  Schmitt thinks that this argument will hold even where an initiative to amend the constitution requires a supermajority. Political decision-taking on the basis of the simple majority rule is legitimate only if citizens share a political identity, in which case they will also agree on a set of constitutional fundamentals. Where they don’t, the identity of ruler and all ruled no longer obtains, and majority rule will consequently become a mere license for the oppression of those who happen to be in the minority. Such oppression, Schmitt argues, does not become any more legitimate where a super-majoritarian requirement is raised and met. That a numerical majority is relatively large and a numerical minority is relatively small does not entail, once there is no longer a shared political identity, that we are any closer to an identity between the ruler and all the ruled than in the case of a simple majority (LL 39–58). Schmitt concludes that it would be absurd to take the view that the formal procedures of amendment provided by a democratic constitution can legitimately be used to overturn its constitutional fundamentals (LL 85–94). Before 1933, Schmitt employed this argument to oppose a Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung) in legal form (Bendersky 1983, 107–91). It should also be noted that his claim that there must be limits to constitutional amendment in a democratic constitution based on the principle of popular sovereignty, and that these limits legitimate the notion of a ‘militant democracy’ that is willing to curb individual rights to defend itself, has been very influential in postwar constitutional thought, in Germany and elsewhere (see Ehmke 1953, 33–53; Fox and Nolte 1995, 18–20; Conrad 1999; Colon-Rios 2012, 126–51). However, Schmitt’s constitutional theory did not amount to an unqualified defence of liberal democracy. While Schmitt denies the possibility of changing the fundamental nature of an established constitution from within, and decries the dangers of the tyranny of a mere numerical majority, he nevertheless affirms the possibility of fundamental constitutional change through sovereign dictatorship, and he makes it clear that the German people, in a renewed exercise of their constituent power, might legitimately choose a non-liberal and non-parliamentarian form of democracy (CT 75–7). The exclusionary nature of the friend-enemy distinction that is to be enforced through extra-legal sovereign dictatorship, to provide a basis for the normal functioning of the constitutional order, throws further doubt on the democratic nature of Schmitt’s constitutional theory (see Kraft–Fuchs 1930; Vinx 2013a).