The Center Cannot Hold
Because I am not particularly familiar with American non-alt conservatism—nor with the minor figures and initiatives associated with the GOP—I was mostly unaware of Charlie Kirk as a political personality. And yet, his outrageous and untimely death at Utah Valley University compels commentary, not only because it was a death provoked by the battle of ideas, but also because of the disturbing chain of consequences it has unleashed.
To make public mockery of the death of a political adversary in abstracto already says more about the one who laughs than about the victim. First, such a person is celebrating an act in which he had no part; the “victory” is not his, nor will it ever be. Second, it is the laughter of someone gloating over a man who can no longer respond, who no longer has the capacity to defend himself. I do not believe that the human being—or his memory—becomes sacred merely by dying. Death in itself does not confer sanctity. Yet there is nothing ennobling, nothing of value, in rejoicing at the elimination of an adversary. Such jubilation is the very opposite of courage: it is cowardice elevated into a collective ritual.
With Kirk’s death—as with the rains that drive men into their homes and leave the streets to vermin, so that snails, slugs, and worms slither shamelessly over the pavement—an entire infestation of political vermin has surfaced to celebrate him being silenced. This too is a political act, perhaps one of the most despicable and dishonorable imaginable: the mob, incapable of defeating its adversary in argument, delights instead in the silence imposed by mortality.
Some individuals are respectful, others merely visceral, and still others intolerant and obtuse, with whom dialogue becomes nearly impossible. Depending on circumstance, human beings display a greater or lesser ability to discern and to value the nuances before their eyes—nuances that are essential if reality is to be grasped in the least biased way possible. Yet in moments when passions are inflamed, when society confronts extreme conditions and responds with its own extremes, the most primitive form of tribalism reasserts itself: the elementary perception of the self in relation to others collapses into categories of “us” versus “them.” These categories, in such moments, overshadow all others.
Among people across the whole spectrum of political currents, it is common to find some who imagine themselves belonging to the most “balanced” category: that which is neither extreme nor given over to passion, the one that wishes to be “neither here nor there.” In a word, the Center. The Center aspires to be something apart, a kind of ultra-rational posture, superior in its serenity, approaching the conduct of a quasi-Zen equilibrium. Yet the problem is precisely this: their self-identification becomes irrelevant, even meaningless, in what Carl Schmitt called “the times of the political.”
The human being struggles to differentiate himself, to categorize himself in the most precise way possible. Even he who declares “I belong to no category, I simply am,” is nonetheless engaged in categorization—he is adopting an identity that differentiates him from others. Self-identification allows the individual to position himself in relation to his peers, to claim a locus within the vast spectrum of human identities. However, just as there is self-identification, there is also the identification carried out by others. At this point, the objective, the subjective, and the intersubjective collapse into a whirlpool of perceptions, no longer easily distinguished, like ingredients churned together in a blender.
Schmitt reminds us that, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” (Schmitt, 2007).
The times of the political are precisely those moments in which this distinction saturates nearly all spheres of life. In such times, the tribalization of human beings ceases to be atomized into countless micro-identities, and instead becomes polarized: reality itself is perceived through the lens of only two camps. Thus “friend” and “enemy” become absolute categories, and the nuances that once existed dissolve into a reality rendered in black and white. What possible space could there be for the Center in such circumstances, when the only categories that count are those of friend and enemy? In the eyes of one’s peers, nuances do not exist; in their world of black and white, all that is not white must, by necessity, be black. Such are the circumstances of the political, and such is the fate of those who cling to a neutral posture.
Neutrality, Schmitt insists, is impossible in an age defined by the friend/enemy distinction:
In a world where the political has become autonomous, there can be no standing above the conflict, for he who claims to stand above it merely conceals the fact that he already stands within it.
How could it exist when the vision of the masses is Manichean, when subtle shades of meaning are eroded, when the alterity of the strange and the other presses itself into consciousness? To be neutral in such an age is to be invisible, or worse, to be coded by others as belonging to the enemy camp. Attempts at neutrality, consensus, or centrist equilibrium often disguise power struggles already structured around antagonism. Giorgio Agamben likewise noted that Schmitt’s categories remind us that politics always contains a threshold of conflict that cannot be transcended by appeals to technocratic neutrality.
The Center becomes not a position of balance but a vanishing point, absorbed and negated by the inexorable polarity of the political. Well, as Schmitt himself stated:
Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.
This is the core of the political, and it leaves no space for a tranquil middle.