President Obama began and ended his recent State of the Union address with a metaphor that has gotten a good deal of positive reaction. He praised the unit cohesion, the unity of purpose, and the common dedication to the mission that characterize the American military when it is functioning at its best. He raised this culture of the military as a metaphor for how the American political system should and could work. Many commentators, and I imagine many American people, seem to have found this metaphor appealing. I beg to differ. I think it is a totally inapt metaphor for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it glorifies the military. Readers of this blog know that, although I respect the men and women of the American military and, I think, can recognize the virtues of the military life, virtues of discipline, loyalty, and valor, I am committed to the value of nonviolence in all aspects of human life. I have written elsewhere in this blog about what I perceive to be the dangers of the current American tendency to idealize and even idolize the military. President Obama’s use of some military virtues as a metaphor for how the American political system in general and Congress in particular should and could operate is just another example of our elevation of the status of the military in American life. I do object to it on those grounds.
Yet I have what I think is a more fundamental and important objection to this metaphor. It is, I am convinced, an inappropriate image of our (nominally at least) democratic political system. Military virtues are what they are because of the extreme circumstances in which military units operate. Under the extreme conditions of the battlefield there is no place and no time for debate, for exchanges of opinions, for bargaining and compromise. The conditions of battle require obedience and discipline. They may on occasion also require individual initiative and spontaneity, but mostly they require unity and discipline. I freely admit that I’m no soldier and never have been one; but I am an historian, and it isn’t hard to imagine how the dangerous and chaotic conditions of warfare require what we all know as the military virtues.
A democracy is an entirely different system. It has different structures and different purposes. When a democratic, representative political system is operating at its best it is precisely a place of competing programs, conflicting ideas, persuasion, and compromise. Some of our political leaders may wish for “party discipline,” where all the members of a particular party fall into line and vote as the leaders tell them to, but that kind of discipline is not actually the democratic ideal. Democratic government calls for debate not unit cohesion, compromise not strict compliance, independence not obedience. In theory at least we elect our representatives to exercise their best independent judgment in deciding on important public issues. Politics are different from the military, and political systems should, indeed must, have different values than military systems.
There have been political systems that operated more like military systems. The one with which I am the most familiar is the political system of the Soviet Union and in particular the structure and functioning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Party’s founder Vladimir I. Lenin created the doctrine of “democratic centralism.” In theory that doctrine allowed for free debate within the Party right up to the point where a decision was made. Then every Party member was required to fall into line and to support the decision, even if that member had argued for a different policy in the period of debate. In practice, of course, the “democratic” part of democratic centralism got lost and only the centralism remained. In practice democratic centralism led directly to the one man dictatorship of Josef Stalin.
Democratic centralism was the political theory that most adopted a military system. In the military debate about strategy and tactics can take place at the highest levels of command and at the point where the civilian political leadership intersects with the highest military command. Once a decision is made, however, the entire military is expected and required to follow the decision and to obey the orders that flow from it. Democratic centralism can work well in a military context. The experience of the Soviet Union proves that it is a disaster in a political context.
It should then be clear that President Obama’s use of the discipline of the military as a metaphor for a better functioning political system is simply inapt. In a democratic system politics is a give and take, an arena of argument and compromise. It is not an arena of strict obedience, and it shouldn’t be. Many of us have strongly, even passionately held political beliefs. Yet if we are committed to democracy as being, despite all of its shortcomings and maddening inefficiency, the human political system that at least has the virtue of being less bad than any other that we know of, we must protect and preserve the political arena as a place of free exchange, of debate, of persuasion, of compromise. President Obama’s metaphor of the military as a model for politics threatens those democratic values. It is an inapt metaphor. Let’s set it aside and work instead to make our political system work the way a democratic political system is supposed to work, not the way a military system is supposed to work.
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