Tag: David Cole

Thoughts on Charleston

So much excellent stuff has been written on the murders in Charleston, I hesitated to weigh in. But one part of the story that I thought could use some amplification is the politics of safety and security in this country, from the backlash of the GOP through today, how that intersects with the politics of racism. So I took it up in my column for Salon. I’m not sure I said exactly what needed to be said or what I wanted to say: for some reason, the precision and specificity I was aiming for here proved to be more elusive than usual. So if you find that the article misses its mark, I’ll understand. Here are some excerpts: In response to Wednesday’s […]

Barack Obama’s Upside-Down Schmittianism

Reading this post by David Cole—on Obama’s unauthorized war on ISIS—my mind drifts to the German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt famously defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” Long established and stable constitutional regimes presume and rest atop legal routines, social patterns, political order, normalcy: “For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist.” In such situations, political authority is constrained by a set of rules and its exercise of power is almost as predictable as the social order itself. But there are moments in the life (and death) of a society that exceed the boundaries of these laws and routines, moments, as Schmitt says, when “the power of real life breaks through […]