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David French

By David French

Opinion Columnist

“When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.”

Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor and writer who is based in Idaho, posted that thought last year. I saw it last week and immediately forwarded it to some of my close friends with a note that said that this sentence captures our political moment. It helps describe America’s moral divide.

Over the last decade, I’ve watched many of my friends and neighbors make a remarkable transformation. They’ve gone from supporting Donald Trump in spite of his hatefulness to reveling in his aggression.

This isn’t a new observation. In fact, it’s so obvious as to verge on the banal. The far more interesting question is why. How is it that so many Americans seem to have abandoned any commitment to personal virtue — at least in their political lives — and have instead embraced merciless political combat so enthusiastically that they believe you’re immoral if you don’t join their crusade or even if you don’t mimic their methods?

It’s a question with a multifaceted answer. In December, I wrote a column examining the question through a specifically religious lens. When a person believes that he or she possesses eternal truth, there’s a temptation to believe that he or she is entitled to rule.

There’s a difference, however, between yielding to temptation and developing an alternative morality. And what we’ve been witnessing in the last decade is millions of Americans constructing a different moral superstructure. And while it is certainly notable and powerful in Trumpism, it is not exclusive to Trumpism.

A good way to understand this terrible political morality is to read Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who joined the Nazi Party after Hitler became chancellor. I want to be careful here — I am not arguing that millions of Americans are suddenly Schmittians, acolytes of one of the fascist regime’s favorite political theorists. The vast majority of Americans have no idea who he is. Nor would they accept all of his ideas.

One of his ideas, however, is almost perfectly salient to the moment: his description, in a 1932 book called “The Concept of the Political,” of the “friend-enemy distinction.” The political sphere, according to Schmitt, is distinct from the personal sphere, and it has its own distinct........

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