Schmittian

That China has gotten rid of the virus, which President Donald Trump called “the invisible enemy,” while the United States remains hobbled by it, is portrayed among Chinese statists as a triumph for the Schmittian worldview.

Us and them: the Schmittian fantasy underpinning the binary myth of a carceral state like Safetown, “everybody keeping watch on everybody else”.

For example, the notorious Eurasianist Alexander Dugin – a key influence on Putin and an intellectual architect of the attack on Ukraine – has been a strong partisan of Schmittian ideas.

Trump may be a Schmittian by instinct and aspiration, but he’s a fair-weather Schmittian only. A true authoritarian, confronted by limits on his power, might have ripped through them in service of establishing his authority.