In addition, constitutional liberals can turn the tables on Schmitt by reversing his assignment of strength and weakness. For Schmitt, as for other antiliberals, pluralistic democracy is weak and dictatorship is strong. But one need only contrast West Germany with East Germany during the Cold War, or South Korea and North Korea today, to contest this image of democratic fragility and authoritarian stability. The United States and United Kingdom survived the abortive Nazi empire and the Soviet Union in part because their looser, more consensual systems, with greater opportunities for self-correction by means of dissent and debate, made it easier for them to avoid or recover from strategic blunders.

At this moment in history, there is no significant intellectual challenge to Western liberalism comparable to fascism or Communism, notwithstanding the mixes of liberalism and nonliberalism in China and Russia and the millenarian violence of the preliberal Salafist jihadist movement. But the public philosophy of liberal, constitutional democracy has always left many people, even in its historic homelands, unsatisfied and in search of an alternative. Outside of fundamentalist religious sects, that alternative in generations ahead is likely to be found in some version of modern, secular, antiliberal thought. The greatest challenge to liberalism in the future may not come from outside of the liberal West but rather from within, in the form of reasoned argument by erudite and articulate intellectuals. Carl Schmitt was a model of the sophisticated modern antiliberal thinker. There will be more to come. 

Michael Lind is a contributing editor at The National Interest, cofounder of the New America Foundation and an ASU New America Future of War fellow.

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