Expert in a Dying Field

The Breaking of the Bipartisan Military Consensus

Portland 2020, Nathan Howard, Getty

The relationship between the military and the broader American body politic has historically been quite fraught—but it has weathered the storm over the centuries based on a bipartisan consensus that the military was not a tool to be used against domestic political enemies.

Throughout our most dire moments: The Civil War, Reconstruction, World War II, the 60s—the consensus held.

We have used the National Guard to break up strikes. To enforce segregation. We used the Army in the Civil War to enforce order in seditious areas along the border with the Confederacy, and we used the Army to break apart the Klan during Reconstruction.

The military has been used for quite a few purposes in our domestic life, and despite how contentious its use has been at times, Presidents have generally been judicious in using the institution against American citizens.

We have not—until now—used the military as a conscious tool to inflict pain on domestic enemies.

The President, the Secretary of Defense, and DHS have changed that in the span of the past few months.

The President has made clear that he sees the United States Military as a tool to be used against anyone he deems an enemy. He has made explicit in speeches in front of service members that he expects the military to be willing to deploy to American cities to coerce Democrats who do not fall in line with his political desires.

His Secretary of Defense has done little more than sign memoranda to put those desires into effect. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has done little more than exhibit a striking dereliction of duty in lending his legitimacy to these efforts. Moreover, to date, no senior officers charged with executing these orders have resigned in protest.

It signals—at the highest levels at least—a willingness to enact partisan policies that would have shocked Americans even 10 years ago.

It will also break the trust and bipartisan consensus around a non-partisan professional military for the foreseeable future.

To have an effective military, one must trust that the State institution responsible for the execution of violence is not a domestic threat. If Democratic political leaders fear that the military is willing to engage in (debatably legal) partisan coercion without any institutional pushback, they will inevitably grow wary of granting the military an uncontested professional sphere to operate within.

To use a term from Security Studies—Democrats will likely engage in a form of coup-proofing when they return to power.

Coup-proofing refers to a process in which political regimes with either a justified or unjustified suspicion of their military enact parallel structures and create cadres of political loyalists to ensure that their military engages in the behaviors the regime wants it to.

The phenomenon of coup-proofing and creating a politically aligned military force often emerges in States that have a history (or present/future need) of using the military as a domestic tool of security rather than as a deterrence against foreign powers.

You can think of Saddam in Iraq or Assad in Syria as archetypes of this kind of military structure.¹

In some ways, the Republican Party is already engaged in this effort with its firings of various officers and officials.

The President has also engaged in thinly veiled political loyalty tests by publicly signaling his intent to use military force against rivals. In making the issue public and socializing the idea of using violence against opponents, he is working towards creating a military force that self-selects towards aligning with his partisan political prerogatives.

He also has parallel structures in the form of MAGA influencers to enforce his ideological vision onto the military in the form of people like Laura Loomer who have played an outside role in drawing up lists of individuals that she deems unloyal to the cause.

DHS also plays a role in being a separate security institution that answers directly to the President and enacts his will outside of other centers of power, like the FBI or DOJ, that have an institutional culture that would likely offer more resistance to conducting raids on apartments in Chicago.

This, in turn, will mean that Democrats will come into power with an inherent distrust of the military and American security institutions. Taken from the Democratic point of view—if the President has taken a conscious effort to shape the force around partisan political loyalties, then those institutions are untrustworthy.

You will—if you take seriously that the President has managed at some level to enact his goals—have to engage in similar actions to prevent the military from acting as a center of power against your political prerogatives.

If they’re willing to march around your own city without so much as raising a fuss, what reason do you have to trust that they’ll follow your directives? If you want to enact reforms and attempt to structurally change the legal structure that allowed all of this to occur, how do you know that the personnel in place will accept those changes?

It is easy to look at this and say that this is all just a matter of civilian supremacy in military affairs.

But that’s a question of a non-partisan military that isn’t being used against domestic opponents. That’s a question for a DHS that isn’t hiding behind masks and breaching apartment doors. That’s a question you could ask if you knew the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was attempting to protect the professional neutrality of the force.

That’s a question you can ask if the American model of civil-military relations that we all believed in for 249 years still existed.

How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field?

1. Before you say anything, I’m not implying the United States is about to become a Ba’athist autocracy. I just think they’re good examples of illustrating the phenomenon.