Yet the Islamic Republic declined to participate, with the Iranian foreign ministry justifying its rejection by citing America’s “criminal acts” during the 12-Day War: namely, joining Israel’s bombing raid and thus violating Iran’s sovereignty in contravention of international law. Soon after, Iran’s foreign minister condemned Trump’s decision to resume American nuclear testing as a “blatant violation of international law” and Washington’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the surface, these gestures appear merely rhetorical — symbolic denunciations intended for foreign media. Yet they reveal a consistent pattern in Iranian discourse: an almost obsessive appeal to international law and the alleged double standards of the Western powers in applying it. Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, routinely invoke the sanctity of international legal norms to indict Washington and its allies for hypocrisy. This language of legality, justice, and sovereignty has become central to Tehran’s moral posture as a self-declared righteous challenger of what it calls the “hegemonic order.”

We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

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On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

The paradox runs deeper still. The faith of Iran, Russia, China, and others in legalism, proceduralism, and egalitarianism in international politics points to their thorough entrapment within the globalist paradigm of modernity. Each of these states proclaims its civilizational distinctiveness — Persian, Russian, or Sinic — but all are, in essence, products of the modern state system. Their bureaucratic rationality, meliorism, and moral universalism are hallmarks of the same Enlightenment project that gave rise to liberalism. They are haplessly embedded in the very worldview they claim to want to overthrow.

Modernity’s essence lies in its universalizing impulse — the conviction that history has a direction, that reason can order the world, and that moral progress can be codified into human institutions and norms. Even those regimes that reject the West’s liberal ideology have internalized this mental structure.

The Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “resistance” against America and Zion, for instance, is a sort of liberation theology, premised on a universal moral dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressors, possessed and dispossessed, echoing the moral Manichaeism of liberal humanitarianism. Despite its broad support for multipolarity, China remains a defender of economic globalization and inclusive global governance based on what it calls the “common values of humanity.” Likewise, Russia’s self-conception as a Katechon — an Orthodox Christian bulwark against terminal liberal decline and a defender of “traditional values” and “civilizational diversity” — echoes the same universal and moralistic tone it attributes to the Global West.

In their current form, the so-called “pariah states” are not civilizational alternatives to the liberal order, but its dialectical mirrors. They contest its dominance not by exiting its sacred moral canopy, but by claiming to embody its true meaning. Just as Marxism arose within and against liberal capitalism, these contemporary challengers articulate their opposition within the same fundamental framework. Their rhetoric of justice, equality, and international legalism reproduces the liberal myth of moral progress, even as it is turned against liberal (political) hegemony.

Realism teaches that in the anarchic realm of international politics, power, not morality, is the final arbiter. Norms, laws, and institutions are mere superstructures built upon the scaffolding of material power: the ability to transport whole infantry divisions across the globe, to parachute special forces behind enemy lines, to deliver strategic weapons that can turn nations and continents into radioactive glass. When Iran denounces US actions as “illegal,” it is not appealing to some transcendent order of justice (even if it professes to do so); it is engaging in the moral theater of power politics. But by doing so, it inadvertently legitimizes the very discourse it seeks to undermine.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.  

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Given the Manichaean backdrop of the postwar order — good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus atrocity — civilizational states could be even more tempted to assert their own exceptionalism or mission, inevitably claiming a universal significance for themselves. They could subvert their own historical cultures by reducing them to an ideology, tout their inherent superiority, and claim for themselves a world-historical role in redeeming mankind from decadence and barbarism. 

Civilizational politics thus risks becoming yet another moral crusade, a dialectic substituting one universalism (the liberal kind) for a new one elevated as its other. In the process, the rhetoric of cultural authenticity may paradoxically deepen, rather than overcome, the moralization of international relations. But its ultimate result remains tragically unchanged: more global convergence, the proliferation and hardening of modern statism, and the cancerous growth of modernity and its metaphysics. 

Significantly, the return of “civilization” does not necessarily herald the return of realpolitik; it may instead inaugurate new forms of moral imperialism, with each civilization seeking to universalize its own particularity as the Civilization fighting global barbarism — in a clash of abstracted civilizations, a Huntingtonian world where civilizations merely mask the global domination of the modern state and all harbor the same force behind their religio-civilizational “veil” (Confucian, Orthodox, Shiite): namely, modernity. 

The tragic insight here is that the moralistic impulse seems inescapable within the framework of the modern state. Every modern regime — whether liberal, communist, Islamist, or nationalist — claims to possess the formula for human flourishing. Modernity itself is a theological project, animated by the belief that politics can and must redeem humanity. As long as this metaphysical conviction endures, the moralization of international politics will persist and, with it, the illusion that law and justice can transcend power.

In the end, the ideological opposition between the “liberal” West and the collection of renegade, revisionist, non-Western powers is an illusion. The contest between them is not a clash between different worlds, but an internal struggle for primacy within the same modernist paradigm.

Iran, Russia, and their allies self-project as the moral conscience of an unjust world order, yet their very moralism reveals their complicity in the postwar world’s ideological foundations. Their invocation of international law is a testament to its total victory — the triumph of a moralized conception of politics that even its enemies cannot escape, at least until such a time when modernity itself, as a zeitgeist and worldview, disintegrates under the weight of its discontents and contradictions. 

The true alternative to liberal hegemony would require the deliberate renunciation of the political and normative universalism associated with the modern project, rather than multiplying “universalisms” under different national or civilizational disguises and claiming one’s own moral superiority. Meanwhile, practically speaking, the insistence on vindicating sovereign “rights” under international law leads these powers to miss actual opportunities to engage with the West and win real concessions — such as by showing up to meet Trump in Egypt. 

Yet so long as even the global adversaries of liberalism remain enthralled by its moral categories, the world will continue to revolve within modernity’s closed circle—an endless dialectic without transcendence, a tragedy without catharsis. Ironically, Trump, the leader of the power that presides over the liberal imperium, has moved on from rules-based-order cant. It’s time the self-proclaimed enemies of that order did the same.

Power politics was a barbarous relic of a rejected past; the world was destined to move towards harmonious free trade, in which Europe’s hard-won moral clarity would guide lesser civilisations, still trapped in history, towards the light. Timid, comfortable, fearful of change and obsessed with petty rules and regulations, once Europe reached middle age with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was happy to observe a changing world tutting from behind its net curtains, the parish council Nimby of continents. Half museum and half retirement home, Europe grew fat and complacent as history was made elsewhere. But from a cave in the depths of Asia something stirred, which would restart history: Covid fatally weakened the boomer continent, and now something new is straining to be born.

It is striking that it took a disease which primarily affects the elderly and unfit to finally make Europe’s leaders notice what had already been clearly apparent: that the continent’s willed deindustrialisation in favour of China had left it weak and helpless, entirely dependent on the charity and vigour of stronger empires. The conjunction of Covid with America’s worst period of internal political disorder since the Sixties also fed a perception among America’s rivals that the global hegemon was itself ailing in turn, fuelling Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Yet if Putin’s war has been markedly unsuccessful on the battlefield, in a pyrrhic sense it has proved the validity of the central assumption driving it: that the post-Cold War world is dead, and we already live in a multipolar order.

In the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia, even America’s allies remain happy to trade with Russia and submit their disputes to Chinese arbitration, viewing the Ukraine war as a distant European border skirmish irrelevant to their interests, and America’s role as global policeman lost to history. Only now are EU leaders, such as its chief diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles, able to face the dawning realisation that “many countries see the geopolitical influence of China as a counterweight to the West and therefore to Europe. They will seek to strengthen their own room for manoeuvre without picking sides”. The latest war in Europe thus helps mark the boundaries of a European civilisational space, delineated by solidarity with Ukraine. For decades, Europe’s leaders flattered themselves that their moral worldview was universal, fated by history to reshape the entire world. Instead, Europe’s values and its interests are revealed as utterly parochial: merely the customs and assumptions of one civilisation among many, and a weak one at that.

It took both crises, Covid and Ukraine, to awaken Europe from its post-war dream. Dependent on China for industry, Russia for energy and America for security, Europe suddenly realised its vulnerability within the new order. As Macron recently wrote in the Financial Times: “because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war Russia decided to inflict on Ukraine, we have acknowledged our strategic dependencies and decided to act to reduce them… We are no longer naive.” Rejecting the idealistic free-trade dogma that had dominated European thinking for decades, Macron further argued in a landmark speech that “we are not destined to become consumers of American industry”, nor is Europe’s relationship to China a choice between economic subjection and conflict: “Rather than trying to fight the Chinese, we are going to do the same as they do: defend our European sovereignty and produce what we need in Europe.”

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In a strange way, Macron’s civilisational dream of Europe’s role in a multipolar world echoes the foreign policy thinking of the two giants of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger. Writing from very different perspectives, just as Germany’s bloody attempt to unify the continent began to look doomed, the two friends tried to visualise a new place for Europe in the world. For Jünger, in his long essay “The Peace”, begun in 1941 and secretly circulated amongst the Wehrmacht generals plotting to assassinate the Führer he so despised, the historical result of the Second World War would not be a reversion to the pre-war order of squabbling nation states brought about by Versailles, but instead the consolidation of the earth’s continents into great civilisational power blocs: “For the first time, the earth as a globe, as a planet, has become a battlefield, and human history presses on towards a planetary order.”

This was a moment of great danger for Europe, Jünger warned: “Napoleon prophesied that in our day the world would become republican or Cossack. If he had foreseen our situation in detail he would have said ‘American or Russian'”, for “at the moment when Europe raises itself to the status of a continent, the gravitational pull of America will be­come more perceptible”. For Jünger as for Macron, history presented the mother continent with a great and fateful choice: vassalisation at the hands of one of the two great empires, or an autonomous civilisation state.

Instead, for Jünger, Germany’s defeat was also the moment for “Europe’s Declaration of Independence”, a time when “the old frontiers must be broken down by new alliances, and new, greater empires must unite the nations”. Here, Jünger does not sound markedly different to Macron in declaring that “Europe must become a partner in the great empires which are forming on this planet, and are striving towards their final form.”

Indeed, like Macron, the Francophile Jünger believed this should happen under French tutelage, as “for long the spirit of that country has been striving towards greater unity in which its labours too will be crowned”. Like Macron’s summoning of the Napoleonic spirit, Jünger celebrated the previous failed champion of a great continental empire: “For this reason secret shrines in honour of Napoleon have been maintained in all lands — for in that prince the old dream of one great monarchy had seemed to be realised.” No wonder Mitterand, meeting the Right-wing warhorse turned idealistic prophet of European unification in 1984, would remark that “Napoleon would have made you a marshal”.

Never quite rejecting his early Right-wing radicalism, the later Jünger directed it towards a pan-European identity and political Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification and the Franco-German alliance. Jünger’s ideal European union indeed prefigures our own, where “there should be uniformity of organisation in what­ever concerns technical matters, industry, commerce, com­munications, trade, weights and measures, and defence”, where “the state as supreme symbol of technical achievement takes the nations in its toils, yet they live in freedom under its protection”. Like his fellow Nietzchean, Macron, who views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the catalyst to reform Europe into a continent capable of defending itself and preserving its unique civilisation, Jünger observes that: “it is thus that nature fashions shellfish, with a hard, gleaming embossed shell and a delicate interior in which the pearls are hidden. In this differentiation lies the welfare of states and the happiness of individuals.”

Jünger’s vision of a new world order divided into great continental empires reflects the influence of his best friend, the jurist and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Unlike Jünger — a fierce and public opponent of Hitler’s regime — Schmitt famously attempted to find a starring role for himself under the National Socialist order, quietly rejecting it only when Germany’s defeat looked certain. It is ironic, and perhaps based on a cursory reading of Jünger’s earlier works, that while Jünger’s reputation is clouded (or among some fans today, enhanced) by his early Right-wing radicalism, Schmitt’s dalliance with the regime whose atrocities created the post-1945 order has only granted his work a certain transgressive glamour, particularly among the Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals who first revived his thought.

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In The Nomos of the Earth (1952), Schmitt observed that the decisive event in world history came at the end of the 16th century, when “the British island detached itself in ideal terms from the destinies of the continent to undertake its own adventure on the seas”. The result was the creation of great seaborne empires, finally culminating in the United States, with the power and will to impose their order on the entire planet, relegating the Europe from the engine of world history to the scene of pitiless and total wars. In detaching itself from the continent, Britain set in train a sequence of events that would lead to Europe’s subordination to Britain’s monstrous child, America.

Yet for Schmitt, in his later writings, there were alternate historical paths on the horizon. As perhaps his most famous modern acolyte, the post-Marxist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, observes, Schmitt looked beyond the bipolar Cold War order he would not outlive to a world where the likely end of bipolarity, American hegemony, would in turn be superseded by “a new global order based on the existence of several autonomous regional blocs”. For Mouffe, a multipolar landscape of civilisational blocs would likely be more stable and pacific than American unilateralism, by dividing the world into distinct but broadly amicable spheres of influence (Ukrainians and Taiwanese, both unwilling members of other empires’ chosen spheres of influence, are unlikely to share her enthusiasm).

A critic of the War on Terror (whose own Schmittian basis has famously been argued by Agamben), Mouffe argued that the potential for world peace brought about by a “a pluralistic world order” is why, “against the illusions of the universalist-humanitarians, it is urgent to listen to Schmitt when he reminds us that ‘the political world is a pluriverse, not a universe’”. Rejecting cosmopolitan idealism, Mouffe argues that we should abandon “the illusory hope for a political unification of the world”. Trying to turn the world into Europe is futile and dangerous: “instead of the vanguard in the unification of the world, the EU should be visualised as a regional pole in this multipolar world”.

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In this multipolar order, as Jünger observed of a united Europe acting as the shield of nations, the EU would, “instead of being seen as announcing the end of nation-states, [provide] the conditions for their survival in a globalised world”. The continent’s survival in this post-cosmopolitan order, Mouffe declares, would entail a rejection of the ideology of free trade, which has meant that “an increasing number of vernacular industries have been destroyed, as local producers are unable to compete with cheap imports” from China and other rival powers. Instead, it is necessary to “to defend a Left-wing form of European protectionism”, in which it is essential “to envisage economic development according to a regional perspective”. This vision, of a protectionist, reindustrialised Europe is precisely that now championed by Macron, who recently announced that “we cannot be the last remaining market without an industrial policy”. In the stirring conclusion to his Financial Times essay, he declared that:

“We have to take back control of our supply chains, energy and innovation. We need more factories and fewer dependencies. ‘Made in Europe’ should be our motto. We have no choice, as sovereignty is intertwined with the strength of our democracies… We Europeans can prove that our continent, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, can once again be the home of flourishing industry and shared progress.”

The post-1945 order, in the simplistic folk wisdom that only fully took shape with the fall of the Soviet Union, adopted the comforting myth that the Allied victory in the Second World War, like the Western victory in the Cold War, was a product of superior liberal-democratic forms. Shedding their overseas possessions in the decades following the war, Europeans flattered themselves that the age of empires was over, but that even as their physical power waned, their moral example would still guide the world.

Instead, the consolidation of the world into continental empires was only beginning. Political morality does not come into the picture: Europe’s conquest and post-war division into two rival spheres was simply the product of America and the Soviet Union’s vast industrial output, and the abundant raw materials, derived from ruthless territorial expansion and genocide in the preceding centuries, which enabled them to feed their factories.

Power flows through a million factory chimneys, and both Covid and the war in Ukraine have revealed to Europe’s feckless and misguided rulers how weak our continent has allowed itself to become. But both crises have also finally brought that fragile, complacent boomer, the world born in 1945, to a close: the entire worldview of its political avatar, Angela Merkel, now stands repudiated, even if no fully-formed replacement has yet arrived. First there were two rival empires, then one unchallenged hegemon, and now a series of potential challengers stand on history’s stage. Belatedly, European leaders are realising that unless it can defend itself, and provide for itself, then as Macron warned, “Europe will disappear.”

Where America is unique among the rival great powers jostling for mastery of the century to come is its distraction fighting a still-virtual civil war on social media at the same time. In the midst of this global contest, we as social media consumers are like some luckless peasant community of a contested borderland, simultaneously the justification for the war, through their expressions of sincere concern for our safety and security, and the battleground, through the harvesting of our data and the endless background turmoil that now fills our lives.

Into this bearpit strode Elon Musk, carrying a sink, with a stated vision of remaking Twitter according to the dreams of its founders barely a decade ago as the “global town square”. The phrase, redolent of Socratic dialogue beneath some shaded colonnade, seems quaintly inappropriate. Few Americans, and fewer foreigners, would wish to linger long in San Francisco’s real-world urban plazas, and their virtual replacement is hardly more congenial. In the real world, far beyond the ayahuasca visions of the site’s unworldly founder, the central square is as often a place of repression and public execution as of well-ordered debate and conviviality; it is the place where political power is expressed through the raising or toppling of statues, bloody revolutions, and intimidating displays of force.

The tiresome and self-defeating illusion of many conservatives, like that of any Hyde Park orator, is that if only the passing public were given free exposure to the brilliance of their dialogue, they would soon become converts. It is the precise illusion punctured by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, when he observed that “a class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict,” for as he notes, “the essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”

But it cannot, and here we see the essential contradiction of Musk’s self-imposed mission: the conflict between free speech and the good of the community is fundamentally unresolvable. Decisions will always finally have to be made by someone, and those decisions are always by their nature political, arbitrary, and thus always a source of dispute. For the essence of politics lies in the final decision for Schmitt, then still writing as a fashionable intellectual of the Catholic Centre Party, aiming to save the Weimar state from its own dysfunction: his remorseless logic had not yet driven him to embrace the disastrous political form which gives his reputation its current frisson. Schmitt’s fundamental insight is more applicable to the Musk case than we may at first think: for now Musk has found himself mired in the ad hoc policing of speech on the site, whether through Twitter polls, or his own arbitrary decisions. 

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For Schmitt, this is all as it should be: the arbitrariness is the point, as the sovereign reveals himself as such through “a pure decision not based on reason and discussion and not justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision created out of nothingness”. For at times of crisis, unresolvable in terms of ordinary politics, comes the state of exception in which sovereign power unveils itself, cutting the Gordian knot of political deadlock: “at times it does so as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive statute a controversy that the independent act of juristic perception failed to bring to a generally plausible solution; at other times it does so as the graceful and merciful lord who proves by pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws”.

This tension reveals itself at its most political in the edge cases, the debatable borderlands where what is lawful may outrun what is good for the community. Again, this aligns with Schmitt’s insight: his opening line from Political Theology, that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” is immediately followed by the observation that, “only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept,” indeed, this very “definition of sovereignty must … be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.” That is, only those cases where the course of action is contested are by their nature political: and only through the final act of decision, one way or another, does the political sovereign reveal himself.

On Twitter, the edge cases are those, like Trump’s presence, on which the preservation of America’s political order have been stated to depend, and on the content most widely considered objectionable by society as a whole: jihadist and extreme Right-wing invocations to terrorist violence, and child exploitation content. Back in an earlier iteration of the platform, before the political community reached a consensus that groups such as Islamic State should not be allowed to openly congregate on social media, Twitter became one of the prime vectors of jihadist propaganda, recruitment and social interaction. It was interesting, even amusing at first, to engage in back and forth debates and snarky banter with Islamic State fighters on Twitter; then it became horrifying and unbearable as the group hurtled further into its darkness. From being a reporter whose career was largely based on the juxtaposition of monitoring Isis content on social media, while reporting the battle on the ground against their physical manifestation in Syria and Iraq, I eventually had to stop following Isis content at all: the constant blurring of the virtual and the real, between London and the Middle East, became too jarring. But is it true, as has recently been claimed, that Musk’s commitment to free speech will lead to a terrorist revival on the platform?

Experts are undecided. Moustafa Ayad, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank monitoring jihadist use of the platform, told me that on Twitter, “the rate of Islamic State accounts being set up or used to spread propaganda has increased over the past two months under new management”, perhaps due to lax moderation as “most moderation teams have been gutted (despite public statements to the contrary) of the context and subject matter expertise required to effectively go after terror-supporting accounts.” Yet Twitter remains a site of negligible activity for the group, compared with other apps such as Telegram where discourse is far less tightly monitored (at least overtly). On Twitter, supporters of Islamic State evade banning through avoiding open encitements to terrorist violence. As Ayad notes, “They primarily stay away from posting violent content to inhabit ‘legal grey areas,’ but they continue to post branded terrorist content and share legacy material, old videos, sermons and series. They will similarly use the phrase ‘IS,’ as a means to reference the Islamic State and still argue that they were referring to the concept of an Islamic state and not the group.” It is illegal to advocate for the Islamic State, after all, but not for an Islamic state: a distinction of which Anjem Choudary finally fell foul when forced by events to upgrade his fealty from the theoretical to the real. 

Laith Alkhouri, CEO of Intelonyx Intelligence Advisory, told me that he has not “not seen an uptick in accounts returning since Musk took the helm”, as groups such as Isis already have secure and thriving networks on far less rigorously policed social media platforms. Like Ayad, Alkhouri notes that the surviving Isis Twitter accounts maintain their presence by avoiding explicit celebration of violence. The accounts he has seen “mostly focus on religious content, abstain from posting images/videos or Isis branded content, and refrain from mentioning Isis as a group. I think these evasion techniques help keep accounts alive.”

Due to the nature of America’s internal political conflict, the policing of Right-wing speech is a more contentious matter than that of jihadist content: jihadist terrorism may kill far more people, but it does not threaten the political order, in the eyes of the political mainstream. Lucas Webber, co-founder and editor of the Militant Wire consultancy, told me that “There is nowhere near the level of terrorism-related content on Twitter compared to the peak IS in Iraq/Syria era of the mid 2010s. However, some extremist elements and ideological armed movements have adapted and manoeuvre around Terms of Service violations.” The Russian extreme-Right Rusich militia, fighting in Ukraine, uses Twitter to “funnel supporters” onto Russian-owned platforms, “and then fundraise from this support base to provide Rusich with weapons, drones, medical supplies, and more – things that have a real-world impact and are used to kill Ukrainians”. As Webber notes, “elements from the “TerrorGram” movement were quite pleased when Elon Musk took over and expressed their excitement about leveraging the platform to grow their international support network. This could ultimately result in direct acts of violence — for example, the recent Bratislava LGBTQ bar shooter was deeply immersed in this space and posted on Twitter during and after the attack.”

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But in Webber’s opinion, “the hysteria from public figures and the mainstream media seems to be largely politically motivated and blown out of proportion. However, the loosening of restrictions will inevitably give more space and oxygen to extremist actors to spread their message and promote their cause.” While decision-making on the edge cases of acceptable speech remains largely arbitrary as “Musk has taken a kind of brute force approach and is aggressively forging his vision through trial and error rather than any real coherent terms of service,” Webber believes that “this aspect will become more institutionalised and stable over time, and this is where it could either revert to type, or settle on set and consistently enforced rules that provide more freedom for political dissidents, conservatives, Right wingers etc to express their opinions”.  Yet it is here, in the debatable lands between legitimate Right-wing critique of the current order, and assertions of the need to violently overthrow it, that Twitter’s speech policies have been most fraught: where does Trump, now facing criminal charges for “insurrection” fit in, having declared on January 6 a state of exception he did not bother to attend? The broadly liberal political establishment may have overreached in its muzzling of Right-wing discourse, but even here lines will eventually have to be drawn by someone, and the final decisions made will always be by their nature arbitrary.

On the heated question of child exploitation content, similar edge cases will always remain a source of political conflict. Though initially disputed by many, experts now agree that Twitter before Musk’s takeover was markedly lax in taking down child abuse material, with the Internet Watch Foundation claiming in 2019 that the site was responsible for 40% of the illegal content hosted on the public internet. Even here, legal grey areas and ambiguities remain, and will, therefore, remain a source of political conflict as the dividing lines are contested. Like Instagram and TikTok, Twitter remains host to legal but unseemly material derived from underaged social media influencers: the task of distinguishing between what is legal and what is morally acceptable proved such a headache for Tumblr that it ended up banning all glamour content (in the process driving adult pornographic influencers to Twitter en masse). Though vastly more reported — and this can only be because it has become a source of heated political distinction between the two American political factions — just the same case can be made regarding the confluence of children and drag performances now driving the American “groomer” discourse. 

As the tech writer Jon Stokes observes in this excellent recent essay, the politics of sex has become the central dividing line of American political conflict. As Stokes enumerates, “Drag Queen Story Hour, Drag Brunch for kids, Kids putting dollar bills into strippers’ thongs, doing pole dancing with strippers, or some other sex-work-related activity, School books that present sex work to kids as just another kind of work, Pride parades with kink on full display and kids present and even participating, Drag kids, Child beauty pageants, Evangelical purity balls, Gay conversion therapy, Porn use by teens” have superseded race as the central battlegrounds on which America’s two political factions contest social media. Sharply divided by the politics of sex in general, the conflict between liberals and conservatives is most heated precisely where the stakes are highest — in the protection of children — and where the boundary between what is legal and what is morally acceptable is so contested.  

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By Mary Harrington

In all of these vexed debates, the central political question is, as Schmitt observed, Who decides? Who decides who may stay on Twitter, and who must be banished from the town square? Who can pluck Kanye West or the former president from their ignominious exile, and thrust them back into silence when they reoffend? It is only Musk, exercising his sovereign power. Where such decisions were once obscure, seemingly nudged behind the scenes by functionaries of the American security state, now they are on display, to be hissed or applauded by the crowd, as if watching an emperor decide the fate of a wounded gladiator. This situation cannot go on for long, but in observing the contours of the present battleground, we are given insight into both Schmitt’s thought and into the contradictory, unresolvable tensions within conservatism between advocating free speech for all that is legal, and opposing that which is harmful 

In his 1929 lecture The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations, Schmitt mocked the technological utopians of his day, who, like Twitter’s founders, believed that “technology appeared to be a domain of peace, understanding, and reconciliation,” where “all peoples and nations, all classes and religions, all generations and races appear to be able to agree” because “unlike theological, metaphysical, moral, and even economic questions, which are forever debatable, purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual about them.” No, warned Schmitt, it is precisely the opposite: “Technology is always only an instrument and weapon; precisely because it serves all, it is not neutral.”

As he observes, in a passage that skewers the initial Utopian dreams of Silicon Valley, “If humanitarian-moral progress is still expected by many today from the perfection of technology, it is because technology is magically linked to morality on the somewhat naive assumption that the splendid array of contemporary technology will be used only as intended… and that they themselves will control these frightful weapons and wield this monstrous power.” Yet this is a grave misunderstanding, Schmitt warns: “Technology is no longer neutral ground” but instead, “every strong politics will make use of it” in ways which “will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground”.

It is in the friend-enemy groupings coalescing on social media, particularly on Twitter, that the political battleground deciding our future has been drawn, and it is in the battle for who controls the edge cases of acceptable speech, that the power to make the arbitrary decisions defining political sovereignty resides. It is a marvel of America’s political culture that, at precisely its moment of greatest internal conflict since its civil war, the world’s richest man could buy himself, if not the throne itself, what is likely to be a veto on who next ascends it. Similarly, for all that Schmitt has re-emerged as a source of political inspiration on the Right following his 2000s adoption by the populist Left, it was America’s liberal establishment that revealed themselves the true Schmittians, in their urge to save American democracy from its errant voters. Under their guidance, echoing Schmitt’s definition of crisis as where “a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state” exists, American politics since 2016 has become a permanent state of exception, in which the diminution of sovereign power in the White House was manifest largely through manipulation of social media. 

Like an absent-minded ascetic king, Jack Dorsey accidentally built a site of great, yet unclearly defined political power, certainly greater than many nation-states: when, by threatening Musk with sanctions, we see the European Union try to assert its own sovereignty, power frankly does not seem weighted in Europe’s favour. Whether or not Musk wishes to keep this power is an unresolved question: as he has recently declared, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.” It is now too late for us to debate whether or not such power should exist: the fundamental question, for Twitter as for American politics, remains unresolved: who next decides?

It’s why I’m sceptical about any discussions regarding the prospect of American fascism. The latest trigger was Italy’s general election, which swept the ambiguously populist Right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia into power. But this is only the most recent. Before that, President Biden himself singled out segments of the GOP as “semi-fascist”, and while he didn’t elaborate, a number of commentators doubled-down on it. Earlier still, scholars in highly-coveted positions, such as Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have created veritable cottage industries out of a moralised analysis of what they treat as a global surge in fascism.

The fascism discussion is increasingly taking on a meta dimension, in which half of the arguments now circle around the usage itself, and whether disputing its usage perhaps makes one, if not fascist, then insufficiently dedicated to the spirit of democracy (as well as pedantic, and so on).

But why do we keep returning to this subject, and why do we find it so difficult to even agree on the terms of the debate? The second question is the easier to answer. For, despite being one of the major forms of modern political organisation, fascism is probably the least well understood. The great Italian historian of fascism Renzo de Felice remarked that unlike liberalism or communism, fascism had no defining texts — no Second Treatise of Government, no Das Kapital. And while it attracted major thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, neither produced a work that served to systematically define it for future generations.

It is the least systematic of the major ideological tendencies of the 20th century, and generating an inductive understanding is complicated by the confounding factors in each country’s specific manifestation. In Italy — the original incarnation of fascism — you have inter alia the particular character of Mussolini, but also the unique role of the Vatican, the country’s geopolitical situation, the recent and still ongoing colonial ventures, and the rising importance of diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, other Right-wing regimes of the 20th century — Spain, Portugal, Greece, Argentina, Syria — all incorporated elements or factions of fascism without necessarily embracing fascism tout court. And over all this hangs the shadow of Nazism, which is of course a variant of fascism, but one whose most salient features — race worship and Jew-hatred — are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions of fascism.

All of which is to say that confusion surrounding the term is probably inevitable, though this has hardly limited its usage. On the contrary: it has by now become an almost obligatory grace note of disapproval, regardless of how far removed from the subject at hand (nor is this dynamic limited to the Left — cf. Jonah Goldberg’s lazy manifesto Liberal Fascism). Of course, this is demonology, not political analysis. As George Orwell put it: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” It is in this sense, the domestic equivalent of bringing up the Munich Agreement in foreign policy debates.

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But fascism is not just an empty ideological vessel; it describes a programmatic way of organising political society that differs from either liberalism or communism. Fascism is a totalising project — one that channels all subsidiary institutions from the family to business corporations to the nation toward the interests of the absolute state. And as Adam Tooze has pointed out, this almost always operates in concert with extraordinary military and economic mobilisation against perceived threats, both foreign and domestic.

If this doesn’t sound very much like any major political phenomenon today (and it doesn’t), why then do we obsess over it so? It is clear that the idea of fascism — however nebulous — continues to exert a unique, dark fascination for us (alas, poor communism, with its nearly 100 million dead, apparently lacks a certain je ne sais quoi). And perhaps this is nothing new. Almost 50 years ago, Susan Sontag noted how: “For those born after the early 1940s, bludgeoned by a lifetime’s palaver, pro and con, about communism, it is fascism — the great conversation piece of their parents’ generation — which represents the exotic, the unknown.”

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But I think there’s something more at work in the collective quasi-obsession with identifying and rooting out fascism in our own society. Machiavelli has a great line where he notes how Roman writers would “praise Caesar but blame Catiline” as a coded way of talking about what were in effect Caesar’s crimes. Something similar seems to be at work with respect to how we discuss the defects of democracy — assigning those tendencies we least like to some external phenomenon that we call “fascism”. Overweening executive power? Militarised deep state? Consolidated corporate authority working hand-in-glove with centralised bureaucracies? Immigration restrictions? Political demagoguery? The truth is that all of the elements that we have seen fit to attribute to the external threat of fascism are perfectly compatible with democracy.

Some of this is simply a function of the phenomenon identified many decades ago by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève: that diverse ideological tendencies are submerged under the overarching form of the modern state. But it is also the case that democracy itself — like Whitman — contains multitudes. And our insistence on associating all political virtue with democracy and vice with various opponents (authoritarianism, autocracy, fascism, etc.) has blinded us to this fact. Like it or not, our ongoing political disputes ultimately remain family disputes, and we will— not for the first time — have to work them out among ourselves.

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By treating fascism as kind of eternally recurring political tendency, rather than a historically distinctive phenomenon, we have elevated it into an Aristotelian taxonomy of political life, but without anything like Aristotle’s philosophical rigour. The result is that our political understanding is reduced to a sliding scale with democracy in the middle, and communism and fascism at either end, serving as permanent tendencies against which we require constant warning from the great and good among us. This account is both too small and too big: on the one hand, this represents an impoverishment of our political imagination; but on the other, it needlessly introduces external ideological categories in lieu of a serious analysis of the political tendencies distinctive to democracies themselves.

In the end though, does any of this matter, beyond its importance to the egos of a handful of public intellectuals? I think it does. First, because — as the motto of Faber College has it — knowledge is good. The “everything is fascism” discourse presents an impoverished understanding of political possibilities, and leaves its audience less informed than when they started. But it also matters because, if you think as many do that our democracy is in a bad way, then a misdiagnosis is practically and not just intellectually dangerous. Getting it right is a concern for citizens, not just scholars or “Historian here!” types on social media. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed doctors of democratic society, having diagnosed the disease as fascism, lambast anyone who disagrees with them as being a partisan of the disease itself, even as the patient grows sicker and sicker.

But Sinema is more enigmatic. It was said that she demanded $100 billion in cuts to proposed climate programmes, though this was denied by her office. The package was trimmed to $2 trillion, but she still refused to support it. She was accused of being bent on the “destruction” of the Biden Presidency. She had, one commentator wrote, a “death grip” on the Democratic Party.

In public, Sinema was taciturn, even as she was trailed and harried by progressive activists, who followed her into public restrooms, or tried to confront her at a marathon. Nobody on the Left understands her thinking; to the Washington Post she is simply “inscrutable“. So fury, and theorising, is their response. (Hers was to tell them, somewhat cryptically on Instagram, to “fuck off”.)

Biden’s bill has been maimed by Sinema, regardless of what happens in the weeks ahead. Eventually, interest in her may begin to fade, or she might face a primary challenge that ends her career as a senator. But there is another way to look at Sinema, one with wider and much longer-lasting implications for politics and political theory than her obstructionism in the Senate.

In recent years there have been two major shifts in the relationship between politics and political theory. On the one hand, a number of important modern political thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, once perceived in American academic and activists circles as useful, even necessary, for ostensibly radical and critical Leftist politics, have begun to appeal to the Right, which long rejected them. On the other hand, adherence to a capitalism-friendly version of academics and activists’ politics, especially on matters of culture, race and sexuality, became a condition of membership in nearly every important institution in the United States. Ideas that once generated a thrilling frisson of subversion in college seminars among students and teachers, who at the time could see themselves as joined in a common project of Leftist critique, have now become the ever-more explicit moral centre of our regime — or are being taken up by its opponents on the Right.

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Such changes can perhaps be traced more easily through the writings of thinkers whose minds, because of their mediocrity, reflect rather than resist larger trends. One such thinker — a former activist and, technically, a scholar — is Sinema, who holds a PhD in “Justice Studies” from Arizona State University. Her 2012 dissertation Who Must Die: the State of Exception in Rwanda’s Genocide, and her 2015 book of almost the same title, are representative moments in the double shift by which Leftists once enamoured of certain strands of radical political theory repurposed it towards the consolidation of a new hegemonic political morality, discarding its subversive dimension — and making it available to the Right.

In her work on Rwanda, Sinema purports, through a handful of incompletely understood concepts drawn chiefly from the writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, to discover in the genocide committed in 1994 a generalisable lesson about the importance of the rule of law. In its absence, she argues, the worst sorts of barbarities are possible, and indeed likely.

Sinema’s work has no original insights, and hardly any grasp on the theory that supposedly informs it. It is, however, a useful document. It sheds, in the first place, some light on Sinema herself, a former anti-war radical who is now perhaps the most notorious centrist in Congress and who prides herself on upbeat bipartisanship (expounded in her 2009 book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions that Win and Last). For those who would rather dim the lights on Sinema, an already highly-visible political personage, her invocation of Schmitt and Agamben offers an opportunity to consider the strange transformation that these theorists’ work has undergone.

Schmitt and Agamben, in principle, should have been uncomfortable reading for Sinema. The former was an early 20th-century German legal theorist who attacked liberal democracy and supplied theoretical justification for the Nazi regime; the latter is a still-living Italian philosopher who used Schmitt’s ideas for his own critique of liberalism, launched from the radical Left rather than the far Right. But, given Sinema’s political and intellectual origins on the anti-war Left of the early 2000s, her choice is less surprising. The two thinkers were critical references for activist and academic critics of American power throughout the War on Terror.

Since the Eighties and Nineties, Schmitt had become first acceptable, and then compulsory reading, for American political theorists, who were taken with what seemed to be his insights into the deficiencies of liberal democracy’s emphasis on the rule of law and the formal aspects of democratic procedure. Some thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe, used his ideas to advocate for a reinvigorated form of political democracy that valued frankly acknowledged conflicts over neutral rules and norms. This so-called “agonism” once inspired populist Leftist movements in Europe, but seems to appeal to few American academics after the rise, since the first Trump campaign, of Right-wing populism at home. Norms — such as Nato and Nafta — suddenly appealed to Leftists who had long critiqued them.

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While some tried to use Schmitt to attack liberalism from the Left, others, drawing on Agamben’s interpretation of Schmitt, argued that the United States was becoming or had become a dangerously illiberal country. Schmitt had argued, infamously, that states inevitably find themselves confronted with “states of exception” — situations where legal norms can no longer be applied. In such instances, some agent must decide what is to be done so that order can be restored and the normal rules can function again. Schmitt saw this power to make decisions in exceptional circumstances as the essence of sovereignty. He argued that liberal democracies — oriented towards preserving the rule of law, which their leaders and ideologues imagine needs no supplement of sovereign decision-making — ignore this fact to their peril.

Agamben, however, countered that supposedly liberal states are in fact constantly dealing with “states of exception”. Liberals do not, in his view, periodically confront normless states of exception in crises; rather they constantly create these conditions. In a series of works including his 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben drew on Schmitt and Foucault to warn that what he saw as the paradigmatic instances of the Nazis’ systematic illegality and inhumanity — the concentration camp and the lethal power of doctors over “life unworthy of life” (the disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) — were also present, at least potentially, in democratic states, which create their own zones in which law and rights are suspended.

After 9/11, these arguments took on great cogency for many thinkers on the American Left. The US Government appeared to them to be suspending fundamental rights of its citizens through the Patriot Act, which suspended long-standing norms about the limits of state surveillance. Meanwhile, in Guantanamo Bay, the Government seemed to consign individuals to a site-specific state of exception in which the norms governing neither the treatment of prisoners of war, nor criminals applied. Agamben’s theories did not offer much clear direction on what critics of the apparently norm-less War on Terror might do to oppose the “sovereign” power of the United States, but they did give a moral and philosophical weight to critics’ sense that the country was on a dangerous slide towards reenacting the worst horrors of the 20th century.

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Rather than argue, as Schmitt and Agamben did, that states of exception necessarily appear, or that liberal states continually create them, Sinema insisted that such situations could be avoided by protecting the rule of law. This revealed a basic misunderstanding of her chosen interlocutors’ arguments. Schmitt posited that the rule of law is never adequate, since states of exception requiring the exercise of sovereignty necessarily appear; Agamben likewise argued, following Foucault, that liberal states are inherently unable to live up to their own constitutional norms and in their routine exercise of power, place certain spaces and persons outside them. Sinema, either with naïveté or the cunning of stupidity, simply wishes the problem away and urges us to follow the rules. But, while her intellectual inadequacies are her own, the lameness of her conclusion reflects a change in the political valence of theory.

By the mid-2010s, as Sinema was writing, Leftist opposition to the imperial and illiberal dimensions of American security policy was melting away — or moving to the Right. In the following years, fears about terrorism targeted the latter, painting American conservatives, and the spectre of white supremacy, as security threats in much the same rhetoric that had been used to describe Islamic terrorist networks.

Since the spring of 2020, as Agamben has repeatedly observed, Covid policy has imitated the War on Terror in its suspensions of rights — and intimated the handing over of political power to medical officials in ways anticipated in Homo Sacer. Thus, if Schmitt and Agamben remain relevant for understanding our politics, it is in ways that are uncomfortable for the cultural Left, which now finds itself increasingly running, rather than critiquing, the machinery of American power.

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In our present-day sequels to the War on Terror — the campaigns against racism and Covid — hegemonic institutions pursue enemies and suspend liberal norms in the name of our psychological and physical wellbeing. Now in possession of what we might call the commanding heights of the moral economy, from which it produces elites’ and would-be elites’ worldview, this Left no longer needs to perform radicalness.

It can assume instead the position of a centre ringed about by benighted, ignorant, but nevertheless dangerous enemies: conservatives. The latter are not credited with having specific, comprehensible or legitimate objections to the dominant policies and values. They are instead imagined as hateful, prejudiced enemies of legality, science, and moral decency — that is, they are seen not as political foes, but as cognitive and moral degenerates — in a manner that recalls the way Islamic terrorists during the Bush era were said to hate America “for our freedom” and to be full of irrational “Islamic rage”, rather than recognised as having a comprehensible set of objections to American policies in the Middle East.

We should not be surprised to hear pleas for the rule of law and deference for experts from those who once, drawing on radical theory, revealed the subterfuges and hypocrisies behind liberal norms of legality and objectivity. Critique, like terrorism, is a weapon of the weak. The powerful claim to defend security, reason and morality, while those out of power, grown clever and cynical from their experience of marginality, contest these claims and question whether such things even exist to be defended. With the cultural Left in the ascendancy, the political theory by which it climbed has become a ladder to be thrown away — and available to be taken up by the Right.

Long after the furore around Sinema is forgotten, her academic work will glint as one ironic point of light in this vast change in the way liberals and conservatives in America think about themselves and their country.

I was reminded of her iron self-control and bird-like fragility watching our Queen enter St George’s Chapel for the funeral of Prince Philip on Saturday. She stumbled momentarily as she approached the chapel door; inside, she sat alone. Born 12 years after my grandmother, she has been our Queen since 1952 and remains so today, her 95^th birthday.

And yet despite the dignified pathos of last Saturday, we can be sure that some will celebrate the Queen’s birthday by calling for her deposition. For many progressives view the Queen as an unacceptable relic of the past. Never mind personal travails; monarchy, they say, is undemocratic, even if the Queen never wields her power. We should have an elected head of state.

But far from being a relic of despotism, constitutional monarchy is our best protection against its reappearance. The story we like to recall traces a thousand years of royal continuity — the same deep history which progressives say demonstrates the obsolescence of our monarchy. But in truth this story skates over a profound rupture: the end of absolute kingship.

Medieval England was broadly Catholic, ruled spiritually from the Vatican by a Pope whose word was officially infallible. It was Henry VIII’s break from Rome in 1534 that signalled England’s secession from this absolute spiritual rule. But Henry retained absolute rule in the temporal world: he was not just a symbolic but an executive head of state, who believed his right to be obeyed came direct from God.

School history today doesn’t often dwell on England’s transition from the absolutism of Henry VIII’s day to the modern settlement. France had its Revolution, America had its Founding, but the significance of Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 is under-discussed, despite its importance.

Perhaps it’s still too much of a sore point. After all, it was also the moment that completed the rupture with Rome begun by Henry VIII. Over a few tumultuous months, the Catholic James II was challenged and then deposed by a cabal of senior English statesmen, in favour of the Protestant William of Orange. Certainly, relations between Catholics and Protestants in the British Isles have been uneasy since, a fact that still drives political unrest in Ireland today.

Just as the Reformation represented England’s secession from spiritual absolutism, the Glorious Revolution represented something similar in the political sphere. Having got rid of one absolute monarch, the statesmen who defenestrated James II set about making sure their new monarch, William, knew his place. A 1689 Bill of Rights set out constitutional principles we have to this day, including regular Parliaments, open elections and freedom of speech. The Bill also limited and specified the monarch’s powers.

The Reformation and Glorious Revolution produced an England in which both spiritual and temporal rule had the same figurehead: a head of both Church and Parliament. The change was subtle but profound, as the authority of England’s priest-kings now theoretically extended across moral and political domains. But in practice, they wielded no direct power.

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This homeopathic dilution of theocratic tyranny proved exceptionally liberating. The new settlement drove the emergence of our parliamentary system, our two main political parties, and — as the monarchy sought a new role — many of the High Victorian institutions such as the Royal Societies, whose grand buildings form the majestic backbone of London today.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were an age of public enquiry, noisy debate, scientific discoveries, imperial expansion and a fair few atrocities — but also of a bouncing, self-confident conviction that Britain’s destiny was in British hands, not those of fate, or of a despot or even God.

Two world wars, one collapsed empire and a de-industrialised North later, things look rather different. Today, younger adults widely believe the world has been getting worse throughout their lives, and are pessimistic about the capacity of science, government or their own agency to change this. In parallel, the freedom of speech first guaranteed in the 1689 Bill of Rights is increasingly regarded as a stalking-horse for hatred. Growing numbers believe that what’s right and wrong — especially where it concerns the rights of marginalised groups — are sufficiently self-evident they shouldn’t be up for debate.

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But who decides on the exceptions to our post-Glorious Revolution norm of debate? It’s been nearly half a millennium since Henry VIII ended England’s official embrace of the Pope in this role. Progressives have yet to offer a clear alternative to either the Pope or the Defender of the Faith, though many assert that no hereditary ruler should be allowed such spiritual clout.

Unsurprisingly, then, progressives (such as Jeremy Corbyn) who support abolishing the monarchy, often also argue for disestablishment of the Church of England. Meanwhile a growing chorus of other progressive voices calls for a lengthening list of often self-contradictory articles of faith to be excluded from legitimate debate — a move that bears comparison with the religious ordinances of England’s Catholic and Anglican eras.

But what if the progressives are wrong and power can never truly be democratised? This was the argument advanced by political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that democracy is always compromised by absolutism, because no matter how flawless a set of rules you devise, and no matter how fair your electoral system, sooner or later a situation will crop up that doesn’t fit the rules.

When that happens, you have to break the rules: a situation Schmitt called the “state of exception”. Coronavirus lockdowns are a good example: of the past year, countless ordinary freedoms were abruptly suspended in the name of virus control. Schmitt argued that you can tell who’s really in charge by who gets to implement such a state: “Sovereign is he who decides the exception”.

Carl Schmitt was, of course, a Nazi. For him, exposing the traces of arbitrary rule that persist even in democratic government was part of a wider argument in favour of strongman rule.

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Critics might argue that quoting a Nazi in defence of the Queen isn’t likely to make the monarchy seem more progressive. But if we accept Schmitt’s argument that even democracies can’t avoid the odd despotic moment, it’s far easier to understand why constitutional monarchies are so often more egalitarian than republics. For even if Schmitt is right, it doesn’t follow that because someone has to decide the exception, that decision-maker has to be a dictator. It wasn’t the Queen who decided to suspend our ordinary liberties for the pandemic, but Parliament, which is made up of our elected representatives.

The role of our Queen is to symbolise that tyrannical twitch we can’t wholly eradicate even in democracies, lest such twitches break out more regularly among our elected leaders. And she must do so without availing herself of actual power. As such, she acts as a kind of inoculation against real tyranny.

Our Queen has two birthdays: her actual birthdate, which is today, and her “official” birthday on the second weekend in June. This aptly reflects her double existence. On the one hand she’s a human individual with a family, a birthday and a recent, terrible bereavement. On the other, she’s an interchangeable cipher, a part not just replaceable but designed to be replaced by her heir apparent when the time comes. Her role is to act, with total self-effacement, as the fulcrum between tyranny and democracy. It’s a position that, once understood, is rightly seen as profoundly sacred.

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That understanding feels fainter than ever today. It wasn’t just our monarch who seemed fragile and bird-like in mourning for Prince Philip. A whole world feels as though it’s wearing thin, and that with the death of Philip yet another of its underpinnings has sheared away: the world of enquiry, debate and optimism; one that felt liberated by having only a titular head of Church and State and responded with two centuries of flourishing culture.

Increasingly, I fear that a new generation feels less liberated than abandoned by such light-touch authorities, and yearns — under the banner of progress itself — for something closer to the moral and political strongmen envisaged by Carl Schmitt.

For ultimately, progressive calls to abolish the monarchy — whether as head of Church or state — amount not to a democratisation of power, but a removal of the principal safeguard we have against a return of the political and moral absolutism that preceded England’s Reformation and Glorious Revolution. Should the mounting demands for authority over the moral exception merge with similar calls for authority over the political one, the relative freedom guaranteed for us by our ceremonial priest-kings may be replaced by something far more direct and assertive.

If there’s any hope, it lies in the despised rural and post-industrial backwaters: Deep England. Perhaps only outside the bubble of elite discourse, our nation’s instinctive appreciation for the paradox of constitutional monarchy is robust enough to survive the progressives who seek to tear down its moral and political dimensions.

Never mind heaven on earth. On the whole, Deep England would just like to be left in peace. On this difficult birthday for Her Majesty, we can only pray that the destructive forces of progress accord her the same courtesy.

First, Ignatieff’s argument is a reminder about how Brexit could not have been better designed to undermine the very conditions of a healthy deliberative democracy.

“Adversaries … will beat you if they can,” he said, “but they will accept the verdict of a fair fight. This, and a willingness to play by the rules, is what good-faith democracy demands. Between enemies, trust is impossible. They do not play by the rules (or if they do, only as a means to an end) and if they win, they will try to rewrite the rules, so that they can never be beaten again.”

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The problem we have, is that the very meta conditions for good adversarial politics are precisely what we are now arguing about. Adversaries will accept the verdict of a fair fight, he insists. Ah, but the fight — the referendum itself — wasn’t fair, argue Remainers, citing shady Russian influence or the presence of dark money. Rubbish, Leavers reply. For them, this line of argument is precisely akin to those who “will try to rewrite the rules, so that they can never be beaten again”. In other words, the framing conditions for limited adversarial conflict have been seriously damaged. And without them, adversaries become enemies.

But there are other, perhaps more surprising voices, that go so far as to argue that Ignatieff’s conditions for a fair fight between adversaries are themselves loaded in favour of the status quo.

The political theorist Chantal Mouffe, writing in The Guardian, describes political contestation as always and necessarily involving an “us” versus a “them”. Indeed, she insists, the politics of consensus as typified by the third way ‘big tent’ movements of Clinton and Blair were always the attempt to by-pass legitimate contestation by the presentation of a false consensus in which voices of dissent were silenced or delegitimised.

These movements assumed that the big ideological questions had been largely settled and that, after the fall of the Berlin wall, politics was essentially little more than a glorified management exercise between people who broadly agreed on their basic goals and aspirations. Following the Iraq war and the financial collapse of 2008, this idea of a common framework no longer seems to exist. Politics has become genuinely agonistic again. Little wonder Tony Blair has admitted he does not understand politics any more.

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Does this idea of agonistic politics threaten the distinction between enemies and adversaries? Perhaps it does. For despite the fact that Mouffe is a thinker of the Left, she acknowledges the profound influence on her thinking of the work of the Nazi law professor Carl Schmitt, and in particular of his concept of the political as necessarily involving the contestation between “friend and enemy”. In other words, for Schmitt and Mouffe, the idea of the enemy is built into the very existence of the political, just as the idea of beauty is built into aesthetics and the idea of the good is built into mortality. It is of its very essence.

“A political community exists wherever a group of people are willing to engage in political life by distinguishing themselves from outsiders through the drawing of a friend-enemy distinction,” writes Lars Vinx, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

“Liberal states, in Schmitt’s view, have a tendency to fail to distinguish properly between friends and enemies, and thus to extend rights of membership to those who do not truly belong to the political nation. In a liberal state, Schmitt fears, the political nation will slowly wither and die as a result of spreading de-politicisation, it will succumb to internal strife, or it will be overwhelmed by external enemies who are more politically united.”

Whatever the grain of truth some may recognise in this description, one would have thought that Schmitt’s unrepentant Nazi past would disqualify him as a political commentator who has helpful things to say about our present circumstances. And one might not be especially surprised that his influence reaches the likes of Steve Bannon and extreme Russian nationalists — even to the Chinese leader President Xi Jinping — who are all reaching for Schmitt. But what is more troubling is the extent to which his philosophy is now receiving thoughtful consideration even amid the supposedly liberal institutes of higher learning. As Gideon Rachmann noted in the Financial Times this year:

“Perhaps more surprisingly, the study of Schmitt has also entered the academic mainstream. In 2017, Oxford University Press published The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt. The blurb notes: ‘Despite Schmitt’s rabid anti-Semitism … the appeal of his trenchant critiques of … representative democracy and international law … is undiminished.’”

So, Nazi past aside (and I can’t believe I am even typing such words while currently living in Israel) what exactly is wrong with the friend/enemy distinction as the basis for political life? Partly, it is the failure to recognise that politics involves the negotiation of multiple identities, commitments and desires. There is not just one “us” and one “them” in the political, but overlapping and shifting patterns of solidarity.

I have political ‘friends’ in one area of life who are ‘enemies’ in another. I share with some a commitment to the redistribution of wealth, I share with others a belief in Brexit, elsewhere I share with some a common religious faith and with others a belief that climate change is real and a human creation, and so on — and these groups are decidedly not the same. In other words, those who are ‘friends’ in one area of political life are ‘enemies’ in another — which is to say that the very distinction between friends and enemies breaks down very quickly in the real world of political contestation.

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OK, there is something to Mouffe’s “us” and “them” distinction to this extent: the centrist politics of consensus is often a way of silencing diverse opinions and maintaining the status quo – its default option being to advantage those who recognise their own values being met within the present arrangements. I suspect the Queensbury rules favoured the Marquis of Queensbury. Likewise, Ignatieff’s rules of the political game may indeed favour his own liberal world view. Such rules can — sometimes should — be challenged.

So I don’t go along with much of the general pearl-clutching that politics has become too heated. Heat is the inevitable by-product of political change. But it is immature – and dangerous — to think that this makes you and I enemies. Tomorrow we will be on the same side about something different. This too will pass.