History has its recurring archetypes. Events may have different historical colors, the characters - change, but the structural processes and ideas that move societies show amazing resilience.
When on January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, the great German constitutionalist Carl Schmitt wrote penetratingly:
„It can be said that Hegel died today.“
This is his diagnosis of the collapse of the liberal-rational state, as projected by the Hegelian philosophy of law and politics - a state embodying the supremacy of reason, the universal legal norm and the reconciled social whole.
Today, almost a century later, this metaphor comes to life in a new way and with particular relevance. The Russian aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2022, which in the most gross form violates the fundamental principles of the international legal order, has coincided with the culmination of radical liberal-progressivism in the Western world, brought to hysterical self-denial in the form of woke ideology, identity politics and gender fundamentalism. This seemed to bury the illusion of the rational-universal state of modernity in its Hegelian sense. The brutality of the authoritarian regime in Moscow has paradoxically coincided with the “nuclear“ attack on the essence of free society, organized by the “awakened“ liberal-progressivists in the West. Liberal progressives tried to relativize the nation, the nation-state and the family, to de-church society by replacing the secular principle with aggressive atheism and in general - to destroy the meta-narrative of the modern democratic world, based on the idea of a balance between freedom and the common good. On its ruins to create a world based on the all-encompassing tyranny of minorities and the transformation of the dogmas of liberal progressiveism into imperative social norms.
Hegel taught that the state is the embodiment of the objective spirit – a form,
through which freedom is realized in a community in which the private and the public exist in harmony. The state, according to him, is not just an institutional framework, but an ethical organism that unites individuals in a reasonable order through law. This is a state of moderate bureaucracy, of enlightened constitutionalism, of a balance between institutions – in a word, a state of reason.
In 1933, Schmitt noted the symbolic “death of Hegel“, because it was then that it became clear that no legal formulas and institutional fetishes could sustain statehood when the people were in crisis, when the legitimacy of the elites was shaken, and sovereignty – emptied of content. And if then this was a conclusion to the collapse of the Weimar regime, today this metaphor has a global resonance – the Hegelian state is dying before our eyes on an international scale. On the one hand – the brutal reality of the aggression carried out by Russia against an independent state revealed the total bankruptcy of the international liberal legal order. All political and legal canons – “international law“, “collective security“, “inviolability of borders“, “sovereign equality“ – proved powerless. Organizations like the UN demonstrated their traditional inability to react when a great power rejected the norms. What remained was not law, but the political will and military capability of states to resist or capitulate. Pure political realism was restored, in the spirit of Machiavelli and Hobbes, which Schmitt deciphered and used to show that it is not the legal norm that makes the order, but the political decision.
On the other hand, this same year 2022 turned out to be the peak of socio-cultural degradation in the liberal West, where the decay of the universalist legal model comes not from without, but from within. The universal human rights on which the Western order is supposedly built have been deeply eroded by the fragmented logic of identity politics, which divides societies into minority and privileged groups, each waging a destructive war for a special legal and moral status. Under the influence of radical progressivism - most visibly on American campuses, in corporate culture, and in the supranational bureaucracy of the EU - the notion of human nature, of biological sex, of free speech, of the rule of law has become blurred. Thus was born a new quasi-religious orthodoxy, in which dissent is punished, discussion is forbidden, and law is replaced by a quasi-moralistic tyranny. Hegel's rational ethical order has become a tyranny of the irrational sense of insult and trauma.
Thus, within a single year, the Hegelian state was torn between two catastrophes – geopolitical from the outside and cultural from the inside.
Regardless of political affiliation, it should be recognized that the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his policies are an expression of the profound civilizational reaction against the disastrous decay of the liberal-progressive order that led to the collapse of the Hegelian state. This reaction is focused on the restoration of national sovereignty, the defense of the traditional value system, the strengthening of borders, economic protectionism, and the fight against cultural Marxism in American institutions. In other words, it embodies a much-needed correction of the Western civilizational project. This is a return to the basics of the political, as Schmitt describes it – rejection of the neutralized “liberal genderless state“, in which friend and enemy are blurred, and the sovereign is paralyzed by institutional formalism.
In this context, Trump is not a destroyer, but a restorer. His politics are not the antithesis of the legal order composed by liberal-progressivism, but its necessary sovereign corrective. For without a political solution in the emergency that the collapse of the liberal myth confronts us with, there is no legal order, but only a fetish of the past. The conservative restoration that Donald Trump and his politics embody suggests a return to the balance between the universal and the national, between human rights and political order, between freedom and order, between institutions and identity.
That is why today, when we try to understand the political-legal topography of our time, Carl Schmitt once again proves to be a prophet. Not as an apologist for dictatorship, but as an analyst who delineates the boundaries of liberal ideology, as a voice that reminds us that politics is not just a discussion, but ultimately a political decision about who "we" are and who "they" are, and that order precedes law, just as being precedes morality.
Hegel is dead because his idealized project of a rational, conflict-free, universalist state was crucified between Kremlin missiles and California campuses.
He must be resurrected. And at the same time - adapted to the realities of the 21st century and the conservative reaction of our era.
A titanic task that at first glance seems unattainable, due to the destruction of the expert hierarchy in society, “knowers-ignorants”, amplified by social networks (according to Habermas). But this is the strategic depth that stands behind the apparent chaos that is purposefully produced by the new American administration. The beginning is called disruption by design, i.e. interruption by design. The risk is enormous, but the success would be historic - a new basis for a sustainable and democratic political and legal order, based on facts and realities, not illusions, and guaranteeing the balance between individual freedom and the common good.