Kyle Sammin: The politics of despair

There has always been loose talk of civil war in certain corners of the online media world. People who believe, for whatever reason, that America’s differences are too vast to bridge and that separation — even to the point of war — is the only solution. 

We saw this in 2004, when after George W. Bush’s reelection, frustrated Democrats circulated a map dividing the nation into “Jesusland” and “the United States of Canada.” It was good for a laugh, but in those less volatile times, that was all it was. 

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tumult of Covid and the George Floyd riots, multiple attempts on Trump’s life in 2024, and now Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the would-be separatists are no longer laughing. And their numbers, on both sides, are growing. 

We’ve counseled in these pages the need to step back from the brink of destruction, noting Abraham Lincoln’s appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” He spoke those words to a nation on the razor’s edge. A month later, the rebels fired on Fort Sumter and a bloody civil war began. We, in 2025, are not so far gone as all that. But it bears repeating that the lines between Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, left and right, must never be allowed to harden into the battle lines between friend and enemy.

One sure warning sign of that hardening is that some on the right are now openly and approvingly discussing the philosophy of Carl Schmitt. A 20th-century German political philosopher, Schmitt remained in Germany after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, in contrast to many of his colleagues who opposed that regime and fled. He worked with the Nazi state and provided the intellectual underpinnings for a system, fascism, that defied intellect as strongly as it defied liberal norms.

Liberalism, Schmitt wrote, “has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary.” This is true but, contra Schmitt, it is a good thing. We have built in our Western civilization a realm where we can debate ideas and compete in business without killing each other. This is one of the great successes of modernity. Communists and fascists want to tear it down.

Schmitt’s work fell into disrepute after the war — unsurprisingly! His critique of liberal democracy, when it attracted adherents at all, found them on the far-left, even including Chinese premier Xi Jinping, according to some observers. This seemed odd at the time, but it was an early indicator of the truth of the horseshoe theory — the idea that the two extremes of the political spectrum have more in common with each other than with the center. Schmitt’s disdain for liberal democracy, his acceptance of politics as a war between friend and enemy, shares much with Saul Alinsky’s view of how to behave in a democracy — no rules, no norms, only an unflinching pursuit of victory.

J.D. Vance noted this connection last year in describing the far-left reaction to Trump’s first election. “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020,” Vance told the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, “is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power.” Vance was correct: a sizable portion of the far-left — what used to be called the New Left, when it was new — believes that law, honor, ideals, and norms are all just masks to disguise power. “No one really believes in them,” they tell themselves, “so we shouldn’t either.”

It’s a logical dodge common to criminals: everyone steals, everyone lies, everyone cheats, so why shouldn’t I? It is easier to live with your own bad behavior if you tell yourself that everyone else is bad, too. A lie, but a pleasant one.

Opponents of liberal democracy have been spreading the seeds of that lie wherever they could for years now. While it once grew on the left alone, now it has found purchase on the right, as well. It is not surprising that this kind of thought has increased since Kirk’s death, because it is fundamentally a politics of secular despair. 

Christians have long considered despair in the religious sense as one of the gravest sins — the situation, as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, of “a man ceasing to hope for a share of God’s goodness” — the opposite of hope. In the political sense, it is perhaps not as grave — you will not go to hell for doubting America’s future — but it is deeply corrosive, all the same. Political systems require belief to function. Writing down the words in a constitution is great, but it’s also necessary that we, as a people, believe in them. Despair is the death of all that, and the descent back into a Hobbesian world of brutish tribalism.

Social media encourages the edgelord, the keyboard extremist who loves to push the envelope, knowing all the while that he will never have to deliver on his threats. What’s worse is that the adulation these online activists receive in the forms of likes and shares encourages others, unconsciously, to emulate them. All the cool kids think America is doomed, why not join them?

And it is true, defending liberal democracy and our American republic is not cool. It is not edgy. It will never lead to the adulation that those arch and sarcastic members of the radical chic (or the new reactionary chic) will receive. Curtis Yarvin will get his Times write-ups. Assata Shakur will get her fawning eulogies. Meanwhile ordinary people coexist with their neighbors in peace, work and live alongside those whom radicals would name “enemies,” even enjoy the company of friends and relatives whom extremists tell them they should hate. That doesn’t make the newspapers or get you followers on Instagram, but it does sustain this American experiment.

Lincoln, again, shows the way. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he said in that same inaugural address. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Too many disregarded those wise words. Too many were already too far gone to hear them. But the four years that followed — and more than half a million who died — should drive home the truth of his plea: we must not consider our fellow Americans to be enemies. We may be opponents, rivals, competitors, but at the end of the day, we must remain friends.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.