat of violence behind building every one of those borders. If you cross this border, or at least cross it in the wrong way, force will be used against you. Every democracy does this. And it does this not just in terms of who can enter the country, but who gets to vote.

And so even if you're saying nice things in your constitution about these are universal rights of men, these are rights that extend to everyone, these aren't just rights that extend to people who are citizens in the country, these are universal rights that our society universally recognizes. That doesn't necessarily mean squat because what you do as the reactionary is you find that border wherever it exists and you start pushing inward.

And as you start pushing inward from that border, you will start fracturing the democratic consensus that exists until you can destroy democracy. And that's how you gain power as a reactionary movement within a liberal. That's how you destroy liberalism. You find the border that they placed and you start pushing inwards. Right. That's what Carl realizes. And that's what he lays out. And it works today as well as it did back then.

She's got the chills. Jesus. Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. It's great. Yeah. It's wonderful. It's right. It's correct, I mean. Yeah. He has accurately identified the flaw in the system and how to exploit it.

He writes, quote,

Maybe he'll prove right about that in the future. Maybe he won't, but we've never tried, right? Ultimately, we haven't. The most potent part of Cohen's essay, he described Schmitt's academic work in the late 1920s as creating a blueprint, quote, "...adaptable virtually anywhere for using reactionary politics to gain control of and destroy democracy from the inside while pretending to be in service of that democracy."

Now, elements of this had been discussed by several thinkers, particularly in the context of the U.S. during the era of slavery. But Schmitt's big – one of his big contributions is that he recognizes race and religion can be used to push that border in, but they don't matter. That's not the only way to delineate the enemy.

All that matters is that you are delineating an enemy, right, and pulling them out of being considered part of the body politic. They can be Jews. They can be black. They can be trans. They can be whoever. But what matters ultimately is that you're picking an enemy and you are identifying them as not a part of us, right? And that's the ballgame, right?

And less than or conniving, you know. And a danger to us, right? Yes, right. So Schmidt argued, you know, not only that this is how you manipulate democracy because unlike what liberals say, exclusion is at the core of democratic politics. He writes this in 1932 in a book considered to be perhaps the most important intellectual work of fascism's birth era, The Concept of the Political. Quote,

Quote,

so he has first this recognition of that like liberalism inherently liberal democracy always draws a border you start pushing in from that border and then he he refines this to the idea that like all politics is about defining friend and enemy right and that's how you gain power and that's how you enshrine your power right and once you have once you have identified a group of citizens as the enemy

and you gain power, you exclude them from the franchise. You turn them into a domestic enemy, which you can then purge and destroy, and that's how you maintain power. Per an article in The New Statesman by Samuel Earle, that a specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy, Schmidt declared. His fellow anti-democratic and decorated soldier, Ernst Junger, described what followed as a mind that silently explodes.

And...

Again, the Nazis are doing a lot of this before he writes about it. But number one, his initial work on sort of this strategy of how to push on the border influences how the Nazis proceed. But also he is explaining what they're doing in an intellectual way that is accurate and doing so in a way that's also not ideological.

in that he's explaining and describing an ideology, but he's not doing it as a Nazi propagandist. He's doing it as an academic, right? And he's doing it in a way that provides a blueprint for other people.

That's such an interesting distinction between him and Goebbels, where I feel like that would be kind of the, I don't want to say lazy, because this is my, I'm making the comparison, but my lazy comparison, where it's, Goebbels obviously, all right, it's propaganda. There's more quote unquote spice on it, where this with Schmidt is just, this is how it works, this is why it works, and this is why it will work.

Yeah, and you do get kind of at the end of this book, he does give – you get a hint of his developing ideology. And part of it, why he hates liberalism, is that liberalism is an onslaught against the political. It seeks to replace conflict, which he views as natural, with economic competition and, quote, perpetual discussion.

And that this doesn't end in a better society, but like kind of a destruction of something important at the soul of humanity, right? Which is this crusade against an enemy, right? That we almost, we need this as people. We need to have enemies, which is a fundamental part of fascism, right? We need enemies in order to be fully human, like an enemy to fight, to destroy, to rally against, right?

Now, Schmidt was not an early Nazi. He was not a particular admirer of Hitler. In the early 1920s, he described Hitler as a hysteric. In 1932, the same year he published the concept of the political, he argued that the Weimar government could and should use the military to destroy Nazism.

But as the Nazis began taking power, he changed his tune quickly from a mix of, you know, he wants to protect himself, but most importantly, because high-ranking Nazis start to take him seriously as a thinker. And he had been doing okay, his books had been doing better, but he really starts to become famous because there's some high-up Nazis who like what he has to say. And his particular back

The guy who's going to make him give him the opportunity to be the rich intellectual he's always wanted to be, right? Who's going to make his life possible is Herman Goering, right? Now, Goering is about to be, he's this World War I pilot, like a fighter pilot hero. He literally takes over like the Red Baron squadron after he gets like shot down. That's what Goering does in the war. He gets fucked up and horribly injured during the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and addicted to painkillers, relatable.

Yeah, there it is. But when Hitler takes power, he's the Reichsmarschall, right? He's going to lose favor throughout the Third Reich, but he is on paper the guy who, if Hitler dies, is supposed to take over, right? So that's the degree to which, like, Goering is held in esteem at the start of the Reich. And he takes a liking to Schmitt's work. He's like, this guy –

This guy gets it. This guy – and we need to bring this guy in and have him be like our court philosopher, right? He's kind of become – because Nazi intelligentsia had been following him for a while. He's a little bit like a Curtis Yarvin figure, right, where he doesn't really have as clear a goal as Yarvin does. But there are a lot of these guys who become Nazi intelligentsia who are following him for a while and respect him for a while, right?

For his part, Karl's part, once it becomes clear that the Nazis are going to win, he's like, well, if some of these guys like me, I can get rich and powerful. That's what I've always wanted. So he starts sucking up, and he writes that Goering was the right type for these times. As he becomes a darling for the far right, Schmidt continues to live a life well out of line with the stated morals of the movement for which he is becoming the chief intellectual theoretician. Per the Claremont Review of Books,

Guilt and Eros combined for Schmidt in Carl Theodor Dreher's silent movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc. With an almost sadistic use of close-ups, Dreher depicts the doomed heroine, a daughter of God, charged with being a child of the devil, as she pleads that she has only fought for God and country. In 1928, Schmidt watched the film a dozen times. Mehring reports that on several occasions, in both Berlin and Rome, he picked up a prostitute to watch it with him.

It seems that his longing for redemption from his own psychic turmoil fueled a need for a higher absolute obligation, which could only come from a commitment to the law promulgated by God or by the state. So there's this attitude that maybe it's because he's got this kind of compulsive sexuality that he can't just be like, eh, people just fuck, you know? He has to condemn himself and find absolution in this idea of law or the state as God.

as representing some higher natural truth in order to gain absolution. It's also just funny that he's constantly watching this Joan of Arc movie while picking up prostitutes. Like, you want to go watch Joan of Arc? Speaking of watching silent films...

Makes no sense. That made no sense. I got nothing. I got nothing. I don't know how to do a fucking ad transition in these episodes. Look, go to Rome. Meet somebody nice. Watch a movie about a French lady getting tortured. You know? Have fun. You become fake Pope once and you no longer know how to do an ad transition. Yeah, yeah. Well, Popes don't need ads because they have all that gold buried under the Vatican, Sophie. That's right. What?

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, what the fuck is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. But I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. Okay.

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

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We're back. Man, I wonder. They got to have a lot of gold buried under there, right? Like a crazy amount. Oh, in the Vatican? Yeah. Yeah, like enough to ruin the price of gold worldwide if they ever put it onto the market. Yeah. I don't think so because there were so many different things where things were getting stolen. I think they would have. There's probably secret gold, but I don't think there's going to be as obvious as there. Oh.

Well, what are they used for all the lawsuits? Like it has to be. Oh yeah. They had to have had a lot lying around for that. Um, what if we all Naruto run into the Vatican archives and just try to like, see what we can get. I,

I would have so much fun going to the Vatican archives. Find the secret sequel to the New Testament where Palpatine returns. I'm excited. I think we can make this happen. Yeah, use your new power as fake pope. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'll tell the Swiss guard to stand down. They're goofy outfits. Stupid ass outfits. I'll be right behind you as you do that. Mm-hmm.

In April of 1933, Schmidt joined the Nazi party officially. In May, he published an article that is generally considered to be the blueprint for the legal expulsion of German intellectuals who had unacceptable political or racial characteristics.

Quote, Germany has spat them out for all time, he said. And he's talking specifically about Albert Einstein, right? Schmidt authors the blueprint for kicking Einstein and other thinkers permanently out of the Reich, right? And describing them as enemies, right? And for him, this is a political term. And this is about, this is one year after he breaks off his friendship with Eisler, right?

But he does write, you as an individual can be friends with someone who is a political enemy because, again, that's a political state. You have to treat them as an enemy when doing politics, but it doesn't mean you can't like them personally. Like socially. But you're also accepting that it means killing them at a stage. So maybe you can't. I don't know, man. Well, killing them politically. Yeah. Not as friends. Yeah. Yeah.

So... Is that Logic Night checkout? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, as much as anything this fucker says does. So through most of the 20s, liberals and liberalism were the center of most of Schmidt's rhetorical ire. But Jews grew more central as time went on. Now, we've already covered that he certainly imbibed the racial anti-Semitism of the era, and he had occasional flings of bigotry during times of stress and depression. But he was also a great leader in the anti-Semitism movement.

But he also spoke glowingly of several Jews in his life. Most crucially, he was completely dependent economically upon the kindness of a Jewish family who treated him as a second son, right? Like that's a big deal in this period of time is that like there's these, this family that keeps him alive. But now that he was a prominent Nazi academic whose writings were not just cited, but were being used to make law under the Third Reich,

he starts being critiqued by like Jewish academics. I mean, but this happens before the third Reich is established. And this is part of like what radicalizes him is that in the late twenties, when it becomes clear that he's like writing in favor of elements of fascism, there's several different Jewish academics critique his book, the crisis of parliamentary democracy. And he goes on a rant and complains for Jews against one Christian. They attack me in all the journals and no one notices what's going on. Um,

So that's a big part if you're wondering like what's the missing piece here between him like dumping his Jewish friends and going full Nazi. Well, it's because some Jewish professors say mean things about this book he writes. Later that year, a Jewish professor was being considered for hiring by his university and Schmidt wrote in to call his would-be colleague a disgusting, craven, dilettante Jew.

So by the mid-20s, he's very consistently racist, but he's still friends with Eisler, right? Up until the 30s, and he's still able to make exceptions in his head.

Unlike most Nazis, the justification he gives for his animus is not racial, right? He is someone who is like, I think his belief initially at least is that like, well, Jews can convert and stuff and then I don't have to treat them that way. But his issue with them is that they tend to be liberal, right? And so he interprets the battle that he is laying out, the alliance, how you win a battle against liberal democracy, and he describes it as a battle against the Jewish spirit. Right.

Per an article by Benjamin Ballant for the Claremont Review of Books,

His friend-enemy distinction now fed into the contrast he drew between the homogenous German Volk and the alien Jew. He hastily severed his friendships and associations with Jews, including his longtime publisher Ludwig Fuchtwanger and the young scholar of Hobbes and Spinoza, Leo Strauss, whom he had recommended to the Rockefeller Foundation for a fellowship that allowed Strauss to leave Germany a year before. By the early 30s, as he moved from scholarship to polemics, Schmitt no longer directed his counter-revolutionary fervor against Weimar anarchism.

And by anarchism, he means the fact that the state doesn't work very well. So he cuts off all of these academic friends, including, have you heard of Leo Strauss?

I know the name. Yeah, I've heard the name. Yeah. Very influential. All of the people behind George W. Bush were Straussians. And when I say that, I'm talking about guys like Bill Kristol, who's now like anti-Trump. Bill Kristol is a Straussian. The Straussians are the neocons. Strauss is initially very close with Schmidt, and Schmidt influences Strauss, and Strauss influences Schmidt. Schmidt is basically his mentor for a

while, right? He helps him get this scholarship, right? And then Strauss comes to the United States and he becomes a core intellectual mind behind neoconservatism, right? So again, the way in which this guy, even though like, obviously there's no love lost between them once Schmidt goes full Nazi, because Strauss is Jewish, right? Um,

So once the Third Reich gets into power and Schmidt has the chance to actually be making laws, he warps his personal politics in order to fit, you know, the regime that's now in place. No longer does he talk about the state working towards some sort of natural law. Instead, he begins to argue that political sovereignty is constituted in the will of the leader or dictator who was sovereign and who had no kind of check and could abide no kind of check on his power.

Per an article on The Power of Carl Schmitt by Richard Cohen, "...the dictator's will is arbitrary, and must be arbitrary. This is not a fault for the fascist, but the highest virtue. The dictator's will is a pure will, unchecked and unregulated by any exterior consideration beyond itself, like a god, like the god."

Only as such is it a truly sovereign will. The dictator can never be challenged, in other words, because there are no grounds upon which to challenge him. Thus any challenge, any criticism, no matter how rational, realistic, or good-willed, is by definition betrayal."

From the standpoint of all allegedly legitimizing authorities, whether ethical, populist, hereditary, religious, aesthetic, utilitarian, economic, or what have you, the dictator's decision is beyond reproach. Force, power, and might are the dictator's first and final resort, and submission is the only appropriate response. Rule, call it law or not, is to dictate order and command. Thus, the ubiquitous military trappings of fascism—

So he's gone from

The only legitimate states have a constitution that lays out what the rules are, and they follow that constitution. And law is always working towards some sort of natural law. Two,

The law is whatever the leader says it is, right? Human will creates law, right? The will of a specific human and put in charge of a people creates law, right? That's where Schmidt has ended, you know, now that democracy has been destroyed, now that Hitler's in power. And he's working backwards to a degree at this point from the fact that Hitler has taken power, right? But...

This is, again, like he's kind of describing what's happening to some extent after the fact, but he's also – he comes to understand and justify sovereignty as the permanent state of emergency or a state of exception, right? Right.

Fascism is like the normalization legalization of arbitrary power. So we even do see some of like his early thinking on like how judges work and the kind of arbitrariness at the center of the legal system. Like this is where he winds up, right? That this is kind of the ultimate political system, right?

It's great. It is interesting, too, where he would talk about how like democracy was, you know, it's it only works because of the eventual force that can be applied, you know, where there it's eventual with a dictator just wearing fatigues, dressed like a general, you know, with the military parades. It's not implied. It's not eventual. It's immediate. Yes. Yes. It's a very. Yeah. The imagery really drives it home. Yes. More so. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

And thanks to Goering's influence, he gets made president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. Uh,

In 1934, after the Night of Long Knives, Schmidt plays a role in justifying and legitimating what had happened. This looks like and is an illegal series of murders committed to settle political scores. But Schmidt argues this is actually perfectly legal, right? He publishes an article called The Fuhrer Protects the Law, which argues that what Hitler had done was the highest justice available, right?

Quote, the Fuhrer protects the law against the worst forms of abuse when in the moment of danger, he immediately creates law by force of his character as Fuhrer as the supreme legal authority. And again, I think we have to look at maybe where we're headed with some of these courts questioning the decisions being made by Trump by diktat.

This is already what Trump's people believe. Trump creates law by force of his character, right? And, you know, Schmidt has provided a justification for purging people in situations like this, right? Because the fuhrer has to protect the law by carrying out illegal acts of violence because he then creates a new law. And so the concept of law fundamentally changes.

is protected by the Fuhrer doing this.

So there is no lawlessness. There's no law. There's never a gap. It's the new dictator's law. There's lawlessness if there's a conflict, right? Right. Between the Fuhrer and power. That's lawlessness, right? And that's what Hitler was fighting against, right? That's why he was protecting the law by doing what he did. He celebrates like when the Nuremberg laws come in, he describes it as proof that the national socialist state is a just state.

And then in 1936, he helps convene a conference on how to get rid of Jewish influence in German law. He gives a speech where he blames the Jews for hollowing out the German healthy, völkisch German way of thinking of the state.

And he calls for a purification of libraries that includes a separate system of citations for Jewish authors, right? So there he is explicitly endorsing book bannings, the purging of books written by friends and colleagues of his, a separate way of classifying them because obviously Jewish law is a danger to good Germans, right?

Well, and they made fun of him. They hurt his feelings. Yeah, and they made fun of him. They talked shit about his book. His awful writing. So he is deeply complicit in the early Third Reich and in the purging of intellectuals and people getting put. He's incredibly complicit in all of this. Now, unfortunately for Schmidt, this in 1936, this speech he gives is going to be like the high watermark of his power in the Third Reich. Because once the Nazis are running everything, they're like...

We don't really need an academic with a mind of his own, right? We got it. We've got it now. We're done thinking, you know? And this guy, he's not really loyal to Hitler, right? So in December of 36, the SS newspaper publishes a hit piece on him, accusing him of being a Hegelian, which is basically true, and a false anti-Semite, which really isn't.

He talked to friends about, like, fleeing Germany. He was like, maybe I need to leave. Maybe this is dangerous. But it's not something he ever seriously considered. He does have some defenders who will be like, well, look, he thought about leaving. And like, I don't know if that counts to me. Yeah.

Hannah Arendt would later write about Schmitt's ouster from the Nazi party as a fairly standard move. The replacing of sympathetic but skilled people with toadies who are utterly loyal to the system, even if they're not very good at anything. Quote from Arendt, and this is, I think, an important one, especially for right now.

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. Nothing familiar there. I'm not picking up on it. What an old idea. Any common themes, yes. What an ancient idea, Hanahad. That's so dated.

Now, he was never – Schmidt is never hounded by the regime or punished. He's never in serious danger. He's out of the – any kind of inner circle here. He's on kind of the outskirts looking in again. But he maintains his position. He keeps being employed at the university. He's a prominent academic. And he lives well up and through most of the war years. But by the time the war ends and the Allies begin to occupy the ruins of the Third Reich –

His last public identity had been as a Nazi intellectual who was participating in the purging of intellectuals. And so he gets arrested by the Americans in September of 1945. He's locked up for like a month or so. And, you know, he's...

Trying to put a brave face on it, he tells his wife, like, I'm not going to collapse like some of these other guys who killed themselves or whatever. Like, I'm going to hold up. You know, they'll realize I'm not guilty of anything. And unfortunately, he's kind of right. You know, he gets released. He gets arrested again in March and April of 1947. And he's brought to Nuremberg.

where he gets interrogated by the U.S. Chief Counsel at Nuremberg, Robert Kempner, four times over the course of about a month or so, five weeks. And, you know, he's basically, Kempner's trying to figure out, is there anything we can go after this guy for? Like, how much is he responsible for? How many crimes did he directly commit? And Schmidt is like, look,

I wasn't trying to support all the horrible things the Nazis do. You know, I'm not a Nazi ever, really. I'm an intellectual adventurer. That's how he describes himself. He's like, look, I was just asking questions. Yeah, he's such a piece of shit. We should have shot this guy in the fucking face. Yeah, immediately. I want to read a little transcript of his interview with Kempner that makes for fascinating reading. Because this is Kempner being like, what the fuck do you mean by intellectual adventurer?

I wanted to give the term National Socialism my own meeting, Schmidt said. Kempner, Hitler had a National Socialism and you had a National Socialism. Schmidt, I felt superior. Kempner, you felt superior to Adolf Hitler. Schmidt, intellectually, of course. He was to me so uninteresting that I do not want to talk about that at all. When did you renounce the devil? Kempner asked. 1936. And...

I believe that he didn't like Hitler, right? Because he doesn't, he's never an intellectual respecter of Hitler particularly, but this is bullshit, right? Like you participated in purging your colleagues. You were so psyched that people were listening to you. That's all that matters. You only renounce the devil because the SS got angry at you and you lost your influence, right? Like this man never had a change of heart.

I'm thinking of who Schmidt I might be getting ahead of herself of who he would favor out of a Hitler. And then you have a Trump. Like, who is the ideal? I think it might be Putin might be the ideal one for him. Fascinating that you bring that up.

This brief after-war period marked the last time Schmidt would discuss his support of the Nazis directly. He returned to Plettenberg and continued to write, although he was fired from his professorship. He found no trouble getting published, though, and once around 20 years had passed, his name starts getting tossed around by conservative intellectuals around the world, first in whispered tones, but then in an increasingly brazen manner.

Schmidt dies in 1985, and he lives to see the beginning of his second rise to prominence. And one of them, you've heard of Marine Le Pen over in France. She just got incarcerated for a bunch of shit. But she's like the leader of their fascist party. Her father founded the party.

Her father is a Schmidt acolyte. Her father, the whole blueprint of the French far right is directly taken from Schmidt. That's why it's so centered on immigrants and immigration, right? Like they are very consciously the French, I think it's the national party that Le Pen leads is their whole blueprint is Schmidt. Schmidt is the guy like they are openly citing and quoting his writings at the very start of that party. Um,

Now, more to the point, there's another fella who becomes one of his acolytes who like finds Schmitt's writing and is like, oh, this is a really good blueprint for how to get in power as a reactionary movement and destroy a nascent liberal democracy. And that guy is named Alexander Dugan.

Now, Dugin is an ultra-nationalist who is seen as the primary political philosopher of the Russian New Right, and he's often called Putin's court philosopher, right? These ideas are also a major backbone of how Putin gets into power, of like the strategy he uses, and how a lot of his adherents in the Russian New Right see what they're doing. He's in the French far right. He's in the Russian far right that kind of coalesces around Putin.

And in the U.S., the main vehicle for Schmidt's ideas getting into the halls of power is through the work of a thinker who had once been his colleague, Leo Strauss. Strauss, a Jewish scientist, fled to France when Hitler took power on a Rockefeller scholarship, and Carl Schmidt had been his advisor. There's a very good piece in the website LibMod that traces out the connections here.

There are very close ties between the conservative political scientist Patrick Dienen, Catholic University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Strauss adept and winner of the Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation, and Vice President J.D. Vance. And he provides a couple of quotes from Schmitt and from Vance. One is, this is a Schmitt quote from 1922, "'Authority proves that it does not need to be right in order to be right.'"

And J.D. Vance saying judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. And you might even add in some of those statements that Vance made about like Haitian – like literal lies about Haitian refugees where it's like it doesn't matter what's true. You make it true by having power, right? There's another quote here from Schmidt in 32. The rule of law means nothing other than the legitimization of a certain status quo. These are all very –

You could hear basically these fucking quotes being trumpeted, you know, among Trumpists, among these like unitary executive theory guys. And that's kind of... It's both...

Schmidt's thinking first starts to influence the American right in a major way with like the neocons who are kind of influenced by him partly through Strauss. Guys like Bill Kristol, right? And David Brooks, right? These guys who are very influenced by Strauss. But by the time Trump comes around and things have gotten too extreme for them, the – like people – like Curtis Yarvin will just quote –

Carl Schmitt. He's a huge fan of Schmitt. Like he, he brings him up constantly. JD Vance is fans of a, of a Strauss scholar who himself is influenced by Schmitt. Like Schmitt's thinking is all throughout the entire right wing project worldwide, you know, from France to Russia, to the United States, there's pieces of him everywhere, even though most people are not taking his work directly, but they're influenced by thinkers who were influenced by Schmitt. Um,

and who adopted some of his ideas for their own. And most importantly, the basic strategy that Schmidt laid out. I mean, unfortunately, still works quite well. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Great.

Anyway. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway, I'm sure that'll go away soon. I'm sure we have nothing to worry about. Yeah, I think we've got it. I think we'll knock it out. You know. So this J.D. Vance guy, he's not high up in the government or anything, right? I haven't heard of him in years. Yeah.

No, me neither. Haven't heard of him in years. By the way, you should read his jizz book. Yeah, his cum diary. Yeah, it's fantastic. Oh, man. Yeah, the J.D. Vance cum diary is a real, quite a publication. It is. It is. Yeah. Well, I don't know. How are you feeling at the end of this, Blake?

Well, I mean bad, but I do also feel like I learned a lot. It does explain – it is very interesting to learn how we got to where we are today. And the scariest part is – or one of the many scary parts is that people – it's not hidden anything.

You know? Yeah. And even with J.D. Vance, you don't have to go on a long sleuthing trip to figure out that he is a Schmidt guy. It's one degree of separation, a Strauss away. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, a Strauss degree. Yeah. And...

Some people are, like you said, just outright quoting Schmitt, like Yarvin, who's also connected to Vance. And yet it is interesting that like in an earlier era, these neocons who now in a lot of cases have aligned themselves with anti-Trump stuff are still – they're the guys who are first pushing unitary executive theory, which is like what leads to the president's basically a king, right? Like that's the end result. Right.

And Strauss is a big influence on them there, right? And then we get to this point where you don't have to just quote Strauss. You don't have to water it down at all. You can just go pure Schmidt, baby. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Right to the source. I wonder, I guess my question for you is, I wonder how much...

would value an outwardly intelligent dictator and if he would even necessarily see value in that where you know Hitler was like incredibly charismatic obviously no one would say that he was a fucking genius I mean Schmidt wouldn't say that he was a genius Trump is obviously not so

is outwardly stupid, but very charismatic, obviously, and can speak very well. He's got a kind of cunning that's very effective for what he needs to do. Yeah. Yes. I wonder, you know, like you have Saddam, who is his, like he had the dress, you know, like he looked the part. Like, I do wonder if Putin is,

Do you know of any like outwardly, you know, even like faux intellectual, you know, like, oh, actually, I mean, we were talking about earlier. Schmidt is a very smart guy. He's just horrendously evil. So can you think of any dictators who were like...

learned dictators it depends on what you you mean by learned right because like yes stalin makes a lot of hideous mistakes that uh cost a lot of people their lives particularly in the early stages of the fighting with the nazis but like is a an educated man who like is red red extensively and you know like he's he's not like a he's not like a a rube right

Right.

And I do think there are very smart people around. I don't think Peter Thiel's dumb. I think he's nuts. And I think he has some blind spots and a freak, but he understands how to do certain things very well. There's kinds of intelligence that he has. Um,

I think Trump has kinds of intelligence. He's been working at this for 20 something years. So I, I don't know, like learned. I think they, I think, I guess the answer is they tend to learn the things they need to learn to get where they want to go. Right. Yeah. They have expertise. Right. Does Donald Trump, is he, does he have like a great knowledge of all of the things that, you know, you and I might respect being informed of? No, but he knew enough to figure out how to dismantle democracy and,

And how to get people around him who knew more about it. Right. And so I guess I'd say dictators tend to be learned in the things they need to be learned and to become dictators. Right. No, I think that's perfectly put. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. Anyway. Wow. Is this how all these episodes? Yes. Jesus Christ. Just us mumbling to ourselves. Fuck. I don't know what to do. God damn it.

Like, where do I even move? Yeah. Fucking Canada's an option. Yeah. Is it Portugal? Do I become a Portuguese windbag? Is that my next- Yeah, become a Portuguese windbag? You guys, it's fine. Robert will let us into the Vatican. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. The Vatican. That's where we're all gonna hide. With all the gold. Okay. So, I don't know. I tend to think what you should do is-

Right. Yeah. And you can find a lot of the blueprints you'll need on the internet. Anyway, episode is over. Blake, you want to plug anything before we go? Yeah.

Yeah, I would. Uh, I have a jizz book of my own. No, I would like to promote, um, August 1st. I'm going to be doing standup in Philadelphia. Also, uh, at Blake Wexler on all social media. Um, if you could follow me there, I would love that. And I'm doing a bike ride to raise money for autism research, autism awareness. Um,

and that, uh, if you can spare anything, it's times are tough right now, but, any donation, if you can do it would be great. It's, uh, that link is in my bio and I have a standup comedy special called daddy long legs, which is available for free on YouTube. And this was a blast. I have so much respect for both of you. This is, this is, I don't, I don't know if I've ever said this sentence. This is a great pod. Like this is a great show. This is a fantastic show. I know no one,

No one does what you do. So, yeah, I appreciate being a part of it. I mean, I certainly will do. We have the Pope. Thank you. We have the new Pope. We have the Pope. You do have the new Pope. And that's how you got elected by your fellow colleagues, Cardinals. Yeah. If you are a... Oh, my God. There needs to be a podcast conclave. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Ooh.

Oh, yeah. To see who the podcasting Pope is. Yeah. And just like the podcast. It better not be one of the pod save guys or I'm doing a schism. I mean, thinking about it would have to be in that guy, Sean, Sean Malin, who just who has the podcast Pantheon book coming out.

later this year that we're in that book so we get to be in the conclave if it doesn't go my way I'm moving to Avignon and I'm going to create like a counter conclave and we're gonna have us an anti-podcast the fuckery we can get oh my god Robert it has to happen it has to happen hope save America

We could do so much fuckery. Oh, I'm plotting. I'm plotting. Okay. Anyways, Blake, Blake, thank you so much for being here. This was so lovely. Robert, Robert, that was horrifying. Did we do it? Yeah. We did the podcast. Let's go away. Okay.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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