1. The biggest learning for republicans who have built their brand on gentleman politics, the high road, and bi-partisanship, is this is a politics that works in a unified nation with a unified culture and all enemies are external.
2. Today, the divide between friend and enemy is not America vs the Russians or America vs the (Islamic) terrorists. As American culture has fractured and external threats diminished, the us vs them is now Red America vs Blue America.
3. This divide has existed for quite some time, but the external threats were such that they masked the growing cultural divide within America that tracks roughly with the divide between blue and red America.
4. This means that The Political has shifted. Russia and their conflict with Ukraine does not matter. What matters most is this growing cultural war within the borders of the US.
5. Essentially, there is a cold civil war going on and most of the Republican leadership has yet to catch up to this reality.
6. The other reality that the Republican leadership has not come to grips with is another insight from Schmitt, that all politics is a form of war. The traditional view, following Clausewitz, argues that war is politics pursued by other means.
7. In other words, the heart of politics is discussion. This is the democratic impulse channeled through the mechanism of parliamentary democracy. War happens when talking breaks down and all other avenues have been exhausted.
8. Schmitt on the other hand, flipped this around and argued that discursive politics is war pursued by more polite means. He argued that beneath The Political is the ever present threat of violence and conflict, war, killing and dying for “us” against “them.”
9. It is this that Republicans have a hard time embracing. Their role as politicians using the discursive medium of parliament and any other means at their disposal is to go to war on behalf of their constituents, red America.
10. The democrats understand this. They are on a war footing every day and approach politics as a war fought by other means. And they know that their enemy, red America and it ineffectual politicians, have yet to engage the fight.
11. It is going to hard for Republicans because they have built a whole brand around “Principled Politics”™️. So much so that the Democrats run circles around them all the time hanging them with their own principles.
12. All that there is today is the ever present reality of us vs them, friend vs enemy, red America vs blue America. America is at war. Will the Republican leadership wake up to this reality?
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