Trump Essentials (7): The Army of the Republic

Lateral Moves Against The Cycle of Doom

The conventional wisdom by American public writers on partisan division, if you go back to about 2000 or so, has run something like this:

1. The American people as a whole are not divided, and even the politicians aren’t as much as they seem.

2. Never fear, George W. Bush will respect the closeness of the election and move his policy back towards the center.

3. At last! We can all be united by 9/11 and be patriotically loyal to the wars that we must now wage.

4. Barack Obama shows that America is not red or blue, but purple, and also that the demographics are shifting against extremism of all kinds. The center reigns supreme!

5. America is a purple country but Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers gerrymandered its elections into sharp partisan division, partly because leftist extremism scared them so much. Let’s find a way for the center to triumph!

6. Trump cannot get the nomination win the election govern as an extremist, because Americans are not extremists on the whole.

7. Ok, Americans are actually divided, but it’s misinformation or something like that. But stop it with your silly talk about civil war: that will never happen.

8. Whoa, shit, they tried to storm the Capitol building in order to block certification of the vote. Um, well, it wasn’t that many people and the institutions still won out. Yay us!

9. 2024: progressive identity politics caused all this somehow. But vote against Trump, because actually he might genuinely overthrow the Constitution and other bad things. But civil war? Can’t happen. Really! Look at the map!

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It must be nice to be so continuously wrong and yet still be welcome on the editorial pages, the Sunday talk shows, and so on. Though that point clarifies that for many analysts, it’s not about being right: it’s about the reproduction of a particular ideological version of common sense.

The term “civil war” has a very circumscribed meaning within that ideology. For tribunes of the mainstream, the only referent they really grasp in America is the Civil War of the 19th Century, a cleanly geographic secession that was precipitated by the defense of slavery.

Armed civil conflicts of other kinds, whether it’s a break-away ethnonationalist region in a small corner of an existing nation-state or substantial bands of insurgents operating relatively unimpeded in terrain that the nation-state can’t successfully project countering force into, aren’t seen in the conventional view as the kind of “civil war” that the United States might be facing.

That conventional perspective should alarm anyone who gives those common global realities a moment’s thought in the context of the United States. The United States is already uncomfortably close to certain kinds of regional devolutions of political authority, to what I think of as warlordism. It’s not just states that are poised to flat-out refuse federal laws and rules if the wrong person is the chief executive, either—which might cut both ways after tomorrow’s election. Dotted all across the country there are sheriffs and other law enforcement officials who very nearly hold all practical political power within their jurisdictions. It would take only a slight push in some cases for them to declare that rather than just assume it.

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Whether there is more than just disorder or protest but something that shades into jurisdictions small and large refusing the sovereignty of the federal government will rest in large measure on what the U.S. military does in the aftermath.

There is a reason that the lifelong Republicans who have raised their voices most loudly against Trump are military officers. They are the ones most steeped in a deep culture of ostensible deference to civilian control over the military. In practice, that control has only gone so far in the post-1945 era. The military is so large, so expensive, so central to the functioning political economy of the United States both in terms of how bases and facilities interact with the communities around them and in terms of the way the global system works, that there are commands that no civilian leader would likely dare to give, or at least until now. An order to withdraw from NATO and leave bases in Europe and South Korea, for example, which are thinkable under Trump. An order to lob missiles into northern Mexico, ostensibly to hit organized criminal organizations. The use of a thermonuclear weapon, which Trump repeatedly asked questions about in hist first term. Or, most worrisomely, a broad deployment of active military and National Guard units within the United States to aid in deporting undocumented people and to strike against political dissent.

It isn’t just that they don’t want to be asked to do something that they would have strenuously opposed in every way possible (leaks to the press, legal opinions, slow-walking the order into a fact-finding process, public resignation, and so on). I think U.S. military officers are aware that they’re sitting on top of organizations with enormous material capacity whose rank-and-file don’t necessarily share the top brass’ commitments, whether on respecting civilian rule or vis-a-vis resisting various orders that might come from Trump.

They’re aware that if push really does come to shove, they might not be able to reliably command their own forces in either of the Presidencies to come. If anything changed in Trump’s first term, it was his own awareness of the armed forces and thus the awareness of the people around him. Trump came in with a fairly standard kind of Republican idolatry towards soldiers and generals, leavened by his cruelty and contempt for enemies like John McCain that extended to their military service. He left having lost that feeling—but the use of Interior’s paramilitary forces, the sympathy of cops, the ways he was able to elevate Secret Service that he liked to something like a Praetorian Guard, have alerted him and his inner circle to the possibility of calling on all the uniformed security personnel of the United States, including the rank-and-file, to act on his behalf whether or not he formally wins the election. He loves the military when it serves as a tool for his own ego, but he might learn to love it more as a tool for achieving unchallenged power.

Trump heads into tomorrow with that possibility in his tactical toolkit, along with a knowledge that if the Supreme Court has a chance to make any decision, they might well decide in his favor even if Harris wins the election by a substantial margin. The problem with the military scenario is that it might be one of the biggest dangers that survives as a threat even if Trump himself leaves the stage for good in the wake of a defeat.

The post-conscription American military contrasts against neoliberal America in some interesting ways. It has an older style of meritocracy to it, and is one of the few American institutions to understand ‘diversity’ less as a cultural affect and more as a structural project that applies to all levels of the organization. It is one of the few institutions that offers an aspirational path that interrupts the school-to-prison pipeline, that extrudes into communities left behind by deindustrialization and globalization. That was one thing in the interval between the invasion of Grenada and 9/11 and something else after that. In the interval between, despite the exception of occasional disasters like the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon or the deployment of troops in Somalia, the risks of military service were relatively small against the professionalization it provided to volunteers. After 9/11, the risks grew considerably along with the life-interrupting potential to be recalled to duty for multiple deployments.

The officer corps may or may not be fully cognizant that the risks in that case were not just to the soldiers but to the role of the military in American life. It’s one thing to have an all-volunteer military composed of soldiers who gain skills, receive benefits, and have the option of progressing up the ranks and another to have one that is being deployed regularly in conflicts that the rest of the country barely even acknowledge. You can thank the troops as much as you like at sports games and in boarding aircraft, but it doesn’t mean much if you’re forgetting them the rest of the time—and if what you’re asking them to do is pointless brutality that has no real strategic purpose, that costs the rest of the nation nothing.

As a result, the all-volunteer military now has embedded grievances that the top officers are largely spared by the fact of their promotion, and those grievances spill over into police and other forms of security work that recruit soldiers as they leave the service. If authority in some parts of the United States is already on the knife’s edge of defying federal command, then the cutting instrument might be ex-military—or even serving military—who break away from the ethos that their commanders still cleave to.

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This scenario is a bad one to contemplate. Just as bad is thinking that somehow the officer corps will arrive to the rescue against any attempt by Trumpists to lure the rank-and-file into rebellion. It’s not implausible that they would try to block that, and it’s not implausible that they might succeed. But that is a coup by some other name, and nation-states that need their militaries to keep their democracies from falling into autocracy are locked into a path from which few return.

None of this bears thinking about right now in the sense that how it shakes out is out of our hands. All any of us can do is vote and hope.

It is the out-of-our-hands part, however, that should draw our attention in the days to come if we make it out of this election with a President rather than a dictator. That we have arrived at a point where the question of which way the military might break—or the possibility that it might break in half—is no longer a Seven Days in May counterfactual but a real concern is partly because the United States has an all-volunteer military while also being a highly active global hegemon prone to use military resources, both personnel and armaments, as a response to situations both real and imagined.

That acts as a highly professionalizing but also isolating pressure on that military. What the democratic society of the United States needs, should it make it through this dark passage, is something like universal conscription for national service, no exceptions for anything, bone spurs included. Not for specifically military service, but everybody should have to spend two years or so working on the common business of this nation, alongside fellow citizens, in a service organized by and directed by the democratic government of this nation. That is what a conscripted army did for the mid-20th Century US, if largely only for white men: it threw all of them together, across class boundaries, across regions, as citizens.

A citizen army is a different kind of thing when it comes to worrying about whether it could be use to enforce the will of a dictator—or break in half to oppose a democratically elected leader.

Historically, postwar liberals were too concerned with controlling projects of acculturation and knowledge-making, of “civic education”, as a means for making what they imagined to be a safe national subject and keeping it loyal, rather in the mold of Benedict Anderson’s descriptions of nationalism. Progressives took over a lot of that project after knocking down the older liberal version of it. I’d rather think about real, material shared experiences through national service as the way to give people a sense of living together in a nation, of sweeping away unreal and hallucinated differences—and perhaps helping them to discover, as Paul Fussell observed, the real social differences that shape their lives for good and ill.

It may sound like an insane thing to be considering a day before an election of such import, but that is precisely what we have to start thinking about so that if we win—a prospect I’m feeling relatively optimistic about tonight—we really win. Not only must we anticipate the real dangers that may arise between winning and the inauguration, but about how to escape a cycle of facing doom and destruction every four years, which is plainly a road to eventual defeat. The only way to escape is to do some dramatically new kinds of things with our nation, our politics, our policies, our ways of being locked in the same polity together with people we didn’t originally choose to be with. We’re not going to get to know one another over tea and cookies, but elbow to elbow in trenches and disaster relief and social aid, maybe we can.