Defining The Enemy: A Schmittian Note On The J6 Incident

The nascent Biden administration has made countering the threat of what it labels “domestic terrorism” a critical priority for the American National Security Apparatus. This sort of terrorism, defined loosely by the National Security Council (NSC) as coercive, affective, or intimidative criminality dangerous to human life conducted within the United States, includes actors from across the political spectrum. The NSC specifically identifies “racial and ethnic extremists”, as well as “anti-government” and “anti-authority” extremists as key components of the overall domestic terror threat, but even amidst these specifications notes the complex and challenging nature of the perceived threat overall (United States, 8-9, 16). Such an admission is only natural, as terrorism remains an essentially contested concept, of which the boundaries and definitions are murky at best.  

Despite the admitted challenges and complexities of domestic terror itself, the Biden administration has had little challenge labeling its hallmark example of the new perceived threat, that being the events of January 6th, 2021, at the United States Capitol. The Capitol incident, which from here on will be referred to as “J6”, has accumulated a myriad of labels in the months following it, including “protest”, “riot”, “siege”, “attack” and even “insurrection”. However, the label of importance for our analytical purposes here is that of “domestic terrorism”. This labeling of J6 as a domestic terrorist event is ubiquitous within the administration, with bodies and officials such as the NSC, and FBI Director Christopher Wray, both referring to it as such: a terrorist attack on American soil perpetrated by so-called “Domestic Violent Extremists”, or DVE.  

While it must be acknowledged that there is an existing debate over the veracity of such labeling, it is not within the scope or purpose of this examination to address the arguments on either side. We concern ourselves here not with whether the label of domestic terror is conferred upon J6 justly or appropriately, but instead with a theoretical and analytical examination of what light such a labeling sheds on discussions of political violence at large. With this point made, it is therefore apt to call this piece a note rather than an argument or decisive polemic, and here our title reaches its relevance as we turn to the subject of the note itself, the realist political thinker Carl Schmitt. 

Writing throughout the twentieth century, Schmitt’s most seminal texts and their contained ideas, be they the friend/enemy distinction of Concept of the Political or the state of exception from Political Theology, might be said to concern themselves with the limits of political action. Keeping this limit focus in mind, our attention turns to Schmitt’s 1962 essay Theory of the Partisan. Schmittian partisan theory will now underpin analysis of aforementioned J6 labeling, as both topics similarly concern the conceptual limits of “terrorism” itself. 

As opposed to regular military combatants, Schmitt defines the so-called partisan by four qualities: irregularity, mobility, intense political engagement, and telluric character. It is based on these qualities that I will now attempt to label J6 participators as Partisans in the Schmittian mould. Firstly, while there were participants in the J6 events possessing service and even government backgrounds, the group at large cannot be described as a regular fighting force in the traditional sense. Secondly, J6 participants were incredibly mobile, moving quickly without any real structure of “attack” (if such a term might be used), and further technologically “mobile” in their use of contemporary digital communications during the incident.  

The third category speaks for itself, as J6 participants were motivated by an intense political fervor that drove them to protest perceived fraudulence of the 2020 American Presidential Elections. The fourth category, the telluric character of the Schmittian partisan, might at first seem the hardest to connect to J6. However, when we consider Schmitt’s own admission that it is partially the notion of a national/homeland defense that justifies his historical labeling of groups such as Maoist revolutionaries as partisans, a J6 connection is revealed. If J6 participants saw themselves as fighting for their patriotic homeland and President against a fundamentally foreign globalist usurpation government, then to this degree they might be labeled as Schmittian partisans. 

With this examination in mind, it might seem more apt prima facie to label the participants in J6 as partisans in the Schmittian mould, than the traditional designation of “terrorist” in the popular consciousness. However, the discussion does not end here. Scholarly analysis of Schmitt has often yielded the conclusion that his partisan is strikingly similar to twenty-first century “terrorists” in many meaningful cases, with both definable as fighters violently acting against the state’s monopoly of the political. Therefore, it might be argued that to muse over labeling J6 participants as either terrorist or partisan is to miss the point. By this logic, so long as the concerned actors are recognized by the state as assaultive threats to its legitimacy and power, labels become a mere convenience of discussion.  

Schmitt ends his essay by stating that “The theory of the partisan leads into the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy…”, and this insight keenly reveals at last the true importance of labels to the J6 incident. As the Biden Administration defines DVE as key enemies of the American security apparatus, the ability to name the enemy, be it partisan, terrorist, or something else, is the real enemy question that Schmitt states results from in his theory of the partisan. A Schmittian analysis of J6 labeling, then, ultimately highlights fundamental truths of political violence, and the state’s relationship to it.  

As Schmitt opens his Political Theology, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Similarly, as the FBI and the NSC seek to decide the limits between terror, riot, and protest, they likewise signal the state’s final monopoly on the political, on the division between friend and enemy that underlies political violence itself. 

Image courtesy of Elvert Barnes via Wikimedia, © 2021, some rights reserved.