  If all those who live together as legally recognized citizens of a constituted democratic state happen to distinguish between friend and enemy in exactly the same way, the equal participation of all citizens in the political process and the electoral appointment of officials would indeed be a requirement of democratic political justice. It would be possible, moreover, to identify the outcomes of the political process with the will of the people, and to consider them democratically legitimate, even if some citizens find themselves in a temporary minority. But the reason why it has become possible to identify the outcomes of democratic procedure with the will of the people is not to be sought in inherent virtues of democratic procedure itself. Rather, the identification is possible only in virtue of the prior identity of all citizens as members of a group constituted by a shared friend-enemy distinction (CPD 10–14; LL 27–28). If, contrary to our initial assumption, those who live together as legally recognized citizens of a constituted democratic state do not share a political identity in Schmitt’s sense, the identity of the rulers with all the ruled will no longer obtain, and the constituted democratic state will no longer be truly democratic. The rule of the majority will degenerate into an illegitimate form of indirect rule of one social faction over another (HV 73–91; LL 17–36; L 65–77). Sovereign dictatorship, then, is still necessary to create the substantive equality that grounds the legitimate operation of constituted, rule-governed democratic politics.