Since then, the tables have been turned. Schmitt is regularly brought up by critics of the second Trump administration. They charge President Donald Trump with declaring emergencies to grab ever more power, referencing Schmitt’s notion that a state of exception reveals who is truly sovereign. Schmitt further held that the true sovereign could claim unlimited power—even declare a dictatorship—to defeat a political community’s enemies. No less relevant in populist times: Schmitt taught that a dictator like Benito Mussolini, if he enjoyed sufficient public support, could claim to embody democracy while pluralistic liberal institutions, such as parliaments, trying to work out compromises threatened to undermine it.

When I started writing on Carl Schmitt in the 1990s, the reaction in U.S. academia was often that you could treat a Nazi jurist with extraordinary capacities as a historical figure but not as a theorist to be invoked in present debates. Little could I have imagined that a quarter century later, a soon-to-be U.S. vice president would do precisely that: Last summer, J.D. Vance charged liberals with having learned from Schmitt how to hide political warfare behind a legal facade.

When I started writing on Carl Schmitt in the 1990s, the reaction in U.S. academia was often that you could treat a Nazi jurist with extraordinary capacities as a historical figure but not as a theorist to be invoked in present debates. Little could I have imagined that a quarter century later, a soon-to-be U.S. vice president would do precisely that: Last summer, J.D.