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Feral Finster's avatar

If we are going to talk about Carl Schmitt, it is worth noting that we in the West have lived de facto in a continuous State of Exception since 2001. In the case of some western polities, de jure.

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hk's avatar

My favorite author on politics (writing in the book with highly uninformative title "Congress: The Electoral Connection," made an observation exactly opposite of Schmitt: the role of party leaders is to dampen excessive partisanship and create an environment where you could do mutually beneficial politics--that actually does stuff--without making undue noise that cause friction (not quite in these words, thus nobody seems to have actually read them). He attributed the development of this system to the relatively successful and peaceful politics in United States for much of 20th century and foresaw the rise of modern telecommunication technology as the harbinger of its destruction. That was back in 1970s, and he saw a particular threat to its survival in, again prophetically, the rise of C-SPAN (to those unfamiliar with US politics, Newt Gingrich and the "New" Republicans used it in 1980s to make noise that sharply delineated who their "enemies" were.)

I think there's a lot that can be synthesized by looking at Schmitt and Mayhew together, of how political institutions are built and maintained and the role of leaders in a stable polity should be. Alas, Schmitt has won that debate, it seems.

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