Knocking on the Barracks Door

"Do not trust the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you or I were going to be hanged."

-Oliver Cromwell, 1654

There’s an interesting point/counterpoint article over at Citybelt, my favorite Jersey City Left Leaning Blog. Please follow this link and check it out, it’s a good read. Also, their blog is infinitely slicker than mine, and I am having difficulty suppressing feelings of insane jealous rage over their obviously superior html skills.

I was considering talking about the defeat of Joe Lieberman, and where I see it leading the country, but it seems as if Mssrs. Weill-Greenberg and Whiten have beat me to the punch. Never mind, it gives me a good point of departure to critique what they have to say. The article’s center point is actually a local politician named Bill Pascrell. I won’t delve into the details, as they have already done a fine job of it, but I did notice a sort of general tone to the whole thing which is salient to those of us who care about American politics. In asking how much compromise one can stand, or if one should compromise at all, the deeper question really is as follows:

How much strategic or long-term “good” should we sacrifice for a tactical political victory?

Cavaliers vs. Roundheads

It’s an important question, because the fall of every republic has been preceded by a party or parties answering the question incorrectly. The Senate of Rome did not intend to vote itself into irrelevance, nor did the Long Parliament initially set down with the aim of cutting off the king’s head. Republics rarely collapse out of the blue; they usually bleed out first, from a thousand wounds. And often this happens not because an evil or overweening faction alone slowly strangles the commonwealth, but because the faction that supports the Right (as in rightousness) kills the body politic by the methods it uses to wrest it from the control of evil councilors. It is this which I fear may be happening in the United States now. The Republican Cavaliers may be insufferably arrogant, elitist, and rapacious, but beware lest Democratic Roundheads prove to be a cure worse than the disease.

The first warning sign is the use of the apocalyptic rhetoric of absolute good and evil, and the subjugation of all other ends to the immediate one of seizing power, by any means necessary.

Concomitant to this is the refusal to judge anyone’s actions other than by whether they promote or impede a particular factional agenda, and to refuse to recognize that people may honestly come to different conclusions from the same set of facts for reasons other than simple stupidity or evil.

Ms. W-G spoke of the fact that the administration and even representatives of their own party had ignored or disagreed with anti-war protesters as meaning that they had been “disenfranchised.” This is a powerful word- disenfranchisement. It means a total and permanent exclusion from the political process. Historically in the United States most political factions have lost some battles, won some battles, and been able to revisit politically previous defeats and victories. There is an ebb in flow in American politics (as in all stable democracies) that means that no defeats are total and no victories permanent- and everyone has a stake in remaining within the system because there is a reasonable chance of their interests being accommodated on some level. There are rarely autos-da-fe in American politics, and this is the true meaning of the secularism of our democracy. This language of a temporary defeat being turned into disenfranchisement is ominous. It is ominous because it sounds very much like absolutism, theocracy, and even a bit like privilege...

I have long been familiar with the right behaving this way, but the long years of exile seem to be radicalizing the American left to the same degree of hyper-orthodoxy amongst its strident elite.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t see in Ms. Weill-Greenberg the ferocity of a Cromwell or a Pym; her willingness to disagree with another colleague (even within, broadly, her own faction) indicates a salutary flexibility of mind. But I do see her looking down a road that has a dangerous end, and I fear that she does not see where it goes; it is the path of praetorianism- the substitution of force for reason and for law.

A New Model Army for America?

She makes the statement, in reference to military forces serving in Iraq;

“Following orders is nothing to be applauded. I support and admire the courageous soldiers and veterans in Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace who come home and speak out against the war, who tell Americans the daily atrocities in Iraq or who refuse to fight.”

I admit to being hypersensitive to this sort of discourse, possibly because of my history of academic research in civil-military relations (I wrote my thesis on the sources of military intervention in politics, and heartily thank the three people who read it, while I also wish for their full and speedy recovery). But I must express to Ms. W-G, and to others who seem to cast aspersions on the military for fighting an unjust war, that in fact following orders is to be applauded. For what is the alternative?

It is often the case that something that is a permanent part of the political or actual landscape that is truly remarkable may be taken for commonplace, or even fails to be recognized, simply because it has always been there. When was the last time (if you live in New York) that you gawked at the Empire State Building, for example? Though a miracle of human engineering, I never look at it, because it is part of the landscape. Tourists from Des Moines, however, stand amazed, because they have nothing like it back home. It’s new for them, not something to take for granted as we do. It’s also instructive to remember that even the grandest of buildings can collapse in an instant.

The obedience of the United States Military is just such an odd thing. Any visitor from Turkey, or Venezuela, or most other countries (including European ones) can tell you that if they are familiar with their history. Since the last military intervention in the core of the English speaking world (that is to say, the US, Canada, and the UK) took place in the 1650s, we look upon the obedience of the military as something so natural it is not even to be thought about. In fact, it is quite unnatural. As Samuel Huntington stated in his classic, The Soldier and the State, the question is not why the military coups, but why they ever don’t coup.

The fact of the matter is that the military holds ultimate potential power in any society. Particularly in an advanced industrial society such as ours. You may be able to fight off the King’s soldiers when they are armed with muskets, but if someone in an Abrams Tank decides to knock down your house and kill you, as a civilian, there is nothing that you can do about it.

It is not the fear of an armed citizenry that prevents the military from taking power, despite what the NRA would have you believe. Nor are there other countervailing sources of coercive force that the government can avail itself of to keep the soldiers in their barracks- I don’t think the LAPD would have much luck taking on the 3^rd Infantry Division. What keeps the soldiers in their barracks and out of politics is a long habit of military subservience to civilian authority. Such a long habit, in fact, that it is so deeply integrated within military society as to be, not only a key value, but a core part of the American military identity.

Lest it appear that I am singling out Ms. W-G too much, let me take issue with a statement made by the other author in the counterpoint, Mr. Whiten.

“Blindly following orders is not the choice of the soldiers per se, but rather the choice of the institution of the military. Individuals enlisting in the military are trained to operate as a unit and not as people. Dehumanization is part of the process. While this stimulation of groupthink on a mass scale is certainly something to be deplored, to fault individual soldiers is pointing the finger in the wrong direction, much as it would be somewhat incongruous to blame television news anchors for the propagation of infotainment. These people are working within the confines of institutions. Without changing the institution, it is fruitless to blame the individuals, for I believe they are victims as well. Whether or not we should be a militaristic society is another question entirely.”

I had at one point completely swallowed the idea (often held by the left, but also the right) that militaries were naturally conservative to the point of rightist extremism, reactionary, and joyously oriented towards violence, who were mostly itching to bend a noble and disinterested body politic to their will. This is, in fact, not the case. The military is a socially complex organism that, while it membership is universally patriotic and nationalistic (in the American understanding of that term) is hardly universally conservative politically, and is definitely not militaristic. Keep in mind that the folks who staff the military are the ones who actually pay the blood tax for decisions mad e in Washington- it’s a lot easier for folks who have none of their own family at risk and got themselves seven or so deferrals from their own potential military service to think of war as a glorious game that they can play (and do play) from a safe remove. It’s quite another to go into combat yourself, to watch your children and your colleagues die, often horribly, and to order those who have placed themselves into your hands, to destruction. Keep in mind that the military is an insular community with strong intra-group bonds forged by ritual and levels of stress that civilians can hardly imagine. Members of a squad become, in ways, closer than family. And then the leaders of these tight knit groups are ordered to send them, and usually themselves, to their deaths.

I don’t know a single person in the military who loves war, beyond the greenest grunt who has never seen it. They may love machismo, and drinking beer, and swaggering, and behaving like good old boys (which, I suspect, is what intellectuals like myself find truly scandalous about them), but rarely are they psychopathic lovers of violence- they are not so much dehumanized as Mr. Whiten suggests, but rather de-atomized by being inserted into a group whose claims are intensely stronger than those of simple self interest; claims strong enough to literally lead one to sacrifice their life for the safety of the group. I am not certain that this s to be deplored. Mr. Whiten is certainly right to say that we ought not to be a militaristic society, but I think the militarism he is thinking of is found more outside the military than within it.

This post is getting a bit long winded (believe me, I could talk for hours on this subject) so let me cut to the chase.

While reading Huntington, Finer, and others on the subject of civil-military relations, I came across a concept that truly revolutionized the way I thought about the military coup.

The idea is this, “the willingness of the military to leave the barracks and enter the political arena is directly related to the willingness of those in the political arena to knock on the doors of the barracks and invite them to come out.”

It seems that, in almost every coup in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s (and elsewhere and elsewhen) military coups had almost universally been preceded by sections of the political establishment asking for a coup. Now no one today is doing this- but by asking for the soldier to substitute their own judgment to that of the body politic, we are asking them to leave the barracks and enter the factional struggle. Once they enter, its hard to get them out. And though they may agree with you today, what about tomorrow? For when your comity of interests end, you will find that they fight not with ballots and parliamentary procedure, but with guns. Guns bigger than we have. So it’s best to let them continue to obey, even evil councils and bad orders, because Long Parliaments which unleash New Model Armies to cleanse the land of evil have a nasty habit of turning into Rump Parliaments.