The Friendly Enemy
On Politics, Progressives, and Liberal Delusions
There is something fundamentally both absurd and insidious with a political scene wherein the only visible and legitimate hostility is between a young Christian man from Kansas struggling to pay rent on a minimum wage job and a progressive, single mother in New York who cannot afford child care, with Wall Street existing nowhere in either person’s equation. There is nothing natural about these hostilities. They are forged, fabricated.
Deciding who is the enemy is a political act. It is the initial action that gives sense, meaning, and direction to any subsequent political act. I want to explain, in what follows, that the identification of the hostile—the adversary—is not “bad” or “ugly” politics, but at its very core. The question is not whether conflict and antagonisms are part of politics. The question is who determines the adversary and on what grounds? Moreover, who conceals the true adversary?
To understand why antagonisms are inextricable to politics, we need to understand how identities are constructed. There is no “we” without the designation of an ‘outside’—a Them. Identity is not something we have; it is something that is constructed and re-constructed. All identity is relational, simply because you cannot define what something is without defining what it is not. Chantal Mouffe refers to this ‘not’ as the constitutive outside, the “Them” that draws the boundaries of the “we.” The important point to understand is that the “we” is not defined in relation to any outside group with benign differences. It is an outside that threatens the fullness of the “we.”
The “we” is constructed through a struggle between political actors over hegemony. Who, for example, decides the relationship between the young man from Kansas and the young mother from New York? And who yields the power to forge a new “we” wherein they would come to realize that they share a common grievance, and thus, a “them?” The man from Kansas and the mother from New York are conditioned through that struggle, to see each other from across a forged frontier. When, in reality, the line, that frontier that explains their lives and its predicament ought to ought to run between those who cannot afford rent and those profiting off of war, the rentier class, and corporate landlords.
Consider Lebanon. For anyone familiar with Lebanon, sectarian conflicts are seemingly eternal, impenetrable features of the country’s ravaged political terrain. However, if you were a young Shi’ite in Beirut before the 1990s, you were just as likely to have been a member of the Communist Party, associating with a cross-sectarian working class that functioned as the “We” against a cross-sectarian ruling elite. Similarly, a broad demographic—including Sunnis, Druze, and Shi’ites—identified with the “resistance” against the “occupation.”
However, to prevent the emergence of a new political frontier, regional power blocs proved instrumental in rendering systemic antagonisms along class lines, or those aimed against the occupation, invisible by constructing a “We” strictly along sectarian lines. The ability of regional hegemons to redraw the lines between friend and enemy is an expression of their sovereign power—their hegemony. It is a prime example of drawing the distinction and then institutionalizing it through a new political arrangement: the post-1990 Taif Agreement order. Here, again, Schmitt is useful: it is not just the construction of an antagonism, but its intensification to the point at which the “them” becomes an existential enemy.
But hegemony is always a temporary stabilization, by virtue of the fact that identity is inherently contingent. In Lebanon, cross-sectarian protests exploded against both the culture of sectarianism and the political order sustaining it. The protests that emerged after the murder of George Floyd were another example of a real antagonism forcing itself into visibility, erupting from beneath the institutionalized politics that, until then, had managed the conflict. Those protests, along with Occupy Wall Street, point not only to the contingency of the construction of political identities, but also to the capacity of those on the margins—outside of establishment politics—to redraw those frontiers by forcing, not asking, certain antagonisms to be made visible.
But those same protests also exposed the different mechanisms of repression: In the cases of Lebanon and the United States, the centrist liberals and progressives did the same thing: suppressing and rendering invisible the real conflict. This is done through a two-pronged strategy. First, deny that the antagonism exists. Second, reroute the antagonism elsewhere.
In Lebanon, for example, the demand, “kullun ya’ni kullun,” designated the entire sectarian-oligarch class, including the banking sector. However, four centrist, moderate forces came to blunt that antagonism. First, the US-backed Civil Society and NGO sector (e.g., organizations such as Kulluna Irada) shifted the object of hostility from the oligarchs to a problem of “corruption,” mismanagement, and “transparency.”
Similarly, during and after the George Floyd protests, progressives attempted to co-opt the movement through what Idris Robinson calls a “strategy of denial”—downplaying the militancy of the events and taming them, neutralizing the movement’s radical demands by reducing them to piecemeal reforms, so that things change just a little in order that they do not change at all. The demand for systemic abolition became a corporate DEI initiative, a symbolic street mural, a marginal adjustment to police funding.
In both instances, notice that there is a shift from systemic grievances to non-systemic, reformist patchwork. From the radical project of creating a new “we” and a common “outside” to a fracturing of the “we” and rerouting any hostility toward that outside—the racist militarized state, or the parasitic oligarchs.
The protests ultimately demonstrated how liberals and progressives act as the very immune system of the State. When a body is threatened by a foreign element, the immune system does not amputate the threat. It deploys antibodies to swarm, break down, and neutralize the threat. It restores homeostasis. The open enemy radicalizes the struggle, to our benefit. But the friendly enemy metabolizes it—and so the most urgent front is the one inside the coalition.