This "Chronicle Review" would indicate that in his book, *A FASCIST PHILOSOPHER HELPS US UNDERSTAND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS,* Wolfe almost seems to address many of the questions put forth in my "Questions for [healing] Disillusionment" & "Recovering the Citizenry" and related theme web pages. If I project the effects of Alan Wolfe's and Laurie Spivak's interpretations (of Conservative values and strategies) onto the public in general, the result looks not too estranged from the psycho-political dumbfounding that seems to have gripped many American citizens. (Scary yet current, which makes it even more scary, of course.) Much appreciation extended to Mark Jensen's finding and posting these articles to the SNOW-News list. Use this link or your back button to return to Christopher's Political Page
 -Chris Pringer

[Alan Wolfe's most recent book is entitled *The Transformation of American Religion:  How We Actually Practice Our Faith* (2003).  He published this essay on the eerie relevance of fascist philosopher Carl Schmitt to the current moment in American history in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   -- Mark Jensen, Associate Professor of French, Department of Languages and Literatures, Pacific Lutheran University, jensenmk@plu.edu

A FASCIST PHILOSOPHER HELPS US UNDERSTAND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
By Alan Wolfe, Prof. of Pol. Science, Boston College

Chronicle Review
Chronicle of Higher Education
April 2, 2004
Page B16
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i30/30b01601.htm
(subscribers only)

To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher.  His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration.  It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.

Strauss and Schmitt were once close professionally; Schmitt supported Strauss's application for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to Paris in 1932, the same year in which Strauss published a review of Schmitt's most important book, *The Concept of the Political*.  Their paths later diverged. Strauss, a Jew, left Germany for good and eventually settled in Chicago, where he inspired generations of students, one of whom, Allan Bloom, in turn inspired Saul Bellow's *Ravelstein*.  Schmitt, a devout Catholic who had written a number of well-regarded books -- including *Political Theology* (1922), *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy* (1923), and *Political Romanticism* (first printed in 1919) -- joined the Nazi Party in 1933, survived World War II with his reputation relatively unscathed, and witnessed a revival of interest in his work, from both the left and the right, before his death in 1985 at the age of 96.

Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi commitments, the left's continuing fascination with him is difficult to comprehend.  Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a fellow at All Soul's College, Oxford, points out in his recently published *A Dangerous Mind*, that attraction is undeniable.  Müller argues that Schmitt's spirit pervades *Empire* (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the antiglobalization movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as the writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, recently much in the news because of his decision to turn down a position at New York University as a protest against America's decision to fingerprint overseas visitors (although not those from Italy).

When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of political and social science at the New School for Social Research in the 1990s, the efforts of the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a conference on Schmitt's thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish donor who informed me that he was not going to give any more of his money to an institution sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to "that fascist."  I was tempted to tell him, not that it would have helped, that Schmitt had become the rage in leftist circles.  *Telos*, a journal founded in 1968 dedicated to bringing European critical theory to American audiences, had started a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt's legacy, impressed by his no-nonsense attacks on liberalism and his contempt for Wilsonian idealism.  A comprehensive study of Schmitt's early writings, Gopal Balakrishnan's *The Enemy*, published by the New Leftist firm of Verso in 2000, finds Schmitt's conclusion that liberal democracy had reached a crisis oddly reassuring, for it gives the left hope that its present stalemate will not last indefinitely.  Such prominent European thinkers as Slavoj Ziûek, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida have also been preoccupied with Schmitt's ideas.  It is not that they admire Schmitt's political views.  But they recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a perspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like Michel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.

Schmitt's admirers on the left have been right to realize that after the collapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable rethinking.  Yet in turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they have clung fast to an authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by such 20th-century thinkers as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci.  And it hasn't just been Schmitt.  *Telos*, in particular, developed a fascination with neofascist thinkers and movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that anything would be better than Marx's contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his legacy.

Schmitt's influence on the contemporary right has taken a different course.  In Europe, new-right thinkers such as Gianfranco Miglio in Italy, Alain de Benoist in France, and the German writers contributing to the magazine *Junge Freiheit* (Young Freedom) have built on Schmitt's ideas. Right-wing Schmittians in the United States are not as numerous, but they include intellectuals -- often described as paleoconservative -- who expend considerable energy attacking neoconservatism from the right.  One of them, Paul Edward Gottfried, a humanities professor at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, is especially prolific.  Himself an occasional contributor to *Junge Freiheit*, Gottfried defends the magazine for rejecting "the view that every German patriot should be evermore browbeaten by self-appointed victims of the Holocaust."  No wonder he has a soft spot for Carl Schmitt.  Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term "fascism" in quotation marks, as if its existence in the European past is somehow open to question.

But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian sympathies.  Still, Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie.  In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.

In *The Concept of the Political*, Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality.  Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable.  In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy.  That is what makes politics different from everything else.  Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves.  Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer.  Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation.  Not so politics.

"The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote.  War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe.  It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy.  But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals.  Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as *Treason:  Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism* and *Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right*, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis.  "Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam," she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire."  (Coulter recently displayed her vituperative talents by calling former Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee, politically "lucky" for having dropped a grenade on his foot while serving in Vietnam.)  Liberals, by contrast, even in their newly discovered aggressively anti-Bush frame of mind, stop well short of Coulter's violent language. Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe.

Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political.  Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil."  Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another.  (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt's ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.)  Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power.  Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.

No wonder that Schmitt admired thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, who treated politics without illusions.  Leaders inspired by them, in no way in thrall to the individualism of liberal thought, are willing to recognize that sometimes politics involves the sacrifice of life.  They are better at fighting wars than liberals because they dispense with such notions as the common good or the interests of all humanity.  ("Humanity," Schmitt wrote in a typically terse formulation that is brilliant if you admire it and chilling if you do not, "cannot wage war because it has no enemy.") Conservatives are not bothered by injustice because they recognize that politics means maximizing your side's advantages, not giving them away.  If unity can be achieved only by repressing dissent, even at risk of violating the rule of law, that is how conservatives will achieve it.

In short, the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself.  Schmitt's German version of conservatism, which shared so much with Nazism, has no direct links with American thought.  Yet residues of his ideas can nonetheless be detected in the ways in which conservatives today fight for their objectives.

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end.  Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops.  Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition.  Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes.  Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them.  Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency --conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

There are, of course, no party lines when it comes to conservatives and liberals in the United States.  Many conservatives, especially those of a libertarian bent, are upset with President Bush's deficits and unenthusiastic about his call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.  And, on the other side of the fence, there are liberals and leftists who want to fight back against conservatives as ruthlessly as conservatives fight against them.

Still, if Schmitt is right, conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political.  From the 2000 presidential election to Congressional redistricting in Texas to the methods used to pass Medicare reform, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have indeed triumphed because they have left the impression that nothing will stop them.  Liberals cannot do that.  There is, for liberals, always something as important, if not more important, than victory, whether it be procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations.

If all that sounds defeatist, at least for liberal causes, Schmitt, inadvertently, offered a reason for hope. Searching for examples of liberalism to dismiss, he happened upon Thomas Paine and the American founders.  Here, in his view, were liberals typically afraid of power; indeed, he wrote with some astonishment, they naïvely tried to check and balance it through the separation of powers.  In that, Schmitt was correct.  John Locke, not Thomas Hobbes, was the reigning social-contract theorist of the American experience.  Our tradition owes more to Montesquieu than to Machiavelli, and even when we relied on the latter, we were influenced more by his thoughts on the Florentine republic than by his apologia for *The Prince*.  America, Schmitt seemed to be saying, is the quintessential liberal society, a point rendered with great gusto, long after Schmitt's *Concept of the Political* appeared, in Louis Hartz's *The Liberal Tradition in America* (1955).  Liberal to its very core, the United States has never been as attracted to the realpolitik tradition in political thought as the Germans; in fact, our best thinkers in that tradition, Hans J. Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, were immigrants from Germany.  Because he showed so little appreciation for the American liberal tradition, Schmitt, supposedly a theorist of power, misunderstood the most powerful political system in the world.

To the degree that conservatives bring to this country something like Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, they stand against not only liberals but America's historic liberal heritage.  That may help them in the short run; conservative slash-and-burn rhetoric and no-holds-barred partisanship are so unusual in our moderately consensual political system that they have recently gotten far out of the sheer element of surprise, leaving the news media without a vocabulary for describing their ruthlessness and liberals without a strategy for stopping their designs.  But the same extremist approach to politics could also harm them if a traditional American concern with checks and balances and limits on political power comes back into fashion.

In the meantime, we are left with a fascinating example of the ways in which ideas fashioned at another time and place can anticipate events in this society at this moment.  No wonder the 2004 election has aroused so much interest.  We will, if Schmitt is any guide, be deciding not only who wins, but whether we will treat pluralism as good, disagreement as virtuous, politics as rule bound, fairness as possible, opposition as necessary, and government as limited.

--Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College.

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Republicans, writes Laurie Spivak, are marketing geniuses. They know how to "name and frame," how to vertically integrate media, how to propagate ideas.[ref: see following article]

Instead of organizing to do likewise, progressive Democrats have either piously hoped that they could rely on "facts," or shifted their message to the right.

These strategies have failed ignominiously.

Since (as linguist George Lakoff puts it) people generally choose a comfortable narrative frame in preference to an uncomfortable fact, the "facts" approach hasn't worked.

And since the public's ultimate policy preferences are still for policies that are closer to traditional Democratic policies than to Republican policies, the strategy of "moving to the right" hasn't been a winner for Democrats either.

What they need to do is learn how to "name and frame," vertically integrate media, and propagate ideas.

Spivak says:  "A progressive movement should be built upon the four M's: mission, money, management and marketing; plus one more, mobilization."

The trouble is, time is short.  The Republicans have been at it for about 30 years now.  Are progressives going to wake up?

What we need is a "counter-movement" -- which is, conveniently, the title of Laurie Spivak's soon to be released book.

Come on, Laurie -- enough of this "forthcoming" stuff!  Time is short -- you say so yourself!  Publish your book!  We need it!

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According to Robert McNamara in the "Fog of War," the first lesson of life is, "empathize with your enemy."  In order to understand the conservative movement's ascendancy in American politics, progressives should take McNamara's advice and try to view the world through the business lens of conservatives.

Think of a "marketplace of ideas" where the products are policies, positions, and issues all competing for dominance.  On the surface, this may seem like the stuff of dreams for "free market" conservatives, but it turns out it's a nightmare.  You see, what we find is that in this marketplace, Democrats actually have the better product and Americans prefer the policies of Democrats by a wide margin to those of the GOP.  In the realm of ideas, just as in any marketplace, the superior or preferred product usually wins out, but not always.  An inferior product can dominate in the market when it has superior marketing, and this is precisely what we have seen come to pass in U.S. politics over the past two decades.

In 1982, 45% of Americans identified themselves as Democrats; by 2003, that number was down to 31%.  During the same period, the Republican Party made gains in party allegiance from about 26% up to 30%.  What is more, nearly twice as many Americans now identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals.  At first blush, these statistics would seem to point to an electorate that is moving ideologically to the right.  However, public opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans are more closely aligned with the Democratic Party on the issues than they are with the Republican Party.

Returning to the notion of a marketplace, let's consider these public opinion polls as indicators of consumer preferences.  What we find is that a whopping 86% of Americans believe that there need to be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment; 77% think it is more important to maintain government services such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid than to cut taxes; 72% of Americans favor stricter laws related to the control of handguns; 63% of Americans favor affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women and other minorities get better jobs and education; 62% don't think Roe v. Wade should be overturned by the Supreme Court; and 62% would prefer a universal health insurance program run by the government and financed by taxpayers.

On virtually every issue, public opinion polls show that consumer preferences are for the policies of the Democrats, and not for those of the GOP. Republicans offer inferior, less desirable policy solutions, while Democrats offer superior policies that are preferred by the majority of Americans.

When an inferior product wins out in the marketplace with superior marketing it is called getting "betamaxed." Remember Betamax?  In the 1970s, before there was the VCR, there was the Sony Betamax, but, as the story goes, the VCR beat Betamax through its superior marketing even though Betamax was the superior technology.  If we consider policies as the products in the marketplace of ideas and public opinion polls as indicators of consumer preference, then we can only come to one conclusion:  the Democrats have been betamaxed by the Republicans.  Conservatives offer inferior policies, but dominate through superior marketing.

You really have to give it to them -- the Republicans are truly marketing geniuses.  Let's consider some of the core components of marketing that the GOP has managed to dominate over the years.  There's branding and negative branding.  We have strategic communications, which in the policy world includes what's called "naming and framing," or how you sell your policies, as well as public relations and promotion. And finally, there is placement, or the distribution channels used to reach the consumer.

When it comes to branding, conservatives have succeeded in tarnishing the "liberal" brand to the point where liberals themselves, like Michael Moore, deride liberals as wimps. The GOP's negative branding campaign against liberals is why so many people are loath to use the "L word."

At the same time, Republicans have successfully built the conservative brand around powerful connotations of patriotism, strength, down-home values and righteousness. They have been so successful at building their brand that people still think of Republicans as "fiscally conservative," even though the last three "conservative" Republican administrations have all run record deficits.

The same goes for the branding of the GOP as the party of "small government." This despite the fact that the current Republican-controlled Congress, the first since 1954, has increased Congressional pork by more than 40%; the Patriot Act gives massive new powers to the federal government; and even non-defense domestic spending is up 11% according to an analysis by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Now that's a brand with staying power.

Republicans also understand the value of strategic communications and the importance of "naming and framing" legislation and policies.  Naming and framing can turn the "estate tax" ("estate" sounds like it only applies to rich folks) into a "death tax" -- we all die and it just doesn't seem right taxing the dead.  When the GOP renamed the estate tax the death tax, they were able to frame it as a mainstream concern with 75% of Americans supporting its repeal, even though the estate tax does only apply to the rich, and it's paid by less than 2% of Americans.

They name legislation "No Child Left Behind," "Healthy Forests," "Clear Skies" and "Patriot Act," essentially forcing legislators to support their bills, lest they be accused of leaving children behind, favoring polluted forests and skies, or being branded as unpatriotic.  It's sheer genius.  It makes Microsoft's tactics for marketplace dominance look like child's play.

Another vital aspect of marketing is placement, or controlling the distribution channels.  Republicans took this a step further by largely replicating Ted Turner's strategy of vertical integration of content and distribution.  Cable maverick Turner recognized that he could become a formidable media force by owing both the channels of distribution -- his TBS cable network -- and content.  So, he bought sports teams, acquired the MGM classic movie library and invented the 24-hour news network CNN to fill his cable channels.

Using this same vertical integration model, conservative think tanks and foundations, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, have been laboring intensively on the research and development of conservative policies, as well as their packaging in media-friendly ways. These policies provide the "content" to feed to three primary distribution channels: legislative distribution channels including elected officials, candidates, senior staff, and political appointees; judicial distribution channels; and various mainstream and dedicated media distribution channels, such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, et al.

In the first quarter of 2002 alone, Heritage Foundation policy experts briefed three Cabinet secretaries, 33 senators, 48 members of Congress and 164 senior administration officials.  Increasingly these policy experts are being groomed to push their ideas in the media directly. In 2002, according to the Heritage Foundation's annual report, as many of their policy experts were seen on television in a single year as during the entire 1990s. They appeared on more than 600 television broadcasts, more than 1,000 radio broadcasts, and in approximately 8,000 articles and editorials.

With dedicated channels, sound-bite content and expert spokespeople in the mainstream media, conservatives are retailing their ideas directly to the public or in marketing terms, the "end user."  At the same time, in terms of direct marketing through the media, Republicans have managed to intimidate Democrats from competing with them by creating the "liberal media" myth, effectively forcing Democrats into a defensive position.

When we fail to view the world through the conservative business lens, we can easily see all of this as a vast rightwing conspiracy.  However if we recall the frame of the marketplace of ideas, then we see it for it is:  a well-run operation that recognized its weakness -- a less desirable product -- and figured out a way to dominate in the marketplace through an incredibly successful, integrated marketing strategy.  Branded by the right and blind-sided by the conservative marketing machine, for more than a decade Democrats have been running to the right and abandoning core progressive issues and values in an attempt to keep pace with conservatives.  This has been completely the wrong response.

Conservatives, after all, are dominating through superior marketing, not with better ideas or policies.  However, because Democrats have failed to grasp the root of the problem, they have reacted to the growing conservative dominance by trying to fit into a more conservative mold. This wrong-headed response has played into the hands of conservatives.  Democrats have lost ground in the marketplace of ideas, and have helped to tarnish their brand, as the right and left alike branded them as "wafflers," "Republican-lite" and "spineless liberals."

What Democrats should have done was stick to their principles and progressive policies and develop an equally formidable marketing strategy.  It's not too late.

For many progressives, thinking about marketing when it comes to policy is an anathema.  Progressives like to believe that "the truth alone will set you free," and that facts and figures on the issues and persuasive arguments win elections.  They confuse framing issues with spin.  There's endless talk about "elevating the policy dialogue," when what they really need to do is to use plainspeak and frame issues in ways that resonate with Americans. Progressives hear branding and they outright cringe.  It all seems so disingenuous.  But do Americans wear Nikes?  Eat at McDonalds?  Drink Coke?

Conservatives don't make a move without considering marketing.  Remember when White House chief of staff Andrew Card told the New York Times that the reason the administration waited until September to make its case for the war in Iraq was because, "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August"?  Know how the founder of the Heritage Foundation explains how the conservative movement was built?  He attributes its ascendancy to what he calls, "The four M's:  mission, money, management and marketing."

It is time for the Democratic Party to recognize that they cannot stem the conservative tide by moving further to the right, by going about business as usual, or by denying the importance of marketing.  Progressives have been betamaxed by conservatives, and the first step to recovery is recognizing the problem.  If we want progressive ideas and policies to dominate in the marketplace of ideas then we have to start fighting fire with fire and thinking strategically like conservatives in terms of marketing.

Progressives have an enormous uphill battle before them. Conservatives have what is known in business as a "first-mover advantage;" they've been at this for more than 20 years.  What it will take to counter the conservative movement is an aggressive, hard-hitting counterstrategy with a quick ramp-up, long-term resolve and sufficient resources.

The good news is that conservatives have kindly provided us with the roadmap to build a successful counter-movement.  A progressive movement should be built upon the four M's: mission, money, management and marketing; plus one more, mobilization.  Progressives need to compete on the same grounds as conservatives but draw upon the Democrat's unique advantages.

With a solid foundation already in place, as well as numerous competitive advantages and untapped resources, progressives can build a movement that genuinely reflects the preferences of the majority of Americans, while drawing upon the traditions of the great progressive reformers of the past. By seeing the conservative movement for what it is, a well-executed, successful strategy dominating through superior marketing, a clear path to build a progressive counter-movement emerges.

--Laurie Spivak manages a UCLA research center devoted to the study of civil society, philanthropy, and nonprofit and grassroots organizations and movements.  This article is adapted from her forthcoming book, *Counter-Movement*.