Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Do it to her and her.

Carl Schmitt, that highly intelligent but nasty old Nazi, had some interestingly nasty thoughts on the importance of making a distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” Though I doubt whether any Tory politicians know much about Schmitt’s thought, one saw (and sees) his playbook in action in the Brexit disaster, both before and after Britain’s leaving the EU, when not only virulent Brexiters with no formal political power but the British government as well deliberately sought to cast the EU as an enemy who sought Britain’s destruction.

Hitler & Goebbels were very good at creating enemies, both within Germany (Jews, Roma, homosexuals) and without it. The more recent collapse of Yugoslavia showed how readily the idea of ‘friend’ versus ‘enemy’ becomes salient – it is not merely tribal, it runs through the whole of humanity. I don’t think one should blame only tribes.

And cynical politicians are happy to use it. Trump, for one; De Santis, for another, Johnson, Erdogan, Orban, and of course Putin, among many. The world these people want is that described in Auden’s ‘In Memory of William Butler Yeats’:

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.