There’s no law, there’s just power.And the goal here is to get back in power.
That quote above, from J.D. Vance, now the Republican Party's designated candidate for Vice President, appeared in Jennifer Szalai's "Critics Notebook," in The New York Times, on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. If you would like to read the entirety of what Szalai has to say, use the following link (The Times' paywall permitting, of course). The headline on Szalai's column was, "The Nazi Jurist Who Haunts Our Broken Politics."
In all fairness to Vance, the quote, above, is only a fragment of what Szalai provided in her column, and it is a "requote" of something first said by Carl Schmitt, who is described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as follows:
A conservative German legal, constitutional, and political theorist, Schmitt is often considered to be one of the most important critics of liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and liberal cosmopolitanism. But the value and significance of Schmitt’s work is subject to controversy, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with National Socialism.
Here is another quote from Schmitt, as reported by Szalai:
"Dictatorship could in fact be democracy's most authentic expression."
Schmitt thought the object of "politics" was not to arrive at acceptable compromises, given that we all have different ideas about what would be best, and what our government should do. Instead, Schmitt was of the mind that "politics" is actually an effort to amalgamate enough power to eliminate any alternative, so that the political "winners" will be able to have the government do what those who win the power struggle believe is best, with no compromise or impediment. In other words, the actual objective of "politics" is "dictatorship," according to Schmitt.
If you don't see where Szalai got her headline, about how there is a Nazi philosopher "haunting" our current politics, you haven't been paying attention to Project 2025, and to the Trump promise that he will begin his next term in office as a "dictator." You haven't been paying attention to the ideas and intentions of J.D. Vance, either, which are summarized in that quote at the top of this blog posting.
As readers of this blog posting probably know, J.D. Vance wrote an acclaimed book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. As they probably also know, the word, "elegy" is defined as a "funeral lament," a mourning for what is dead, and gone.
I don't like the Carl Schmitt concept of "politics," and I think it's going to be critically important for Americans, everywhere, to vote against the Republican Party (Trump/Vance) ticket. Otherwise, I am afraid that Vance's next book might well be titled, "An American Elegy: Memoir of a Politics that Didn't Think That Dictatorship Is Its Acceptable And Actual Objective."
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