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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and today I'm

talking to William Davis, who teaches politics at Goldsmith, and whose most recent book is

Nervous States, How Feeling Took Over the World. He's a regular contributor to the LRB, and he has a piece

in the current issue about the new political polarisation, and how it's come about that we have a

politics that reduces to a base distinction between friend and enemyisation, and how it's come about that we have a politics that reduces

to a base distinction between friend and enemy, whether distinction itself is what counts,

not whatever fuels or justifies it. Hello, Will, thank you for joining me. Hello. And the idea of a

politics that reduces to a friend, enemy distinction is associated, as you say, with the Nazi

philosopher and jurist, Carl Schmidt. You begin your piece with say, with the Nazi philosopher and jurist Carl Schmidt.

You begin your piece of Schmidt, and the idea he developed in the late 1920s that public

engagement with power should be limited to expressing consent or disapproval simply by calling out.

Public opinion, he thought, is the modern type of acclamation. And that's a very shriveled form of democracy,

but it sometimes seems as if it's the form of democracy that we currently have. So the question,

I suppose, is how is it that Schmidt's model has come to pass? So that's how have we got here?

Well, I think, I mean, Schmidt was also a leading critic of parliamentary liberal democracy and of the

failures of the Weimar Republic that he was in many ways reacting against in the late 1920s.

And I think that that passage of Schmidt's writing that I talk about in the piece, and which is the inspiration

for the piece, in that he also talks about how a people cannot be represented. It is a critique

of the idea that a demos, a people, can be represented by parliamentarians, by political parties, by people gathered together in a parliament

acting as we now understand in a liberal democracy as professional politicians. And Schmidt was saying

...