Is the ‘Friend-Enemy Distinction’ Right-Wing Critical Race Theory?

In a recent article, Toby Young criticised the outburst of Right-wing cancel culture that followed Charlie Kirk’s assassination, arguing that “the Right must take the moral high ground when it comes to free speech”. This is a sentiment with which I strongly concur.

Among the arguments Toby addressed was one you often hear from MAGA Republicans: that they’re engaged in an ‘existential struggle’ against America’s ‘enemies’ and must therefore use every means available to secure victory, including limits on free speech. He pointed out, correctly in my view, that you can’t justify limits on free speech “in the name of saving America” because such limits are anti-American.

What I’d like to focus on here is the argument Toby was addressing. It is based on a concept from Carl Schmitt that has become popular on the Right in recent years, namely the friend-enemy distinction. The idea, as I noted in a recent article of my own, is that relying on principles is dangerously naïve and as the Left has long since abandoned them, the Right must do the same. Why would ‘we’ give the Left free speech when ‘they’ won’t do the same for ‘us’?

My article criticised the friend-enemy distinction, arguing in favour of institutional neutrality and free expression. In response, some thoughtful commentators suggested that “there is no such thing as a neutral institution”, that institutional neutrality is “just the framework your friends enforce when they’re in charge”, and that it is “modernity’s attempt to eliminate politics entirely in favour of process”.

Indeed, Schmitt himself criticised neutral institutions as inherently unstable and short-lived. To quote one cogent exposition of his work, “Schmitt judged liberal neutrality a fraud”. (Though he took a more moderate position in his later work.)

What seems noteworthy to me is how similar all this sounds to an idea the Right was busy fighting just a few years ago: Critical Race Theory. Let me quote from the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, the former of whom is considered “one of the founders” of the discipline:

Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law … CRT’s critique of merit takes a number of forms, all designed to show that merit is far from the neutral principle that its supporters imagine it to be … Civil rights activists reply that the marketplace is far from neutral.

Basically, CRT holds that so-called neutral institutions merely serve the interests of the dominant race, which happens to be whites.

As an amusing exercise, I asked three different AIs (Grok, ChatGPT and DeepSeek) whether the statement “there is no such thing as a neutral institution” is more likely to come from a Left-wing person or a Right-wing person, and all three stated unequivocally that it is more likely to come from a Left-wing person.

Now, just because Right-wing thinkers and Left-wing thinkers have both criticised something doesn’t mean they are therefore the same. Hitler and Stalin both criticised liberalism but they had radically different ideologies.

However, in this case, the logic of the critique is almost identical. Proponents of the friend-enemy distinction reject neutral institutions because they believe those institutions will be taken over by their political enemies. Critical Race Theorists reject neutral institutions because they believe those institutions will be taken over by the dominant race.

Some proponents of the friend-enemy distinction would presumably acknowledge the similarity between their arguments and those of Critical Race Theorists. Indeed, they might argue that it proves their point: Critical Race Theory is an example of a Left-wing movement that aims to take over institutions and use them to advance a Left-wing agenda. (And Critical Race Theorists might make the very same argument in reverse.)

My response would be: why not just argue that institutions should be neutral? Yes, perfectly neutral institutions will never be attainable, but that doesn’t mean that reasonably neutral institutions aren’t worth striving for. As I pointed out in my article, non-neutral institutions are what you find in backward countries outside the West. The rule of law, by contrast, is central to the Western tradition.