"Civil Society" Was Supposed To Be the Buffer Between Government and Individuals - Granite Grok

“Civil Society” Was Supposed To Be the Buffer Between Government and Individuals

Carl Schmitt

What happens when PROGRESSIVE Socialist Government refuses to “stay in its own lane” and destroys and absorbs its functions after decades of effort? We become its target.

Emphasis mine:

One seldom finds a clear definition of the political. . . The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state—as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains—religion, culture, education, the economy—then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics.

As a polemical concept against such neutralizations and depoliticalizations of important domains appears the total state, which potentially embraces every domain. This results in the identity of state and society. In such a state, therefore, everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the state it is no longer possible to assert for it a specifically political characteristic. . . The state’s form thus becomes increasingly questionable and its radius of power ever broader. – Carl Schmitt (The Concept of the Political)

Steven Hayward at Powerline adds this:

…his description of the absorption of more and more social (by which we’d understand as largely private) domains sounds an awful lot like progressive government in the U.S. today.

Like I said, our government has all but eliminated Civil Society where we set our own norms and traditions. What we have seen, however, that that Power hungry lawmakers and bureacrats have been predisposed to continue their march well beyond anything wildly foreseen by our Founders and have co-opted almost everything and making everything political.

EVERYTHING. Go ahead, name me one thing that is no longer political or into which Government has stayed out of.

I dare you even to try.

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