/lit/ - Literature

>>21595687
I think Trump is a conman but I think you can draw from Schmitt the idea that EVERY president or ruling party is gonna move outside the rule of law if there was a sufficient threat to the state, if they want to fulfill their role as the sovereign, which is what Lincoln did (like doing things which were "unconstitutional" and outside his prerogative powers), which is probably the best example of that happening in the United States, because the sovereign's overriding priority is to protect the state.

>>21597747
>>21598008
I've corresponded with someone who studied under Schmitt scholars who have gone to China for conferences with academics there who have worked on Schmitt, and what I was told -- about why there has been interest in him there -- is that much of his work deals with some shortcomings of the liberal tradition, and China (this was around 10 years ago when you see a lot of Schmitt scholarship in China, not sure if there's as much now) was opening up a bit and exploring liberalism, like seeing what they could learn from it. The Chinese are very much about taking things they think will work for them from other systems and dropping what they don't like.

What's important here is that Schmitt's work doesn't try to criticize an "authoritarian" system like what China has when discussing liberalism, as a lot of political theory writing about liberalism does. And the two most important concepts in Schmitt, the concept of the political and the state of exception, are interesting to them. But I don't see those things as inherently "left" or "right" as others ITT have said. In the West, it's often the right which has been interested in Schmitt, because you have to ask yourself who in the 70s/80s was interested in looking into the works of a guy who was in the Nazi Party, and they tended to be weird conservative types. But in fact there have been oddball Marxist academics in the West who have too.

>>21598728
Russia is weird and kinda schizo from what I've seen but Chinese propaganda is DEFINITELY anti-racist / anti-colonial, and you should see what the Party says about the U.S. because that would absolutely kill whatever sympathy white nationalist types have for China dead instantly on the spot, like racism being really bad mmm'kay and that the U.S. needs to undergo a revolutionary change to wipe it out, although without the sexual orientation stuff. I actually don't think the Chinese government disapproves of gay people (they're not Christians) but they don't promote it either. Their tradition comes from the Third International communist movement and that's way more apparent in domestic programming which can often feel like the Soviet Union:

https://youtu.be/75FSf_Y5Uwo