The friend/enemy distinction is Carl Schmitt’s foundational concept from The Concept of the Political (1932) (cite: Schmitt, 2007). Schmitt argued that the defining criterion of the political is not right and wrong, not good and bad, not profitable and unprofitable, but friend and enemy. The political enemy is not a personal adversary, a competitor, or a moral offender. The enemy is an existential threat to the political community’s way of life — a group whose existence negates the community’s own form of existence so intensely that conflict becomes a real possibility.
Schmitt insisted that this distinction cannot be resolved through liberal procedures — negotiation, compromise, constitutional mediation. The enemy is not someone you disagree with; the enemy is someone whose form of life is incompatible with yours. Liberal attempts to dissolve this distinction, Schmitt argued, do not eliminate the political but merely disguise it: liberalism fights its wars in the name of humanity, peace, and progress while denying the antagonistic structure of what it is doing.
The concept became operational in fascist governance, where Joseph Goebbels rendered it as a struggle between “light and darkness.” Cold War rhetoric inherited it: Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” reproduced the existential antagonism while claiming liberal universalism. Liberalism itself inverted the distinction — Karl Popper’s “enemies of the open society” — but preserved its antagonistic structure, treating tolerance as a weapon and intolerance as the existential enemy.
emsenn’s “A storm is a storm is a storm” traces how the friend/enemy distinction was carried through fascist grammar and into postliberal moral dualism, where Stephen Miller declares, “We are on the side of God.” The vocabulary changes; the grammar does not.
Related terms
- Carl Schmitt — who develops the concept
- Postliberalism — the contemporary tendency that reactivates Schmitt’s logic
- Producerism — the moral economy that maps onto the friend/enemy divide
- Necropolitics — the sovereignty that operationalizes the distinction through death
- Hegemony — the cultural condition that the friend/enemy distinction disrupts