Don’t Mourn, Repoliticize!

At around 11 p.m. on November 8th, Americans discovered that we're still living in Carl Schmitt's world. Schmitt, a German legal theorist, argued in the years leading up to the Second World War that political liberalism—defined for him as the governing philosophy that takes individual freedom as the supreme political value—was bankrupt. At the time, fascism was spreading across Europe and South America and communism was beginning to assert itself internationally. Empirically, Schmitt's thesis was hard to contest. But then something strange happened. Liberalism turned into a political juggernaut. The Allies, a military coalition that included basically every liberal power on earth, defeated the authoritarian Axis. Then the United States, the greatest of the liberal powers, outlasted the illiberal Soviet Union to become the guarantor of what looked like a liberal world order.