Religious, Legal: How Different from the Political?

Ever since reading Nazi Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, that reduces to Curtis Yarvin's maxim that "there is no politics without an enemy," I have been thinking about the other social distinctions. But first, Schmitt on politics:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

But whatabout the others? Schmitt mentions various others, "moral, aesthetic, and economic." The distinction in the moral is between "good and evil" and in the aesthetic between "beautiful and ugly," and in the economic between "useful and harmful, or, for example, profitable and unprofitable." I think we need a table.

Social Category	Positive	Negative
Political	Friend	Enemy
Moral	Good	Evil
[Religious]	[God]	[Satan]
[Law]	Legal	Illegal
Aesthetic	Beautiful	Ugly
Economic	Useful	Harmful
Economic	Profitable	Unprofitable
Economic	[Collaborator]	Competitor

Note that I have inserted some ideas of my own -- with square brackets -- in respect of the religious. And in respect of an economic collaborator. Schmitt makes it clear that "enemy" in the political sense is a public, or collective, enemy.

In Section VIII of The Concept of the Political Schmitt criticizes "liberal thought" for trying to imagine that the political is not really about friend vs. enemy. "The enemy is no longer called the enemy but in return he is set up as a threat to peace[.]" In other words, "liberal thought" confuses the issue of the political and the enemy. Schmitt thinks that

Liberalism does not radically deny the state, but on the other hand it has not found a positive theory of state or its own state reform, but only sought to sequester the political on the basis of ethics, and to subject the political to the economic; it has created a doctrine of the separation and balance of powers, i.e., a system of checks and balances of the state that cannot be called a state theory or a constructive political principle.

 So what does all this mean when it's at home?

I think it means that the political is the biggie. If there is a political issue then nothing else matters. There is an enemy, and everything is secondary to the question of the enemy.

But then we get to the problem that, on the one hand the "liberal thought" of the Enlightenment wanted to bury the political in its doctrine that there really is no issue that makes us think of the "other" as the enemy. And there is the left that reduces all questions to the political, and thus to the friend / enemy distinction, and thus reduces everything to a fight with the enemy.

And there is the critique of Buckley conservatism, that it amounted to a rhetorical standing aside history shouting Stop, when it should have considered the Left as an actual enemy, against whom conflict was possible, as with the Soviet Union.

So, I would say that all the lines in the table above, other than the political, are questions of social distinctions for man-the-social-animal once the question of the enemy has been dealt with, and the enemy has been defeated; they are all disagreements about values, and good-vs-bad behavior.

But is the left really all about the political and the definition of the "other" as the enemy? It is interesting that the left always plays at conflict, as with its "activism" as a stand-in for revolution. As I say, the left's activism is really play-acting at revolution, as the medieval romances were play-acting at rough-tough feudal lords when the lords had become soft courtiers and needed the nostalgic recollection of the bad old days when men were men, and would just as soon cut off a chap's head before breakfast as eat a haunch of venison.

And when the left is in power, whether in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, or today when the woke left is in power in the US, it treats the populace not quite as enemies, but definitely as subhumans -- slaves really -- who need regular applications of the cowhide whip.

I wonder: should we call the left's bluff, and suggest that if they are really serious about revolution and the elimination of white supremacists and armed insurrectionists they should put their money where their mouth is.

Now, I like to say that the Age of the Political is over, in that I don't believe that the "other" is ever really an enemy since life on this Earth is no longer about securing food-growing land against other claimants for said food-growing land.

But I understand that there are bound to be reactionaries that still hanker for the good old days of enemies and revenge, and want to drive their enemies before them and hear the lamentation of their women.

It still comes down to the question, of how to deal with lefties that think of us as the enemy while we think of them as spoiled brats.