There’s an old Winston Churchill adage that seems particularly fitting for this moment: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” And the crisis presented by a mob storming and ransacking the Capitol is going to good use. The establishment left — Democrats, mainstream media outlets, and large swathes of Corporate America — have seized on the riots and used it as an opportunity to punish their political enemies and advance their own agendas.
For example, in an address last week, Joe Biden characterized those propagating claims of election fraud as complicit in “insurrection” and “domestic terror,” another installment in a long list of attempts to associate Trump supporters with far-right terrorism. He then went on to liken Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels for their role in challenging election certification.
This harsh language is no accident; it’s designed to justify a crackdown on free speech and civil liberties, as well as alienate Republican politicians from the levers of power. Prominent Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have called for expansive domestic terror legislation focusing on “white supremacist extremists,” repeatedly attributing such terrorism to Trump and his rhetoric. Others have gone even further: Missouri Rep. Cori Bush has introduced a resolution to expel House members who believe the election to be fraudulent, while Homeland Security Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson has even floated the idea of putting Senators Hawley and Cruz on a no-fly list.
Meanwhile, Big Tech has followed suit, limiting speech and discussion in areas the government cannot. Not only has the President of the United States been banned from almost every social media platform, but hundreds of conservative pundits and thinkers have also been deplatformed. Parler has been removed from the Google Play Store, App Store, and even its hosting provider, Amazon Web Services. Salesforce has gone as far as preventing the Republican National Committee from emailing Trump supporters.
If domestic terror legislation and mass censorship of regular conservatives seems like an inconsistent and disproportionate reaction, that’s because it is. It’s not whataboutism to compare the events at the Capitol to the summer-long plague of rioting and violence in the name of Black Lives Matter, which received tacit support from the media and politicians alike despite causing far more death and devastation.
But pointing out this absurd and blatant hypocrisy misses the point. It’s not supposed to be logically coherent. What matters is that the mass censoring and classifying of one’s political enemies as terrorists wrests power away from them. It’s an example of the reduction of politics to the friend-enemy distinction.
Originated by German political theorist Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction states, to put it simply, that “all political actions and motives” can be reduced to the distinction between friend and enemy. In other words, politics is about aiding one’s friends, and, if required, disadvantaging or even harming one’s enemies. Laws, principles, morals, and so on don’t really matter; at the end of the day, they’re all irrelevant if they’re not respecting the friend-enemy distinction. Clearly, the establishment left has wholeheartedly embraced this idea. To them, Trump, his supporters, and even conservatives as a whole are the enemy, and all that matters is that they are disadvantaged.
Therefore, the actions of the establishment left only appear to be hypocritical and contrary to their own principles, because they’re not acting on principle. Trying to understand these actions through the lens of ideology is unproductive because there is no coherent ideological justification for what’s happening. Instead, it’s friend-enemy politics. Moral or ideological justifications don’t have to make sense because the only goal is to punish political enemies and advantage political friends. Nothing more.
We can observe this in the gleeful cheering-on of immensely powerful and largely unaccountable tech companies deciding who can and cannot have a voice in the digital sphere, simply because these companies have favored the left while punishing conservatives. The normative question as to whether or not these companies should be exercising this power is ancillary to the larger moral good achieved by the censoring of the enemy.
Moreover, the left’s argument in defense of this censorship, that preventing Big Tech from deplatforming individuals is somehow an affront to the property rights of “private corporations” but forcing bakeries to bake cakes isn’t, is so absurdly incoherent as to be laughable. But again, the argument doesn’t have to make sense, nor adhere to any principles. Actions need not be coherent, nor even constitutional; all that matters is that they punish the enemy.
This adoption of friend-enemy politics is most obvious in the mainstream media. The press, the institution ostensibly tasked with investigating state and corporate power on behalf of the people, has instead welcomed censorship, deplatformings, and firings with open arms. The responses from a majority of journalists at prestige publications, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, have ranged from astonishing credulity to zealous support. Many have called for more censorship, deplatformings, imprisonments, and enhanced domestic terror legislation.
Perhaps most disturbing is the media’s credulity as to the explanation for why President Trump was censored in the first place. The claim is that his words were tantamount to an “incitement to violence,” the rapidly-expanding criteria now being used to justify mass deplatformings and rigorous censorship. Of course Trump never actually called for violence; in fact, he did the opposite, asking his supporters to remain peaceful, and begging Capitol Hill rioters to “go home.” He did, however, challenge the establishment’s narrative on the election results, continuing to maintain that the election was fraudulent and stolen. According to many, including “national security experts,” this spreading of “dangerous conspiracy theories” is, in itself, encouraging violence and domestic terror.
The obvious implication here is that any challenge to the establishment’s narrative will be characterized as a call for violence, therefore justifying censorship and repression. You’d think a journalist who believes in the freedom of the press would be worried about this, right? Of course not; freedom of the press only matters when it benefits them. The establishment narrative is their narrative; it echoes what they want, so why should they care? Their political enemies are losing, and they are winning.
By extending the logic used to categorize Trump’s promulgation of certain narratives as a call to violence, it’s not hard to see how certain opinions and beliefs regarding establishment narratives will soon become “dangerous” and “violent.” More censorship and violation of civil liberties will ensue. But this is all justified because, to the establishment left, conservatives are the enemy. Not political rivals, not competing interests, but enemies.
Conservatives would do well to understand this point. There are no rules, nor principles, to which the establishment left is adhering, other than the advantaging of friends and the disadvantaging of enemies. If the left can get away with it, it will, so long as it’s in the interest of its friends.
Thank you for reading. You can follow my blog at ashstaub.com
