Juan Donoso Cortés on Never Trumpers as Una Clasa Discutidora

A class given to endless discussion and disputation

I have on several occasions referred to Never Trumpers as yap-and-scribble do-nothings who think of politics as a grand debate gentlemanly conducted according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules and endlessly protracted. These men and women of the Beltway bow tie brigade think of themselves as doing something worthwhile whether or not their learned discussions in well-appointed venues achieve anything at all in slowing the leftist juggernaut.  Leftists love these their lapdogs. George F. Will is one of many. It now occurs to me that Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853) had their number long ago. He floats an important insight, however extreme his overall position, which of course I reject.

I owe most of my understanding of Cortés to Carl Schmitt. So for now  I merely pull a couple of quotations from his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985, orig. publ. in German in 1922: 

According to Donoso Cortés, it was characteristic of bourgeois liberalism not to decide in this battle [“between Catholicism and atheist socialism”] but to begin a discussion. He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” una clasa discutidora. It has thus been sentenced [condemned]. This definition contains the class characteristic of wanting to evade the decision. A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict. (59)

Just as liberalism discusses and negotiates every political detail, so it also wants to dissolve metaphysical truth in a discussion. 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. (63)

To understand the Trump phenomenon it is useful to study Carl Schmitt. Trump is a man who knows how to make decisions and move from talk to action.  He is not one of the bow-tie boys who belongs to the club and is content to chatter.  He knows how to fight. He knows that civility and refined manners count for nothing in a confrontation with  leftist thugs from Chicago brought up on Saul Alinsky.  You hit them, and you hit them so hard that they reel in shock.

I know what some of you will say: Schmitt was a Nazi! He was indeed, joining the National Socialists in May of 1933, the same month that Martin Heidegger joined. By invoking Schmitt am I not acquiescing in the view that Trump is Hitler-like?  Of course not. Consider: would Hitler have recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel?  Would Hitler have garnered the support of the German counterpart of the National Rifle Association if there had been such an organization? The Trump = Hitler identity theory is clear proof of how scurrilous leftists are. Their endless lies were refuted by the Orange Man’s four years in office. And of course Trump is far from the extreme and border-line insane views of Cortés.

You say you won’t read Schmitt and Heidegger because they were Nazis? But you read Nietzsche who in many passages is a proto-Nazi as I could easily show, and will, in due course. Will you not read Jean-Paul Sartre because he was a Stalinist? How about Gottlob Frege, the greatest logician since Aristotle? Will you not read him because Michael Dummett claimed that he is an anti-Semite?