Huntington Won't Save Us
This isn't a Problem of Civil-Military Relations
Federalized Alabama National Guard overseeing a march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965, Dan Budnik
In the wake of President Trump’s planned expansion of the National Guard, Federal Agents, and potentially active duty military to target Democratic cities, there has been particular ire directed towards traditional American notions of civil-military relations.
While I would certainly be the first to say that I’ve long had a distaste for Huntingtonian notions of the military’s role in our political community—I would submit that our current crisis falls outside of the scope of civil-military relations.
It is first and foremost important to point out that what President Trump is doing is legal. It is—in my opinion—an illegitimate and authoritarian use of Federal power designed to cow political opponents through the threat of force, but it is very much legal and has substantial precedent in American history.
From Selma to Little Rock, American Presidents used both the active military and federalized National Guard to enforce Federal power and break segregation. George H. W. Bush used the active military in LA in response to violence. The National Guard was encamped in D.C. for months following January 6th.
There are many more instances I could cite here, but it suffices to make my point that this use of the National Guard and active military is—legally speaking—largely at the discretion of the President. His only real constraint is the Posse Comitatus Act.
The only substantive civil-military questions that revolve around this are questions of whether military officers ought to quit in the face of being given lawful but unethical orders. They, of course, have a duty to argue against and attempt to convince policymakers to abandon deeply misguided and immoral actions. When those orders are illegal, they have no obligation to follow them. How the military navigates those questions all fall into the realm of civil-military.
Anything beyond that? You are arguing for the military taking illegal actions to stop civilian orders. There is, of course, a gradient between shirking orders and using force to compel a change in civilian political decision-making, but you’re left with a series of illegal actions from the military when we talk about the current crisis in America.
While every servicemember is—at the end of the day—only accountable to their own conscience, this is a problem of civilian political leadership and what they’re attempting to achieve through the use of force and implied threats of violence.
The military is a political organ of the State1, and the actions of military members should always be understood through a lens of politics. This is often used to (correctly) remind those in the military that they need to understand the violence they are engaged in is connected with political outcomes—it should not be forgotten that the military is a political tool of civilian leadership.
The GOP has a clear view in mind of what they are doing, and they have pursued their campaign of domestic crackdowns with a single-minded view towards cowing any opposition. Whether it be Democratic cities, law firms, immigrants, elite colleges, corporations, or members of the Intelligence Community deemed disloyal—the GOP has systematically sought to bludgeon any perceived defiance into submission.
It’s unclear to me how much Carl Schmitt GOP policymakers have ever read, but they are certainly acting as though they’ve at least absorbed the Wikipedia version of his political philosophy. They’ve relatively deftly used the President’s emergency legal authorities to deploy troops to American cities against anyone perceived as being an enemy.
This is not a problem of civil-military relations. The Pentagon, not wanting to do counterinsurgency in Iraq despite being instructed to do so, is a civil-military problem. The military being purged of members of domestic opposition parties is a civil-military problem. The average public statement from Douglas MacArthur was a civil-military problem.
This is a problem of a party that views the political competition in the United States as a zero-sum fight in which the State is used as a blunt instrument to accomplish its ends. The President has declared his state of exception, and it is all transparently based on pretexts and deeply dangerous. It is also—at this point—all within his legal purview to do.
The problem is a civilian political ambition to instrumentalize the military to an authoritarian end.
Political leaders and civil society are the ones who need to respond. These actions need to be fought with protests in the streets, with actual oppositional media, and with the court system. But as long as this is all legal? The Pentagon is not coming to the rescue.
Some German guy and his wife wrote about this, I think. Something about politics and violence.
Actually, according to Wikipedia, Nazi Germany had a degree of idealization of agricultural societies, which are believed to be purer and "folkish" than degenerate urban areas. See the parallels?
The kind of American "low-density fantasy" is actually a pretty interesting phenomenon, I think it started with the 70s when the first smear campaign against urban areas started.
Also, another case study would be Gaulist France with the mass use of militant groups and political destabilization, also veterans radicalized by failed foreign counterinsurgencies.
There is also a conservative resentment that generally lurks beneath the surface, eager to tell those concerned, "Why can't we tell the military to shut up when *we* want something done, for once? It was the liberals who told our greatest general to stop short of victory in Korea. To water down victory again in Vietnam to some nonsensical bean-counting exercise from RAND." To say nothing of desegregation, though fewer will publicly oppose that now of course.
For better or worse it also seems the AVF force is one less likely to take a stand in a situation like this. That's what professionalism is about. But it's also the trade-off you get with a more professional force, which shares conservatives' instinct of liberal democracy as one of a state of emergency (balancing against commune-ism in the 19th century, fighting against fascism and Communism in the 20th century, etc.) Which is why they have few qualms with the war-derived powers Trump is now using.
For liberals, liberal democracy is instead more about rule of law. Which is a homefront thing, and thus easier to focus on if you've never really had to interact much with the emergency/violent part -- as is the case with many Democratic leaders, all now of the AVF world and most having thus never served. Janowitz haunts Huntington even from the grave.
Wrote a bit on the MacArthur part of this recently: https://open.substack.com/pub/damnthetorpedoes/p/from-little-boy-to-the-yalu-modern?r=5vggye&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false