A Conservatism Beyond Carl Schmitt

I don't mount an attack against the Enlightenment or against pluralism, unlike most on the Right. And I don't see the political leader as being allowed to make dictatorial decisions, other than with temporary emergency powers, preserving the constitutional law and order---but that exception should never prove the rule. I think we can preserve the Constitution while retaining pluralism, or more precisely ethnopluralism, and not replace the constitution with some form of dictatorship.

Unlike Schmitt I think ethnopluralism can be seen as founded in the “primordial condition.” The primordial affirmation of ones own ethnic group and ethnic culture relates to primordial human nature and the human preference for ones own people, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. This need not overrule constitutional federalism and the separation of powers and states in the U.S. Constitution, indeed it affirms it. Our modern day crisis is more and more like the crisis of the Weimar republic which eventually led to militant revolution and dictatorship from the right (Hitlerism) and from the left (Leninism).

Unlike the far right and far left who seem to prefer dictatorships, and unlike most conservatives, I defend our Constitution and the separation of powers and states but I see our Constitution as affirming the ethnopluralist solution to our present and future civil and ethnic disruptions, without leading to the destruction of our Constitution and a dictatorship of the left or the right.

Unlike Schmitt I do not see a hopeless, endless, human battling that is solved only temporarily by dictatorships (see “Agonistic Politics,” Chronicles, July 2015). I see not agonistic politics but ethnopluralistic politics, with a federalism protecting states and regions with distinct ethnic cultures and ethnic people, which could be conservatively accommodated by the separation of powers and states in the U. S. Constitution.

What are the obstacles to ethnopluralism? The promotion of universalism on the left and dictatorship on the right. Both define their enemies as “absolute enemies,” leading to thinking of the enemy as non-human and even as vermin (now ISIS does this). Hitlerism, Leninism and even ultra-orthodox Judaism tend to consider the enemy as vermin and therefore they shatter the order of any natural ethnopluralism.

Last but not least, no great civilization rose or sustained itself without being founded in religion, and ethnopluralism can be founded in the theological materialism of the Twofold Path, which affirms the material evolution of ethnopluralistic life, to supermaterial Godhood.