Episode 152 -- Carl Schmitt, Part 2

0:00And then he follows up, shattered, home, horny, falling apart, can barely stay on my feet. Unfortunately, unfortunately I get him. He is so me. But like half the entries in this diary are this. Or just like, I'm exhausted. I feel like shit. I want to have sex. Everything sucks. Yeah. Fit of rage because Duska brought home a ridiculous still life by Jil featuring a dead fish. Okay, but don't you hate it when your wife brings home a ridiculous still life featuring a dead fish? I mean, I'm with him there. Sounds ugly. I don't want to look at a dead fish on my walls. I do not believe in making the different enemy distinction except when it comes to dead fish pictures. That is the enemy. I am the sovereign. There is no exception. Hello, I'm Adrian Dogg. And I'm Moira Donnigan. Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right. So Adrian, today we are back with part two of our opus on the Nazi political philosophy for Mr. Karl Schmidt.

1:01Yes. Karl Schmidt. Schmidtie to his friend. Who we are not. So we're just going to call him Karl Schmidt throughout. We're going to launch right into this. This is kind of a funny crossover episode in the sense that we talked about the basics of his philosophy and his outlook and the sort of central feces. He's like really famous slogans, right? The sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception, right? The fact that politics is about the friend, enemy distinction, etc., etc. That we went over in the first episode. But here I want to show how this actually meets real politics. The best way I could think of that was I've been following Mr. Karl Schmidt through the year 1933 and turning our podcast series into a book for coming 2027. And I think it's really instructive to sort of see how he intervenes and how he distends and adjusts what he thinks. I want to flag right away for our listeners that there are two ways of reading that. There are Schmidtians and there are Schmidt scholars who say like no, he teally distorted himself

2:06and twisted himself into this pretzel in order to accommodate himself to the Nazis. And there are a lot of people who say like no, he's just making explicit something that was implicit in his philosophy all along. And you know, just because he later falls out of favor with the Nazis in 1936 doesn't mean that he didn't largely agree with them on a lot of stuff. Now in recapping what we talked about last time, I do think it's important to kind of center him as a thinker of the politics of the friend enemy distinction, a guy who thinks that most of the concepts of modern political theory are just theological concepts about which we've forgotten that they are political concepts. And he's the great sort of exegete of sovereignty. And I think these are the things that make him so incredibly beloved by Silicon Valley creeps by various anti liberal right wingers in the Republican Party and the Trump administration right now, right? And I think a lot of it has to do with this idea that liberalism represses certain facts

3:07about itself. And this is something they love because of course it means that you know better than the person across from you. It means that they don't really understand their own project and you understand it better than they understand it themselves. And it kind of frees you of the you know, you're so busy pointing out the hypocrisy of the other side that you kind of don't ever have to put meat on the bones of your particular objections. You don't have to say like, well, what would this politics really look like? Right. You can just kind of gesture at it as dishonest, but like substantively what do Schmidt and his imitator say that liberalism is avoiding? Is it about like a confrontation with violence and domination? Is it about these quasi mystical animal forces? What does he say that liberalism denies or looks away from? Yeah, it's surprisingly capacious. And I think it kind of does shift throughout his life and it shifts depending on who he's talking to. His work as a jurist seems to suggest that the prime thing that liberalism represses is

4:07really the fact that a constitution has to have a sovereign that someone has to be in charge. He thinks, well, they all try to dissipate or defray that fundamental truth, but it's all just shirking responsibility. Ultimately, you do need to kind of come down hard on some people and deciding on that is what sovereignty is. So that's the specific sort of legal case. What we do today associate with the theory of the unitary executive in the United States. Within these feckless, talky constitutional structures slumber something far more steely, far more hard-nosed, and liberals by and large don't want to acknowledge that. And don't want to wield it. Of course, when they do wield it, he thinks it's illegitimate too. Like basically, only right wingers can seem to lay hold of this legitimately, though he sometimes is impressed with communists to do it too, just because he really likes force. But generally, he thinks that this is really more of a stand-in for a wider failure. And that's where the question of the political, the concert of the political, which we talked about last time comes in. He thinks liberalism is about the avoidance, about repression, or about maybe side-stepping,

5:12the truly political, right? The true politics, which is about friends and enemies, right? And you could say like, oh, you know, they're sticking their heads in the sand. That's not quite what he's saying. He sounds frustrated when he describes this. When he says, for instance, liberalism, quote, has attempted to dissolve the enemy, transforming him into a competitor on the business front and into a debating opponent on the intellectual front. That sounds like what he's saying, they're avoiding his violence. To me, that's what it sounds like. Yeah. So just strength and dominance, right? This is supposed to be a life and death struggle. And instead, they've turned into a debate society, right? If you read the writing of Curtis Yarwin, it's all this, right? Yeah, this is a frequent far-right critique of liberalism. It's bloodless, it's legalistic, it's interested in rules more than interested in power. And therefore, it sort of abnegates our circumvents what they understand as this more authentic and quasi-mistical drive of dominance and force.

6:13Yeah. And we should say this guy, of course, never punches anyone in his entire life. All this is done at a desk. So there is this kind of like, ersatz thing going on there where he has these fantasies of omnipotence and of dominance. And in the end, all he does is write pretty good essays. There is an element of displacement going on here too. But yet, he thinks it's nambi, pambi, it's feckless. And it's kind of a feminine to sit in meetings with people who properly ought to be your enemy, right? He puts it as follows in political theology, quote, again, the liberal states, nature is quote, negotiation. A hesitant half-measure born of the hope that the definitive confrontation, the bloody decisive battle might yet be transformed into a parliamentary debate and indefinitely deferred through endless discussion, right? This is a guy who is very much frustrated by the Weimar Republican. He's like, you're avoiding the ultimate questions, the ultimate confrontations. So as an alternative, he's really into like making a decision, taking action, making these

7:16very clear distinctions between friend and enemy. That sounds like something that would appeal to the sort of like, move fast and break things crowd from Silicon Valley, right? Like the sort of people who themselves probably spend a lot of time at desks and inchairs, but have these fantasies of domination and force. Where they also spend some time at the climbing gym, so a place of furious contestation and vicious friend enemy distinctions. No, I think that's exactly right. And a lot of the political theories, such as they are, subtending the Trumpist takeover at the sideline of Congress, the use of executive orders, the fixation on unelected bureaucrats. And at the same time, the idea that certain bureaucrats, like Doge or Stephen Miller, are somehow empowered by the valk, by the will of the people, even though like none of us can ever remember voting for any of them, right? Like the way that sovereignty sort of transfers itself, as you say in this quasi-mystical

8:17way, this clearly all bespeaks the influence of Carl Schmidt. Or that's just how they feel and Carl Schmidt gives them the buzzwords to pretty that up a little bit. So Schmidt having sort of carved out this intellectual niche for himself by 1933, when the Nazis rise to power at the end of January, I imagine he's quite excited. Exactly, right? Decision, action, and enemies. If there's one thing that is in ample supply in 1933, it would be those three things, right? So let's get into it. How does he respond throughout the year? By 1933, Schmidt had made a career of being, let's say, an internal critic of the Weimar Constitution, really, what he's doing is like, here's how you dismantle this fucking thing. And I think it's important to note that the way he accommodates himself to what eventually emerges from the collapse of the Weimar Republic, shows why it's so dangerous that our conservative elites worship at the altar of this guy. Like, you can see this is when it goes from an intellectual exercise of internal critique to a proactive politics and like, it ain't pretty.

9:21So one reason why today's authoritarians like him so much, I'd say, is that he wasn't saying throughout 1933 that Germany should break with the Weimar Constitution. He does say it's all a mistake, but he doesn't think, let's all chuck it to the dust heap. Rather, he claims that the Constitution of Weimar had the tools and elements of a far more authoritarian state in it. Almost like what we sometimes think of as like, framers intent in the United States. And he's saying, like, you can excavate that. So that's the other reason I think our conservative elites like him, because in the end, the proposition, let's get rid of the US Constitution is a highly minoritarian position in the United States. But being like, oh, maybe we can reinterpret it slightly in such a way that it really becomes its opposite. That's something that has a great deal of appeal to like the authors of Project 2025 to people at various institutes and think tanks. And I think their Schmidt again is like a really scary influence, but also someone that we can learn from where this journey goes.

10:23So this is in some way a rehash of Project 1933, but we're speedrunning it today. So as you know, Hitler comes to power on January 30th, 1933, but maybe we'll rewind the tape a little bit to Wednesday, January 25th, 1933. And I'm going to be quoting here from his diaries. What I'm going to do here is basically draw on his own diaries, which are weird. I imagine they're freaking creepy as hell because wasn't he also like kind of a sex addict? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So like everybody, keep in mind that we're talking about a Nazi who loves violence and is compulsively visiting prostitutes. Yeah. And sleeping with like friends wise and stuff like that. Yeah. So we're going to interspersed with his writings because one thing Schmidt does in this moment when Germany sort of reconfigures around him is to write himself into that process.

11:23He publishes an enormous amount, switches publishers, all that stuff, rewrite some of his older works. He's really furiously engaged in this process of writing himself into this process and interpreting that process in ways that the new rulers would like. And I think looking at his essays from that year is super, super helpful. Yeah. So I have here in our doc the entry from January 25th, 1933, just to give people kind of a sense tired, got up at the last minute. He's like always tired and feeling terrible, by the way. Relatable. I'm sorry. Relatable guy. Totally. And then he goes to there in a somber 70th birthday celebration that's a political scientist and economist. Speakers included Reich commissioner Kayla Dreadful, Halton, Ludwig Bernhardt, a student and finally a somber himself. He struck me as a buffoon, a sad affair, had a pleasant chat with privy counsellors Züring, felt revolving towards Voilfett and his wife. Fradeem would look very beautiful. Oh my God.

12:23What a dick. He's like, I went to this party. Everybody there sucked. Who are these people and what's wrong with them? So these are his set at the time. Right wingers who are not Nazis. These are usually associated with the German national people's party, the NVP. And pop in adjacent, which is who he's working for at this point. Okay. Yeah. And he thinks they're buffoons, dreadful. Felt revulsion towards Wolfers and his wife. Revulsion is quite strong. Who is Wolfers? Yeah. Good question. This is Anord Voifers, Swiss economist. And there are two possibilities why he feels revulsion here. Is it going to be racist? Sorry. I'm just like, is it racist? You tell me. This is Carl Schmitt like turning the big knob that says racism on it and looking back and ever approval over his shoulders. Yeah. Basically, what if us is Nazi adjacent in early 1933, but he's also according to the Nazi

13:23terminology, have Jewish. Oh, I'm sure that's going to work out great for him. Good job, buddy. Yes. I think he leaves Germany in 33 and undergoes a political realignment. So it had us off to him. And then, the German president chooses differently. But yes, revulsion, paranoia, disgust around Jewish people is a cruelly shocking through line in these diaries. You know that Arkram drawing where Arkram's avatar is miserable, hunched over, a little like Gremlin of a man and he's muttering to himself, I fucking hate everybody. Like, look at you. You're all idiots. You're disgusting. And then there's just somebody walking past him. And it's just labeled like a normal guy. Like that's how I think of a lot of this kind of creep masculinity. And I do think we have to qualify Schmidt as a creep here. Yeah. Because there's this sort of like needfulness, this like searing resentment and contempt that makes them socially just incapable and kind of like rotten.

14:27It is worth noting though that he hates everyone a little bit, but the most physical reactions he reserves for Jewish people and like they'll later show up in his nightmares. Like he has nightmares about them like hounding him at a time when people are literally getting shot from being Jewish, right? Yeah. Somehow he's still the victim in his own fantasy while the literal Holocaust is ongoing. Well, not yet. And there are three of them. Not the holocaught proper, but you know what I mean? Yeah, these are not people who aren't any position to hurt him, but in his mind. And it's a physical revulsion, right? It's like a bodily sense of disgust. So that's the party. Then what does he say? Yeah, he concludes this note by saying sad, depressed July 20th is gone. What does that mean July 20th for fresh memory? So July 20th is the moment is the date of the coup the previous year in Prussia, which is where he was Schmidt helped von Poppen take over a federal state that basically was run by social democrats and replaced it with a right wing government, which to him was

15:31sort of the model for a right wing takeover. So here he is on January 25th, five days before Hitler comes to power to say the spirit of that moment is gone. Like this is his, you know, January 6th with a beautiful day, but nothing came of it. He's like, ah, all of my dreams. Yeah, hang in there a little carol. I know. Things are going to turn around for you very quickly. I know. Okay, so that brings us forward. Where are we now? Let's stay with him in January for a little bit on Friday, January 27th. He notes in his diary, the Hindenburg myth is at an end, a ghastly state of affairs. Schleiche is resigning. Poppen or Hitler will take over. The old gentleman has lost his mind. Macmahal. What's that? Macmahal is a prime minister of France in the 19th century who unsuccessfully tried to bring back the monarchy. Okay. So Hindenburg right is the right president at the time. He's the one who will appoint Hitler three days after this. But Schmitt is not greeting this as some kind of exciting development.

16:32Like this seems to be genuine. The frustration is not that he doesn't want to right wing take over what he wants is some sort of restoration of the empire and seems. He thinks that like Hindenburg because he was a general, because he's an aristocrat, because he's part of the old Prussian elite is sort of well positioned to take Germany back to where it needs to go. And he thinks that neither Poppen or Hitler can really do it. And especially the word myth I think is pretty important. In February he'll note that one of his friends is quote, deeply depressed about the end of the last German legend and Hindenburg's political passivity. Right. This idea that like you need to have a good story, you need to have a legend of myth that can sort of bring the people together. And that that myth sort of has to transcend the party, has to transcend class, has to transcend particularism, right, is I think really, really important to him. And for him, Hindenburg is the one who could have done that. And he perceives I think accurately January 33 as Hindenburg's ultimate failure.

17:33He's like this guy is not going to matter. However this shakes out and that's bad. So I want to point out like he's getting his wish, but not quite in the way he wanted. And then on the 28th he notes a bit of a cold, very sad afraid of the political events to come, loathing for the socialists and for what is returning a spineless liberalism. Oh my God. Yada yada. Do these people not get tired of having the same thought over and over? It's also where is the spineless liberalism returning? Where are the socialists returning? You just have like popping or Hitler coming to power. Yeah. How does this wind up with you being the victim yet again? It's really remarkable, right? Like he's tense. He wants something to happen. And then when it does happen, he's like, well, I don't know, do I want it like that? You know? Yeah. So much for decisiveness and the friend on a distinction. He can't make up his mind about getting everything he wants. Yeah, the whole thing, this is a term that I think Sam Adler Bell often uses about these guys that I like is this is cosplay, right? Like he cosplays as this decisive person.

18:34Like he's worried that the wrong group of right wing creeps will take over his ministry and he therefore will no longer have a job, right? He's high up in the administration. He doesn't want to lose that job. You can fucking varnish that all you want with like friend enemy distinction like in the end, like you're like, this is a nice paycheck. I like it. That's right. Our listeners might remember this guy has gone from being a law professor to being a prosecutor for the state. He's kind of like an in an AG sort of role. No, I think he's more like on the defensive side. I think he's there. I think he's there. Lawyer for certain election related things. He also is still teaching at the same time. Will 1933 briefly take a professorship in Cologne and then go back to Berlin? That's very strange because a lot isn't flux during this year. His CV is also a little bit strange, but like yeah, he'll jump around a lot. Now he is teaching during this time. Can you explain this gap in your resume, coach? Yeah. So then we get to Monday, January 30th, 1933. He has a cold again.

19:35He is writing a letter to Ludwig Kass, head of the center party, who basically had called him out in print and had said like this guy wants to destroy the constitution. And he needs to be stopped. And he's like, how dare you stop saying things that I'm doing? You say destroy the constitution like it's a bad thing. Yeah. So he writes this letter, kind of an open letter knowing I think he writes the letter and sends copies to von Popman others, sort of defending himself, but also is exactly saying like, hey, maybe it's not such a bad thing. And then he goes to a cafe. Cafe Cuchera finds out that Hitler has become Reich's chancellor and Pop and Vice chancellor excited, happy and high spirit sent off the letter to Kass. So his feelings about Hitler in those early days are interesting. Like he later heavily retconned this stuff. And so it was like I was always against this. It's unclear. Like he's happy and excited here. But at the next day, January 31st, he'll say he's agitated furious at that stupid ridiculous

20:38Hitler. He's going to get himself to a place where he recognizes this regime as a fulfillment of his fantasies. It is not that in the beginning. That much appears to be genuine unless he really went through and fucking red-conned everything. It seems pretty clear. Now a lot of this may have to do with worries about his own future. The Nazis come with their own legal war machine in tow. Many of whom, let's say, were about Schmidt's age, but had a change in career fortunes right around 1945. And the fact that a lot of them were war criminals and did get hanged at Nuremberg. But they come with their own legal war machine, meaning it's very unclear what popens legal war machine will now do. So all these guys are probably going to be out of jobs. They're not interpreted as sufficiently nationalist or sufficiently far-right. They might be suspicious by the new incoming Nazi administration by virtue of not having been Nazis yet. Exactly. But let's switch to February. In February, we see the first publication of Schmidt's after Hitler, his name Chancellor.

21:43It's, of course, it was written before. It was written sometime in mid-January. And it's about developing the total state in Germany. And this is the idea that he'll seize on as 1933 grinds on, which is to say what I did with Prussia in 1932 is really the blueprint for how Hitler can establish or someone. He's still thinking someone in January 33, someone can establish a total state in Germany. Yeah. And he's probably thinking it could be Schleiche, it could be Popem. He's probably not thinking Hitler then. But he's probably not unhappy this things out. Now he just has to make clear that he meant Hitler all along. Yeah, it occurs to me that there are several people. I don't think Schmidt is especially unique here. There are several people in the German right who were kind of interested in this authoritarian project and in sort of moving beyond the Vimer constitution into a more politically restrictive model of governance, who also thought that Hitler was kind of an idiot or like a clown.

22:43He seems to have not commanded a ton of personal respects. There's a lot of people who are like, okay, we don't like the person, but maybe looking at a board with the project. Exactly. And I think that's exactly what's happening. It's very much about the project and the person of Hitler will become more important as 33 grinds on. Yeah, but at the outset, there's a lot of people who are like, okay, this guy's a clown. I can use him for my own ends, which sounds to me kind of familiar from our own era, right? There's a lot of people who are like, I can use Trump. I can like ride the Trump wave and manipulate him to get what I want. And that just like basically never works out for any of them. I mean, it worked out for Karlsmit for a little bit. Three years. The other thing of course is that this is still about a kind of constitutional refashioning of Germany. And he's not particularly interested yet in the concept of the folk. That's going to become way more important in the later spring for him. This kind of idea that the movement, the Nazi movement and the state and the folk are all merging now.

23:43That is something that he gets more interested in as the Nazi project takes shape. I just briefly want to read to you from his diary on Tuesday, February 8th, just because it's funny. Friendly confirmation from Poppen regarding my letter to Kass. He's the only decent fellow, right? So he's still, this is still his guy. He's like, this is what a nice guy. He likes me, which is like the number one way you get Karlsmit to like you, it's too like him. I'm being nice to him. And then he follows up shattered, home, horny, falling apart, can barely stay on my feet. Unfortunately, unfortunately, I get him. He is so me. But like half the entries in this diary are this like, are just like, I'm exhausted. I feel like shit. I want to have sex. Everything sucks. Yeah. I'm afraid because Dushka brought home a ridiculous still life by Jil featuring a dead fish. Okay, but don't you hate it when your wife brings home a ridiculous still life featuring a dead fish? I mean, I'm with him there. It sounds ugly. I don't want to look at a dead fish on my walls. I do not believe in making the friend enemy distinction except when it comes to dead fish

24:43pictures. Is that the enemy? I am the sovereign. There is no exception. But then here it comes. He concludes this note by saying, escape plan. I thought Switzerland then Italy going underground, vanishing into nothingness. All right. So he's thinking like, this is going to be bad for me. Yeah. He's really thinking about leaving like in a way that people like Thomas Mann and Bertrand Brecht at this point are not right on by February 8th, even like confirmed communists are like, yeah, let's see where this goes. I mean, there are a few people who sort of like rush off Erich Maria Remark among them who like really just like run immediately and are like, this is going to be bad y'all. But everyone else is like, well, they can't do all of this for sure. So let's not run quite yet. And Schmidt is like, oh, no, no, no. I'm on kayak.com, googling like Prague. How do you get to, you know? And I think that that's really important here. Like, I think this is genuine. I think he's like, these people mean business and I may be on the wrong end of them. Then we get more stuff about the Jews. Yariara, yeah.

25:43He's so obsessed with like occasion in hatred, right? He keeps pissing off everyone else and he's like, there's so much hatred from me, right? Like February 10th, he's like, Lomon came and spoke of the Jews hatred towards me, especially at the School of Politics. He's like, yeah, man, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, that sounds reasonable. I don't know. Yes. On February 28th, terrible hatred of the center party members towards me. You're like, okay, dude, like again. Yeah, it's like, what do you expect? That's the other thing about these fucking guys. They want to be like, okay, you should be excluded from political participation and rights. Your life should be made really hard. You should be deprived of dignity and probably subjected to violence and why don't you like me? You know, there's such little bitches about it. He really is. I mean, he's just so techy about this and at the same time, it's like, you've made it, it's not even that he's written against them. He's made it his political project to destroy that party. And he's like, I may don't like me for some reason. It's like, why are they mad? Yeah. Anyway, but so it's not clear how effective he thinks the Nazis are being at this point.

26:48On Monday, February 27th, 1933, he notes in the evening, quote, a pleasant, lively conversation about the futility of the one party system in Germany. So he's saying, like, it's not going to happen, right? He's like, I like where their heads at. Not going to happen. Bora, do you remember what happened on February 27th, 1933, around the time that Schmidt is having this dinner? I mean, I barely remember this morning, but I'm guessing from context clues that they just start outlawing other parties. It's the Reichstag fire. Oh, this is the moment when it all starts, right? Okay. Yeah. And there are people who do have deals among them, the leader head of the Gestapo, who are very clear that the Nazis had all these arrest orders, like in the drawer ready to go. And that like basically the Reichstag fire is the occasion they need. Again, Schmidt, knowing whom he knows in the government probably knew that, but still, like he's able to feel so set upon and like, he's like, oh, we're just not going to get our beautiful one party state. Like 27 days into this fucking thing.

27:49He's like, decided to be a victim. I'm sorry. This is what I believe they refer to among the reactionary center as the victim mentality. It's like actually you're doing okay, buddy. Your project is coming to fulfillment. Why do you just want to whine? Why are you so committed to a notion of your own defeat? Then it also doesn't seem like he's particularly active right now. Like everything is happening without him even having to make much of an effort. And I think that is his ultimate source of frustration, right? He at some point talks about like, oh, they're trying to destroy the myth of Carl Schmidt. He was happy when people thought of him as like this Emmy-N�s Grease behind pop and he was kind of pissed at like now it's all happening without him. I also want to point out that this attitude of like being predisappointed is something that is so common among especially sort of Silicon Valley elites. We're going to already tell they're going to they're setting themselves up for like, I was pro-Trump and then I just felt so disappointed by and I didn't I didn't think it was going to be like this and it's like what fucking made you think that?

28:50It's the same as like I wanted to be woke, but you made me you pushed me to the right with it. Yeah, there's a, I don't know, there's a way in which like a posture of like preemptive knowing cynicism is supposed to like signal your own sophistication, but it also is just I just find it so whiny. Yeah, I think he's basically keeping his options open here, right? This is all collapses after the March 5th election. He can sort of say like, look, did I agree with some of the stuff sure, but in practice it was just he was an imperfect messenger for a very good idea, right? Like, exactly the kind of thing a Peter Tiel can then say about Trump every time like after he's made him president again, right? Now let's skip ahead a little bit now. So we have the elections in March and after that serious glycial tone serious coordination measures kind of bringing the state into line. That's when the local and municipal governments have to have Nazi control the same way that the federal government does, right? The national government. Exactly. And it soon spills out of control. It starts with the administrative state and then becomes just something that happens in

29:53schools and universities at the post office, at the rail company, et cetera, et cetera. And it really becomes purge very much like the purges that we see under someone like Hague Seth or we saw under Doge and it tends to target people who are quote unquote unreliable, which usually means social Democrats, although eventually it also means center party people, communists are long gone already. And it means Jews mostly at this point. This is where Schmidt finally gets to do stuff because he helps write one of the coordination measures the law of April 7th about bringing the local municipalities into line with the federal government. And he writes a commentary on that law. And this is where he starts building his own myth. And we should say like Schmidt knows his way around a constitution. So like he's not wrong about this, but he's starting to sort of emphasize an underlying, right? And he now reads his interpretation of the Poisson Schlock of the coup from above where basically Hindenburg and Kvampapin conspired to take over the federal state of Prussia,

30:58right? It says though, Trump were to remove Gavin Newsom and install someone as the governor of California. And he basically reads that as a first step towards the total state, which I think is accurate. The Nazis looked at that and were like, okay, cool, we can do that, right? And as essentially presaging the Ascente Hitler, and I think that that parts a little bit more doubtful, but he writes in the notes to the law, the Prussian coup in heavy quotation marks. I'm guessing on his part of July 20th, 1932, represented the first attempt to assert the Reich's right to unified internal political governance. Okay. So now the Reich, by which I assume he's meaning like the Nazi regime de facto, has its own rights that can be enforced by the law over the rights of municipalities or states. Yeah. I mean, it's a good flag. Yeah. What he's saying here is that Germany as a whole, the Reich as a whole has rights. Right. But he doesn't mean like any opposition parties.

32:01This is not something that was going to come up if say the Reich stock had been under SPD control. Exactly. And in fact, it's very clear that the Reich for him at this point is very much not an institutional entity, right? Like what we say when like something VUS, right? Like that's the institutional framework of the United States that is on trial there, right? Oh, so he means like kind of like the essence of Germany, like the German spirit. Yeah. Oh my God. That's the other thing is these guys talk, it's like define your terms and they can't, because they're talking about a vibe that they're trying to grant legal rights to a vibe here. Yeah, exactly, right? This is not an institutional entity. It's not even a political entity in the way we would traditionally understand that it's political in the sense that he uses the political, right? It's vitalist as I was mentioning last time. It's a subject that is able to make the friend enemy distinction for itself. That thing has certain rights. And you've already detected this. That definition leaves out communists, social democrats, Jews, et cetera, et cetera.

33:03It's not everyone. It's not every German citizen. It's an illiberal model of the nation. It's basically the nation as a thing that you belong to and you can be excluded from. And that's not an accident. As the structures of the Weimar Republic totter and collapse around him, the Volk sort of re-emerges as a central category in Schmitt's thinking. That's not new for him. He sort of pushed this line since the late 20s, but he now can sort of emphasize that. And just to give you a sense of like how that shifts your legal categories, to me it's fascinating as a, you know, in a way a child of liberal democracy myself. It really helps to envision the kinds of examples he has in mind. Because while Karl Schmitt is, as we mentioned, very good at these sort of big claim, he is also a practiced lawyer. So he can sort of then drill down, be like, this is an example of this. Here is one example that really clarified this for me. And this is from a 1929 essay, Essence and Genesis of the Fascist State, where he criticizes

34:05the institution of the secret ballot. OK. Right? Like my first reaction, exactly. Am I? OK. Well, we're really, we're really far down the rabbit hole, Karl, aren't we? His claim is that the secret ballot actually swarts the will of the Volk by unduly individualizing, privatizing and most importantly, depoliticizing it. I'll just quote from this essay that today's methods of secret individual voting jeopardized the entire realm of the state and the political through complete privatization, entirely displacing the people as a unified entity from the public sphere. The sovereign, da-da-da, vanishes into the voting booth, and degrading the process of forming the state's will to a mere aggregation of secret private individual wills, or in reality of uncontrollable mass desires and resentments. OK. Like the Volk has a right to find its own collective will.

35:09That is its essence. And this necessarily has to override the individual wills of anybody. I happen to deem inconvenient. And it strikes me that this likes us up a no-trust-gossman fallacy, right? Because if you have like a section of the Volk that does not agree with this, you suppose expression of the collective will, then they're not a true member of the Volk, right? It's a concept that is sort of morphologically exclusive, right? It's like able to like keep changing. There is definitely an element of that. If I had to steal man's argument here, I would say he's probably thinking of public acclamation as a counter example. The way maybe at a march, if someone starts shouting something that the rest of the group doesn't share, you might shout them down and be like, just get in line and shout along with us. And then there's a form of like collective will-finding that is public and is open, right? Like two groups might shout at each other. I think that's the sort of thing he thinks. He's like, you can be in the minority here, of course.

36:10But the collective will impress itself upon you. It'll be very obvious. It'll be physically palpable to you that you're in the minority and you will not feel good. So that would be the most steel manned version of this, right? And he's correct that the liberal state, of course, wants the secrecy of the ballot precisely to thwart that, to be like, it shouldn't just be the loudest voices. It shouldn't be our craziest passions that carry the day. The voting is meant to be a lonely place where you sort of think like, play really believe this or am I not comfortable with this, right? It's meant to stage a break from collective life. And here am I as an individual person? How do I feel right now in my heart of hearts? To him this is a bourgeois fiction, but I think that a lot of constitutionalists would defend that and say like, well, no, especially in the situation where mass media can generate the impression of widespread popular support, something that Joseph Goebbels was developing as a technique right as Schmidt is, you know, saying all this stuff, right?

37:14It's actually much better to sequester people forever briefly from the clamor outside and be like, wait, does this actually make sense? Do I want this? Anyway, I think that's a pretty clear example of like how where he thinks there's this undue liberalization, this undue individualization and privatization of what ought to be a public consensus finding of the fork. But as you point out, this also kind of requires saying, well, you guys don't belong. And not just like because the other shout louder, but because there's something wrong with you, right? Like this becomes a kind of biologistic and vitalistic conception. And basically his claim in May, in a May essay that he writes the good right of the German revolution, May 12th, he points out like right now what you've seen out of Hitler is mostly stuff coming out of the administrative state. You get the police cracking down, you get the Reichstag fire decree, you get the coordination laws, right?

38:14The Glyschaltung, you are starting to see governors replaced by Stadthalta, et cetera, et cetera. Right? And his point in that essay and in many of the essays at the time is to say, that's a mistake. That's how we're doing it. That's not what's actually happening here. What's happening here is a self assertion of the Volk, right? He says, quote, in rapid succession, the Reich government has enacted laws whose true significance has been grasped only by a few. The underlying legal principle that governs and informs this body of legislation can be summed up in a single word and concept, Glyschartigkeit, sameness of kind. A people is awakening to an awareness of its own nature and is rediscovering itself and its own kind. Uh oh. Yeah. I know what that means. It's like, wait, is this fucking essay about us and how we don't belong to the Volk? So he says, for now on, German law and the German state are not based on an empty and formal equality of all before the law, but rather on the substantive and essential homogeneity

39:19of the entire German people, people united and uniform within itself. There it is. Blood and soil. There we go. Yeah. Exactly. Right? So like, Schmidt, like he claims to not hate democracy. He hates what we think of as democracy, but his democracy is like one where like the Volk will shout you down. He doesn't profess to hate equality. He just think we have, we have a overly abstract form of equality. Equality is not a thing that we should all arrive at. It's the thing we should depart from. The fact that you and I share a biological destiny and a biological identity and that should be the kind of jumping off point for our political decisions, not the goal for our constitution. Right. Well, this is always a double edge sort of what we call populism, right? Because the notion that the people are sovereign means that you have to deal with the fact that the people don't all agree with each other, right? And one very popular way to do it by the likes of Schmidt is to sort of identify a very specific

40:20group of people that you mean and only sort of permit their perspectives to be legitimated or like recognized. Exactly. Four out of five German dentists agree. And the fifth German dentist is no longer working as a dentist at this point, right? Schmidt's very clear that this is not about changing constitutional structures and bringing things into alignment with the central government. That's also what's happening. But it's about the sovereignty of the Volk, one that excludes many people, right, who have German passports, who have the right to vote. So this Volk concept, something that he has come to as a source of democratic legitimacy or like governance legitimacy, it does seem to be like a kind of rapid return of this idea. It's like post-Hawk trying to form a justification for what he sees the Nazis doing. Is he trying to guide them in their future consolidation of the German state? What's the object of all this thinking about the Volk? Hard to say. I mean, he's had this idea since the 20s. I think he firmly believes in it.

41:20It's very clear that he hates, hates, hates anyone that he would exclude from this group. I think what he's doing here is more trying to egg the Nazis on. He's saying, yes, it's smart to get a bunch of people into positions of power. But every populist does that, every authoritarian does that. You guys have to go further. You have to explain that Glyce Chalton, that the equalization of these institutions is not about making things the same. It is about recognizing what is already the same and what is not the same, what doesn't belong. Again, I don't want to hand it to Carl Schmidt, but as a diagnosis, he's of course right. In some ways, people thought, this is a authoritarian government removing its political enemies from positions of power. He's like, no, this is about who biologically belongs to a category. I think historically, yes, that's what it was about. Carl Schmidt likes it, which is a problem. But as a diagnosis, it's definitely more right than anyone who would have said in April

42:25or May, it's like, well, dictators always do this. They're just going to get their buddies in a couple of positions of power. And then it'll all run its course, right? He's like, no, no, no, no. This is a biological project. Yeah, it's occurred to me a couple of times. I don't want to get too derailed here, but it's occurred to me a couple of times as we talked about Schmidt that he has a much clearer vision of the Nazi project than somebody like Thomas Mondeau's at this point. He understands exactly what they're doing, whereas other people are still confused and thinking about it under perhaps older or less comprehensive models of corruption. Yeah, exactly. You would think about it as corruption or you think about it as populism. This is a point that I think Frederico Finkelstein makes in one of his books that populists and fascists both love talking about the enemies of the people. But one group does something about that, right? Whereas the other one is just does that when a judge is like, oh, that's corruption, by the way. I don't know if that entirely holds any more as a distinction, but it's very noticeable that again, Schmidt here has a decisionistic agenda. He's like, these distinction between friendly enemy do not matter as a matter of rhetoric.

43:29It only matters if you make them matter, right? If you make them part of people's lived reality that has to be part of what's happening here. Otherwise, fine. You're like Andrew Jackson. You have this rhetorical stance and you sort of make some headfakes towards authoritarianism, but you're not quite going there, right? And he's like, no, to make the different enemy distinction is you believe it and you will try to destroy that enemy. Okay. Just to give you a sense of what that can sound like in terms of who belongs and who doesn't to this valk on May 31st. You mentioned Thomas Mann. Schmidt writes an article about people like Thomas Mann, though Mann at the time would not have been in his cross here, isn't necessarily because if you recall, Mann sort of kept a little mum early in 1933. He writes this brief article in the Vesto Chabu Obahta. We should also mention that for a law professor at the time and a government worker, Schmidt is like very present in newspapers. A lot of these are newspaper articles. And this one is called the German intellectuals. So basically here we get to a group that is definitely not part of the valk.

44:32And I would invite our listeners to think of this sounds like any people they could find on Twitter today. Mary the first paragraph here. Today hundreds of quote unquote German intellectuals sit abroad inciting war against the German people. The treason against state and nation that they practice secretly and under a cloak of concealment for decades, they now perpetrate openly before the entire world. Most of them still hold German citizenship and can in that sense still call themselves Germans. Whether it would be expedient to strip them of their citizenship by law is a separate question. And perhaps not even an important one. For those of you keeping track at home, this would take until August. They would make Carl Schmitt's suggestion here a reality within less than three months. The fact that they use the German language no more makes them Germans than the counterfeiting of German money makes the counterfeiter German. They have never belonged to the German folk. So this is also a sense of German identity as something that's being stolen and cheapened

45:33by people who are outside of this sovereign popular well. Yeah. People who speak good German, people who claim Germanness, people who have been secretly infusing corrosive ideas into the valk, but who never can quite belong, we can only create a mimicry of German culture. G, yeah. Yeah. It sounds like anti-Semitism. It sounds like racism. It sounds like a lot of stuff that's very familiar. Yeah. It's a credit to him, I guess, that he doesn't say the Jews in all caps, but he might as well, honestly. I mean, this sounds to me like an escalation. Is this just him kind of going public with what he felt like when he was at that party with the Jewish guy in January? Is this just kind of him exposing or like stating out loud what he's always believed? Or is this a real change in his thought? It's really unclear, right? There is definitely some red conning going on at this time. Schmidt had published his major works with one publisher, Dunker in Humblott in Berlin,

46:35and his editor there was Ludwig Forchthwang, a Leon Forchthwanger's brother. And almost immediately in 1933, he moves it to a new publisher and begins basically spamming that publishing house with manuscripts. Remember from the first episode that Schmidt's books tend to be quite short. And so Schmidt just kind of craps these out and rapid succession. And the publisher of Hansiateshe Verlachs' Anstalt, you know, it's not around anymore for good reason. It's not a Nazi institution that it pivoted hard to just like publishing Nazi stuff in 33. Okay. Not even sure if it's that much about like ideological alignment, though I'm sure that existed too. It was really much more about like, you know, all these idiots have to like shit out these pamphlets and then like they make all their party-faceful suck ups who are trying to like become something in the Ministry of Propaganda by them. So this is a really good grift for someone, right? By May, for instance, he's revising the concept of the political for this new publisher. He makes changes to it to make it more predictive of the Nazi state.

47:38He's also applying for NSDAP membership right before the party closes the door. This is mostly throughout April. So while he's not technically what was called the fallen of March, right? The people who rushed into the Nazi party the moment the votes have been cast on the March 5th election. He's basically a guy who fell one month later. Good job. Real moral high ground there, Carl. So by April 29th, he has bought a Nazi-fied cap and gown by May 1st. Labor Day, he is elated by the quote, grand celebration, wearing my new academic gown. And then reports on this big rally they have for May 1st, which the Nazis sort of tried to turn into this big performance to sort of like show solidarity with the working class. Rector Lloyd Poit spoke magnificently. Then Winkler, Kempner and a young S.A. man, the latter, insulin and overly arrogant. Then we sang a horse-wrestled song with great enthusiasm, often felt a sense of dread at its catholic brutality and elemental force. So here he is, not three months after like, I hate this Hitler guy being like, well, what

48:42are the lyrics to the horse-wrestled lead again? I used to be terrified of it, but now I'm into it. All right. Well, now let's jump forward a little bit. In October, there's a big meeting of the Reich's jurists in Leipzig. And it's a really kind of interesting conclave because of course, while coordination measures are slowly purging Jews from the academia and from the justice system, not all of them were purged, meaning if someone was a front fighter, for instance, in World War I, they probably still could be a judge. They might be a lawyer. They might still be a law professor. That's right. There are exceptions to the racial exclusions for like World War I veterans, basically, right? Yeah, for a little bit. Yeah. But they are not invited to this thing because basically it's run by the national socialist jurists, Bund, whatever it's called, and they're like, no Jews, please. We're Nazis over here, right? And so this conclave, I find very, very fascinating because Schmidt comes to this, he's sick again,

49:45he's having a bad time, someone is mean to him. He's got to wash his hands. Like he always has a cold. His post nasal drip must have been almost as upsetting as a fascism. Yeah. This is of course the show of these big Nazi jurists who he's kind of jealous of and kind of whom he doesn't respect. I mean, justifiably so they're complete idiots. But he's also got this like wounded supremacy of the creep, right? He's like, even among the other Nazi lawyers, he can't feel at home. He has to resent the success of others. He has to understand himself as, you know, this slighted genius. Exactly. He ends up giving one lecture there, which it's about the administrative state. It doesn't matter so much. But it's material from a book he's going to publish in November of 1933. It's called state movement and people. So this is this triad that he's proposing, right? Like it's no longer sovereignty is centered in the congruence of state movement and people, the people being right here as the Volk. And I think this gives you a really good sense of like how Schmidt is thinking about these

50:45things. The big question around this jurist's meeting is the rechts status, the question of the state of laws. Because like you're re-fashioning the entire way the criminal justice system works and whom it's supposed to serve. There are entire principles of the legal system in Germany that are supposed to be turned on their heads. One example I think this comes in a little later is the prohibition of analogy becomes the demand for analogy. So this is kind of a complicated one, but basically in a liberal constitution, one of the principles is nulla, ternessini, lege, right? No punishment without a law. Just because something feels like it ought to be against the law unless you can point out which paragraph this person has violated, they can't go to jail. The Nazis want to turn that on its head because they're like, that's just protection of the criminal. If it feels wrong to the people, it's wrong. It's bad and should be punished. So just get fucking creative with it. So there's all this stuff that has to be turned on its head. And at the same time, the question becomes like, well, how is this still a state of laws?

51:49Right? It feels like it's a state of vibes, you and I might say. And there's this real debate and this real question, but like, well, how exactly do we justify this? And here I think we can see Schmitt's intervention again because I think his justification of this or his critique of this fixation on the state of laws goes back a to a law that is to a pattern we've seen from him before and B gives us again, a very nice exemplification of how is thinking really works once you put it into the service of a government. What it resembles is that once again, Schmitt is saying, well, yes, this is a problem if you have an overly liberal understanding of what a state of law means. Same way that he's like, yes, yes, yes, I'm not against democracy, but not that kind of democracy, right? Yeah. Like he's saying, I'm foreign, the state of law, but I don't mean by what you mean by it. And I think that the liberal state has basically either degraded our understanding of what the state of laws should be or has in fact repressed what it really is. So he says in state movement people, the liberal applies the term reichstadt, state governed

52:53by the rule of law, only to a state structured in two parts. A state structure differently has quote, no constitution is not a quote constitutional state and naturally not a state of law either. It is not free, but rather an autocracy, a dictatorship, a despotism, et cetera. Again, like this is one of those Schmittian diagnoses where you're like, yeah, I would kind of say that, right? Yeah, like I sort of know what you mean, but then he goes on. Do you mind if I read this part? Yeah, sure, yeah. This two-part structure is based on the antithesis between state and free individual, between state power and individual liberty, between state and a society free from state control, between politics and a private sphere that is apolitical and therefore unaccountable and uncontrolled. So this is the vision of the state extending into every aspect of private life, which is not just sort of like the family life, but really like into like the mind itself, right? The state becomes synonymous or like supersedes the individual or comes to encompass the individual

53:53so that like a set of individual rights becomes kind of moot because there's not a distinction between the state and the person. Exactly. So he thinks it is central to the liberal state as it emerges in the 18th century that there is a sphere which the government has no business interfering with, right? And like it is the job of the constitution to create limits between those two spheres. If you look at the Bill of Rights in the United States, right? Like you have a right to try by jury. They cannot be any bills of a tinder. They cannot be a quartering of troops. They cannot be searches and seizures, et cetera, et cetera, right? But this is also a feminist criticism of liberalism, right? Is it leaves vast swaths of private life in a like, we're so in state of nature where only the strong rule or should I say a hapsi in state of nature where the strong rule and where you know women are there for sort of unable to guarantee their own like safety or dignity. Yeah. I one should say that Schmidt, he thinks is a superannuated, but his critique is not really that it is in itself bad, although he probably does think that he thinks it's just not accurate.

54:59This two-part structure he thinks becomes increasingly illusory as states modernize, right? He says, quote, behind the veil of liberal democratic freedom and the bourgeois rule of law, the pluralistic system of a multi-party state merged as was characteristic of the 14 years of the Weimar Constitution. Which means is that basically the picture of the individual versus the state is outmoded in a mass society. There are non-governmental but also super individual political institutions that interpose themselves between individual people and power. That might be like a corporation or a union or even I think at church, you know, like a lot of these institutions exist. Yeah, he says these are often self-contained organizations of national, denominational and other kinds. That's what he means. He's saying, look, that is an overly idealistic picture of how a society operates. Really, there's a mediating influence there, meaning that there is really a tri-partite structure here. The bipartisan structure on which the modern liberal constitution depends doesn't exist

56:01in any of the actual liberal democracies anymore, he thinks. Behind the bipartisan structure of the liberal democratic constitutional framework and an anarchic pluralism of social forces proliferated, a chaotic amalgam of the state and the non-state, the public and the private, the political and the ostensibly apolitical. Right. He's saying, these things are new, a fish North foul. You get this thing that's like a kind of mashup of both. But how will we control civil society? Indeed. But the argument he makes is to say, well, there's a moment when you pastor talks to you about how important it is to be faithful or to be nice to your children. And then the next Sunday, he might sort of give you hint of how to vote. This is where the Kutua Kump once again raises its head. The fact that Schmidt was raised Catholic and understands the kind of difficulty that Catholic Germans were in after unification. But note that he's basically saying the Catholic Church is not sort of a leftover of a prior state of affairs, this kind of medieval remnant sticking out into 19th and 20th century Germany.

57:07He's saying it's actually indicative of a porya of the modern liberal state. It's not only that the Catholic Church isn't going to go away in a liberal state. Actually this stuff's proliferating, right? Even if you leave the church, you're going to belong to a union. You might belong to a fucking bunny breeders club or whatever. Like, things are going to interpose themselves and they're going to collectivize human ways that are neither fully political nor fully apolitical. He's so mad at the idea that people have friends. I'm sorry. He's just like so outraged at the idea of people hanging out in a quasi formalized way. This is also where his critique of another descending force comes in. And this is what I wanted to close on because it's one that is extremely popular right now on the right. Because from it is particularly worried about a particular portion of this chaotic pluralism you mentioned. The German civil service has never been a mere bureaucratic apparatus in the sense understood by Western liberal democracies. Rather, he says they functioned as an independent power within the state.

58:11The bureaucratic state, the federal bureaucracy, is its own source of power that is not accountable to the Volk. And therefore, it forms a unregulated threat to the expression of the will of the Volk. Yeah, it's much nicer than the original German news. You would know. It's the deep state. It's the deep state, y'all. It's Dr. Fauci, unelected experts. I'm told by the Supreme Court and now that they all serve exclusively at the pleasure of the president. So long as that president is expression of the will of the people, special birthday boy, Donald Trump. Exactly. All these schmittians will revert to being a separation of powers like sticklers for liberal order. Right. We anarchists, the moment, you know, president AOC picked out the drapes on the Oval Office. It's important to stress that schmitt is not necessarily saying that this pluralism, this chaotic pluralism. You mentioned is a bad thing though, honestly, like probably, like he clearly is impatient with this stuff.

59:14But you could take him to say, this is just another place where liberalism is diluted or dishonest about its own reality. At the same time, I do think the point about the deep state here is a pretty important one. I do want to point to the fact that schmitt can be quite astute in discovering contradictions and repressions within liberal constitutions. At the same time, I think that this statement has an empirical problem. I don't want to fact check a work of political philosophy that feels kind of weird. But as someone who has just read through a ton of texts about and from 1933, I do feel like I need to point out that this is kind of a strange argument to make in late 1933. We're in October 1933 by now, right? Yeah. He's writing this October, publishes the book in November. It makes sense to say that bureaucrats actually have a lot of power and that they could wield that power sort of independently of popular will. Sure. Again, like we've gotten that during COVID-bloat. But in 1933, this was manifestly not the case, right?

1:00:15German civil servants fell into line to a shocking degree, whether that was with their own removal. No one is ever like, fuck you. I'm staying in my job. Yeah. They're like, oh, shit, I got shit, can't, oh, sucks. Yeah. Or they're like, well, I should do what the chancellor tells me what the president tells me. I serve at their pleasure. I will therefore start making lists of Jews. Do I know what they're for? No, do I care? No, it's my job, right? As a historian, that's just not what happened, right? Right. So it's conspicuous that he sees this as a potential source of resistance where in fact, resistance is not an evidence. Exactly. They clearly were not an independent power. Yeah. They fully understood themselves to be an apparatus, right? So there's something that feels really off about Schmitt's diagnosis, and that feels particularly off at the time that he writes it, which I think gives you kind of sense that this is really a guy trying to backfill the empirical evidence for the state that he sees emerging, the total, the fulrashda, the state focused on the leader figure of Adolf Hitler.

1:01:17It seems like he's really trying to make things rhyme that don't really want to rhyme. And he has all these noxious tropes he operates with, that really don't work particularly well for the way that you're actually unfolded. He's just seen empirically what it looks like when a liberal constitution gets destroyed from within and taken over by a total state. The total state's not quite there yet, but I mean, it's pretty darn close. And yet, he basically, he has the same friend, enemy distinction he had in January 1933, he has the same impatience, he has the same kind of animating resentments, even though it turned out that all these people that he thought were his enemies and were like trying to destroy him and who he was so afraid of and who haunted his nightmares, like all these people didn't turn out to matter. And yet, he holds on to them. And I think it's precisely because he wants to make common cause with this project. Gross. It's gross. What a little fucking gross freak. So before we leave our listeners, I would like us just to a brief coda,

1:02:21because we've gone through 1933 with Carl Schmidt. And you mentioned that he has a falling out with the Nazis, not too far into the Third Reich by 1936. So like still fairly early, what happened there? So basically, the SS seems to have disliked him and accuses him of opportunism, broken clock. Yeah, I think they're going to say it's like, you can't say they're wrong. No, yeah. In my book, I argue that jurists in the Third Reich just found themselves in a really difficult bind. They had to pretend like it was business as usual, like Schmidt being like, oh, actually, the Prussian coup to the various enabling laws to the synchronization or coordination laws actually are one single process. And really, what we are seeing here are revisions of the Constitution. And then you have the fact that this is a obviously law breaking and obviously illegal seizure of power in many cases, right?

1:03:22And so sometimes you succeed in creating these kinds of justifications. But as time goes on, it's very clear that like, the Nazis are happy for certain things to be a breach of the legal status. Yeah, to be inconsistent, to be a violation that just source up their own position of domination. This does remind me a little bit of how Trump has a really hard time hiring lawyers now, because of which, as old ones, it got to spark, right? Like the legal arguments that representing that guy requires you to make is often just like incompatible with professional standards that alone your personal dignity. And that I can see that as being an ongoing contradiction that's very difficult. The people who are resolving it really are the people on the Supreme Court who are like kind of just happy to have, as you mentioned, inconsistencies, glaring, opportunism, because they can neither be promoted nor fired. Right? There's no ambition, nor any consequence to sort of rein in their impulse to degrade themselves that way.

1:04:24And if Schmidt wasn't there, I could see him getting kind of cornered. And this is the way that, you know, revolutions eat their own. We're definitely seeing this in the manga right now, right? Yeah. These movements, demands, things of their adherence and of their intellectual and popular foot soldiers that are actually not sustainable over the long term. And people wind up being back to these weird corners from which they can't really fight their way out. I think that's right. I always have to think of a story that Richard J. Evans tells in his book Hitler's People about Hans Frank, who was one of those Nazi lawyers of the very like much earlier than Schmidt. Like was Hitler's lawyer for a long time. And his moment sort of comes in June of 1934 during the night of the long knives, where he's ordered to basically execute a bunch of S.A. prisoners. And he says, well, no, they're in my, you know, I arrested them. We're going to have to have due process, right? I can't kill these people on this list. And he gets back essentially, I think, a telegram saying, well, if you don't want to execute the man on this list, we can put you on the list.

1:05:24Yeah. And that's the thing, right? Like you're riding the leopard and, you know, eventually it will come for your own face. There is something about a regime that makes it a principle to substitute the whims of one man to the rule of law. It is inherently unpredictable. Maybe if Hans-Frank had been somewhere else in June, 1934, he wouldn't have been in this position. But eventually you're going to get into that position, right? You're going to get into a moment where you don't know when, you don't know how, when basically the structures that have been set up by the Führer's Stat, by the state, organized according to the leadership principle. And that leader himself, right? He's going to be like, well, you know, again, like it's the sovereign who decided the state of exception. Like that is both the central insight that Karshmit brings to the Nazi state. And it's also, I think what undoes a lot of people like him. That like that state of exception, we talked about it in the last episode, has its analogy in the divine miracle. And just like that, it tends to come out like a bolt out of a blue sky.

1:06:26And so like making that predictable, making it universalizable, making it so that people can live their lives by it is inherently difficult, and inherently contradictory. And it's particularly difficult and particularly contradictory for those whose job it is to then explain why dear leader never actually was inconsistent. Not a job by envy, not a job anybody can succeed at. And one that everybody will laugh at you when you inevitably fail doing. And nobody will feel bad for you ever at all. Exactly. Don't feel bad for Karshmit. Got what it was coming to him. Well, not quite. Not really. He lived until the 80s. No, I said that and I realized it wasn't true. I was like, no, did not get what was coming to him. But... Guns front did. Does suck. So that's a small consolation. And we'll see you guys next time. See you next time on Embed With The Right. Embed With The Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com. Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yashizumi and Keri Lau.

1:07:29Our title music is by Keri Lau.