As we lurch uncertainly and with diminished confidence into America’s semiquincentennial, we would do well to reflect on the reasons our constitutional system seems rickety, our democratic norms attenuated, public trust in institutions shattered, and faith in the American dream and exceptionalism at ebb-tide. Two hundred and fifty years is no small achievement for a republic, but most of us would like to see it last at least a little longer. Current criticisms of the state of the nation result from disparate answers to this question: are the problems we are facing features of the system or an imported virus that has corrupted it? If the latter, from whence and when did that occur?
In some ways, however, that question obscures the nature of our constitutional framework, one that emerged out of intense debate and overcame serious resistance. Rereading the constitutional debates reminds us that no perfect instrument was ever crafted by imperfect hands and that critics of the Constitution had legitimate concerns, many of which now seem prescient. History, not simply tinged but driven by irony, has a way of undoing the best of designs. We have become the empire Alexander Hamilton longed for, and like all empires, we are brought nearer to the dust but no closer to wisdom.
It is difficult to determine which part of the Constitution generated the most debate, but certainly those disagreements over a standing army hold a special place. Sarah Burns’s essay gives us an overview of the history of congressional and executive wrangling over control of that army, yet such wrangling can only occur once that entity already exists. The overall structure of her narrative is pretty straightforward: as the military gets bigger, the ambitions for it grow larger and the restraining actions of Congress shrink, resulting in an increasingly imperial president in charge of an increasingly imperial military. Just as the anti-federalists feared, for they knew America could be a republic or an empire, but it could not be both.
If a gaffe is mistakenly speaking the truth aloud, then Madeleine Albright committed a classic and revealing one when she wondered what the point was of having a powerful military if you weren’t going to use it. The anti-federalists understood and worried about this temptation and worried that, all too often, giving control of that military to the president would be like giving a chainsaw to a child: he might be able to fell a tree, but more likely would cut off a limb.
Burns’s story is about congressional abdication of not only its war-making power but also its oversight authority. I have no objections to that argument, and I think any clear-eyed observer of American politics realizes that the ascendancy of executive over legislative authority is as serious a “threat to our democracy” as any dreamed up in the fevered imaginations of letter writers to The New York Times.
Which might not be an enormous problem were it not for the head-rush-inducing fact that the executive presides over “the world’s most powerful military” both in size and strength. One need not be a Freudian to see at least part of what’s at work here. An increasingly swollen military necessarily results in a tumescent presidency. While it is true, as Burns writes, that “voices in both branches wanted continental dominance, and they won out over those whose preference was for a small republic,” her accompanying observation is equally true that “the large standing military caused the most damage to the powers of the legislative branch.“ We would do well to remember the root causes of the imbalance of power.
In contemporary America, one complains about the size and status of the military to one’s own peril. We are constantly asked to defer to the militarization of our daily lives, from flyovers at ball games to military salutes at public concerts to allowing military personnel to board planes before us—throughout even our daily lives, we are slowly bent at the knee. We now find ourselves in a world where to criticize the military is to criticize America itself, and thus it goes with empires. We would do well to revisit the resolution of the argument that set us on this path.
Standing armies corrupted leadership but also the morals of the community.
Hamilton’s arguments in Federalist #24–29 all engage anti-federalist concerns over a standing army. The anti-federalists contended that standing armies necessarily threatened liberty, not only in the sense that their power could be applied directly to citizens but also in the two-fold problem of provisioning the army and the likelihood of succumbing to the temptation to use it for offensive rather than defensive purposes. Brutus identified this connection between executive power and a standing army:
The liberties of the people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in the usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that any army will subvert the forms of government, under whose authority, they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of the leader.
Burns identifies the Spanish-American War as a turning point in the balance between congressional and presidential control of the military, and indeed it was, but perhaps more importantly, it marked a turning point in the projection and use of American military might. As Walter McDougall has argued, the Spanish-American War marked the transition from our “Old Testament” period, whereby we were to be an example to other nations, to a “New Testament” nation that went out into all the world with a messianic sense of purpose. Burns misses this messianism in her assessment of presidents from Wilson forward, especially the second Bush, but it’s a central feature of foreign and thus military policy. She does recognize the added danger that accompanies “a victor’s sense of righteousness,” but here too misses the proleptic application of that sense in Wilson.
Nor does she, in my judgment, make enough of the desire to become a great nation. It’s in her essay, but not as a driving force, one already clearly identifiable in Hamilton’s Federalist essays. Like a young man trying to eclipse his father, Hamilton believed America could only rise to its level of greatness if it overcame and overwhelmed Great Britain. Only with a strong military could America take its place on the world stage and become a consequential nation and clip the wings of European power and pretension. Hamilton realized that Congress would be neither flexible nor fast enough to employ that military properly. What was needed was a strong chieftain, clearly modeled on Washington, who could command. J. G. A. Pocock wrote of Hamilton that his “known desire to build up the republic’s permanent military strength, and the widespread suspicion that he hoped to head that strength himself, were all that was needed to confirm his critics in their inherited belief that rule by a strong executive, wielding influence and supported by a monied interest, led logically to rule, at once corruptive and dictatorial, by a standing army.”
Standing armies corrupted leadership but also the morals of the community. J. Glenn Gray, in his essential The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, commented on how the base crudeness of military life, particularly when in battle, had a way of bleeding over into civilian life. The proliferation of “F-bombs” finds its provenance in the military but has now become a feature of American public life. A powerful military attenuates the fundamental principle of constitutionalism and also republican virtue: self-restraint. America has become, as Saint Augustine might have said, dominated by lust, either by libertine self-definition or by dominating others. Gray identified this trait as well: the tendency of military power to narrow the temporal horizon and to weaken the checks on will and appetite within that horizon. Jonathan Shay, in his work, related how soldiers found themselves doing things they never thought they were capable of doing, and they take this regrettable and hard-won knowledge with them back into public and private life. War may be a means to glory, but it debases us in the process.
The anti-federalists defined a good society as a peaceable one. They were not pacifists, but they understood that standing armies invited conflict. They understood the subtexts involved in Hamilton’s occasionally esoteric musings and that he saw European powers not simply as rivals but as a mimetic rivalry, and this positioning would ultimately disrupt a peaceful public life and a satisfying private one. As Brutus wrote:
The European governments are almost all of them framed, and administered with a view to arms, and war, as that in which their chief glory consists; they mistake the end of government—it was designed to save mens [sic] lives, not to destroy them. We ought to furnish the world with an example of a great people, who in their civil institutions hold chiefly in view, the attainment of virtue, and happiness among ourselves. Let the monarchs, in Europe, share among them the glory of depopulating countries, and butchering thousands of their innocent citizens, to revenge private quarrels, or to punish an insult offered to a wife, a mistress, or a favorite: I envy them not the honor, and I pray heaven this country may never be ambitious of it.
Alas, we have become ambitious about it. Burns’s essay is one of declension, but, read a certain way, also one of inevitability. The standing army is a central feature of the constitutional system, and the rise of the military-industrial complex necessarily weakens Congress, for it operates under the authority of the executive. Furthermore, voters would become beholden in various ways to the military-industrial complex, thus forcing their elected representatives to yield even more power to the executive.
How might we have avoided such inevitability? Brutus offered a simple solution: require a two-thirds supermajority for all bills concerning peacetime military build-ups. Hamilton had argued that the standing army had to be large enough to cover every possible contingency; Brutus believed such a capacious standard would necessarily bankrupt society financially and morally.
“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” Madison observed. Even so. Burns notes in her essay, that “despite mountains of evidence proving the need for a more assertive Congress, presidents continue to make the same kind of mistakes in military engagements, large and small.” If people keep cutting wood to the wrong length, perhaps it’s time to take away their saws.