Carl Schmitt and American Conservatism- Is it really a relationship?

Carl Schmitt and the MAGA movement have been noted by scholars such as Mohamed (2018), Scheuerman (2019), Trump (2023), and Adams (2024) as conceiving an intellectual relationship. This is founded upon the dual notion of Schmittian exceptionalism and enmity as deriving the force for American conservative politics. Although most of the literature on Schmitt is centred upon the exceptional powers of the Bush Administration and their War on Terror, as well as continental European authoritarianism, such as Orbanism in Hungary, there is a growing literature on the MAGA movement and Carl Schmitt's influence. My paper challenges the existing literature by scaffolding a case that MAGAism is not only an intellectually divergent movement, but that Trumpism cannot represent Schmittian political thought. Instead of representing a unified, homogenous country, Trump’s political movement rests upon non-violent enmity, excessive Presidentialism, and anti-constitutionalism, which dissects the political body of the US into heterogeneous strains. Far from being a united form of regime, as perhaps the Bush administration attempted during the war on terror, Trumpism emerges as a different beast. The paper achieves this claim by engaging in a close reading of primary texts such as Constitutional Theory, Theory of the Partisan, Dictatorship, and The Tyranny of Values. The paper, by utilising close reading, emphasises Schmitt’s paradoxical relationship with enmity by simultaneously recognising its necessity to define political community, but also restricting its effects beyond borders, and homogeneity as constructed via defined unity, which can be imagined by a constitution. Schmitt’s definition of democracy, not as one of the ballot, remains controversial, but his belief that monarchy had fundamentally ended with the enlightenment highlights why MAGAism as a ‘Schmittian movement’ is once again off-key. The paper uses the secondary literature on Schmitt and MAGAism to construct a new framework which locates the intellectual energy in that movement as distinctive from a genuine Schmittian interpretation of politics. Instead of Schmitt, we should look to the intellectual ‘new right’ of American politics, rooted in its own traditions, marking out the MAGA movement as somewhat distinctive from continental European conservative traditions. In attempting this project, the paper contributes to the understanding of Schmitt in different contexts, allows a fresh analysis of the MAGA movement, and builds a scaffold for future work to establish a distinctive approach to conservative movements across continents. Therefore, the paper can make a genuine impact in the literatures of ideology, Schmittian studies, and authoritarian studies.