131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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question of identification, and specifically the question of who has control over the means
with which the will of the people is to be constructed: military and political force,
propaganda, control of public opinion through the press, party organizations, assemblies,
popular education, and schools. In particular, only political power, which should come from
the people's will, can form the people's will in the first place.
One can say today, faced with the expansion of democratic thought, that an identity with the
will of the people has become so common a premise that it has ceased to be politically
interesting, and that the conflict only concerns the means of identification. It would be
foolish to deny a generally accepted agreement here. Not only because today there are no
kings who have the courage to declare openly that if necessary they would remain on the
throne against the will of the people, but also because every significant political power can
hope by some means to achieve this identification one day. For that reason none has an
interest in denying a democratic identity. On the contrary, all are more interested in knowing
how to confirm it.
The rule of the Bolshevist government in Soviet Russia certainly counts as a notable example
of disregard for democratic principles. Nevertheless, its theoretical argument remains within
the democratic current (with exceptions that will be mentioned in chapter 4) and only uses
modern criticism and modern experiences of the misuse of political democracy. What counts
as democracy in Western European states today is for them only the trickery of capital's
economic dominance over press and parties, that is, the lie of a falsely educated popular will.
Communism would be the first true democracy. Apart from its economic foundations, this is,
in its structure, the old Jacobin argument. From the opposite side, a royalist publicist can
express his contempt for democracy with the tenet: Prevailing public opinion today is so
stupid that with the correct approach it could be brought to renounce its own power. This
means that it could be brought "to demand an act of common sense from something that
lacks sense—but isn't it
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