The Last Institution
“America is all one prairie, swept by a universal tornado.” So wrote George Santayana at the end of World War I. By a universal tornado, Santayana meant the creeds born of complete consensus that at times formed among Americans. In his day, they were the gospel of work and the belief in progress. Like tornadoes, once such creeds touched down, all felt their force. Like tornadoes, such creeds left in their wake an unmistakable path, and the peril of conformity. And like tornadoes, Santayana saw such creeds as a particularly American phenomenon.
It is the American prairie that permits tornados to form, and the prairie’s flatness is part of what gives tornados their power. As Santayana saw it, a similar flatness distinguished American society from that of England, though the two shared a liberal heritage. The English social landscape was made varied by long-standing institutions, among them a time-honored class system. These institutions, like so many forests and hills, buffered the creedal winds which sometimes blow over a country. America, in turn, had precious few institutions that might give one shelter in a storm. Its social landscape was one great howling plain.
That was a century ago. Since then, the American prairie that Santayana surveyed has somehow flattened further. American institutions are rarer. Where they are found, they are much weakened. Church membership has collapsed. Unions are a shadow of their old selves. Universities have never seemed so reedy. America’s once dense lattice of fraternal lodges and mutual aid societies has given way to a roll of parasocial advocacy groups that permit us via a donate button the illusion of civic life. And Americans have felt the wind. They register in poll after poll their fast-falling confidence in all the above.
If such polls are to be taken as a measure of institutions’ strength, though, at least one appears to endure. It is the American military. The military has retained a distinct form in an ever more formless society. From that form it derives a self-confidence otherwise scarce among the worried institutions that once stood proudly alongside it. Such confidence and form alike attract to the military many Americans who desire both for themselves but cannot find either elsewhere. And as reverence for their relatives and ancestors who served in uniform suggest, even many Americans who do not join the military take shelter in the idea of it.
How did this happen? How is it that the American military now looks to be its country’s last robust institution? Liberalism’s many critics answer, directly but more often indirectly, by saying that the military has outlasted other American institutions precisely because the military takes exception to liberalism. It has survived as an institution, the thought goes, only by standing apart from the liberal tradition which otherwise eviscerates (according to this school of thought) the bonds tying man to man and so makes America that howling plain. In this way, liberalism’s critics offer the American military up as sort of a negative image of liberalism, and suggest that to the extent to which it survives, it reminds us of viable alternatives to the liberal ideal itself.
But a closer study of the country’s history suggests that it is emphatically not so. The American military does not stand apart from the liberal tradition enshrined in the Constitution which it serves. Rather, the American military is one of the country’s great living monuments to its founding tradition. One cannot understand either the American military or the stubborn endurance of the greater American experiment, an endurance which critics of liberalism such as Santayana and his many successors have long struggled to explain, without an appreciation for the fellowship of the two.
Before going further, we should mark the meaning of liberalism as it is used here. The word is here not used in the partisan sense now common, as a stand-in for the politics of say, the Great Society. Nor is it used in the way liberal internationalists used it, as the platform of a foreign policy which sought to meet the threat of Soviet communism and what followed. By liberalism I am referring to that political tradition which came primarily from England and Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which seeks to check the abuse of political power by jealously guarding the sanctity and the liberty and the equality of the individual. It is the philosophy which animated the American founders to revolt against abusive power. It is the philosophy expressed in their declarations and captured in the Constitution that they framed.
Once reminded of its liberal origins, we see that if America is a prairie, it is a prairie by design. When the country’s founders declared their independence, they intended independence not only from the Crown, but also from the involuntary ties that made men subservient to others. They revolted, in the words of Gordon Wood, against “the entire conception of society as a hierarchy of graded ranks and degrees.” In the conduct of that revolution, the founders took hatchets to certain deep-rooted institutions that gave shape to the social terrain of England: the titled nobility, established religion, and standing armies.
The felling of these institutions was a program derived from the writings of John Locke. A full decade before the founders wrote the abolition of hereditary privilege into the first article of the Constitution, states were already abolishing it of their own accord. Likewise, well before the ratification of the First Amendment, most states had disestablished religion, including, by 1786, a holdout Commonwealth of Virginia. And to preempt the replication of the oppressive redcoats, the Constitution denied the new legislature the power to maintain any standing army for longer than two years at a time.
These measures had, with the glaring exception of chattel slavery, their intended leveling effect. When, fifty years later, Alexis de Tocqueville came to America, he wrote that “the last vestiges of hereditary rank and distinction have been destroyed,” and “no familial or corporate influence can be discerned.” This state, startling to an aristocrat like himself, Tocqueville called the “equality of conditions.” It was not pure socioeconomic equality — even then, America had its wealthy citizens — but a social equality that, at least among Anglo-Americans, left each man substantially free.
Such equality of conditions was not an unqualified good. It could easily isolate man from his fellow man and so leave him vulnerable to centralized power. In a passage that has haunted students of American society since, Tocqueville observed that the democracy he encountered in the young United States threatened to destroy man’s sense of belonging to his family, or to any greater organic whole. “Again and again,” Tocqueville wrote of democracy “it leads him back to himself and threatens ultimately to imprison him altogether in the loneliness of his own heart.”
Yet there was good news, too, to be reported. The Americans Tocqueville met had not withdrawn into themselves. Rather, they had replaced the involuntary associations of the old world with willingly entered, free institutions of the new. In doing so, Tocqueville declared that “Americans have used liberty to combat the individualism born of equality, and they have defeated it.” From the American victory over individualism, Tocqueville derived a maxim of political science:
Of all the laws that govern human societies, one seems more precise and clear than all the rest. If men are to remain civilized, or to become so, they must develop and perfect the art of associating to the same degree that equality of conditions increases among them.
A century later Santayana, another foreign-born and discerning observer of American society from a Catholic and tradition-bound country, noted that Americans’ art of association had survived the intervening years. Even in 1920 Santayana could still say of the American that “public spirit sustains him . . . The community prospers; comfort and science, good manners and generous feelings are diffused among the people.” All this, he marveled, Americans managed “without the aid of that foresight and cunning direction” that many ascribed to the illiberal states then forming on his home continent.
Who would say the same of America today? For halfway through the twentieth century, that American art of association began to die. Virtually all of the “free institutions” celebrated by Tocqueville suffered. By the turn of this century Robert Putnam famously announced that Americans were bowling alone. Theda Skocpol called it “the Tocqueville Problem.” Most measures of civic engagement have not rebounded since. Americans have significantly shed religious affiliations (though religious revival is now in the air) detached from their local community, isolated in smaller households, reduced their civic commitments, and spent less time with friends. The social scientific literature on these developments is vast. Observers have taken to calling ours the “the anti-social century.”
There is less consensus as to what killed association in America. Some have claimed, as long ago as Walter Lippmann, that mass media destroyed the local images of reality that Americans shared in Tocqueville’s time, and thereby alienated them from their homes. Others, such as Christopher Lasch, diagnosed the postwar American as a narcissist who cannot admit obligations “to someone or some cause or tradition outside himself.” Some say that atheism separated Americans from God and so denied them a common good. Still others contend that the automobile separated Americans from each other and so denied them a common place.
Among these many theories of America’s atomization, perhaps the one gaining the most purchase these days indicts liberalism itself. Rather than look for a wrong turn in the twentieth century, this theory casts the American project as wrong-footed from the start. In this telling, the founders’ error was to launch a Lockean revolution at all, for Locke’s idea of liberty amounts to undisciplined autonomy rather than virtuous self-mastery. In due time such a categorical premium on individual autonomy corrodes all ties that bind men together. Under such conditions, it is argued, no institutions, which definitionally exert force over the individual, can be expected to survive.
But if atomization was the revolution’s inevitable effect, one might wonder how the art of association in America persisted for so long. What can explain the civil society which Tocqueville and Santayana lauded? The answer that the anti-liberal theory gives is that such public spiritedness endured only because the Lockean revolution had not yet completed its work. To sustain voluntary association all those years, Americans drew on a preliberal stock of fellowship that liberalism could not replenish, and that stock ran out. When it did, sometime in the twentieth century, the bottom fell out of American society.
This critique of liberalism has a long history and takes many forms. Some of it is constructive, some less so. Of late, it was put most forcefully by Patrick Deneen in his book Why Liberalism Failed, and so is associated with the American right. But one finds it in other forms also on the American left. Progressives bemoan American atomization in terms often derived from the work of Karl Polanyi and Herbert Marcuse, as an economic process. As they see it, liberalism finds man “submerged in his social relationships” (Polanyi’s words) and then disembeds him to create an untrammeled and self-regulating market.
These arguments are so many variations on a theme: liberalism, be it to create a sovereign capitalism or out of some mistaken idea of liberty’s meaning, suborns all institutions to the individual and so destroys them. Leave it to its work and soon society is smoothed over. Only the individual and a centralized power remain — precisely the conditions that worried Tocqueville. In this dystopian anti-liberal vision, there is no other institution, any stable set of norms and ties that exert power over people, left to intercede on atomized man’s behalf. Many invoke the present institutional crisis as this theory’s irrefutable proof.
There are several problems with this collectivist analysis, and I wish to focus on one of them. It is that there is an unexpected and glaring exception to this theory of complete institutional crisis. In an atomized America, the military may be the last institution standing. It has kept its form and its authority, and it exerts great power not just abroad, but also on the individuals within it. One can of course see that power in outward markings such as the uniforms that servicemembers wear or the way they must keep their hair. But the institution’s integrity and durability are reflected in deeper things. More importantly, one can discern the military’s power in the interior transformations that those individuals who pass through it undergo. That is to say, the military reliably and permanently changes Americans while honoring the individual and bonding him to his fellows. That alone makes it rare.
On the surface, the American military’s institutional durability is not hard to explain, even if you grant that America’s liberalism is fatally anti-institutional. The two are easily reconciled. Locke said that security is a precondition to the full exercise of liberty. Polanyi’s interpreters say that his self-regulating market must be “encased” in order to survive. Either way, liberal society must draw some line around its individualism, it must exempt some institutions from the individualist imperative, if any institution is to do the work of securing or encasing whatever must be secured or encased. The most salient of those restraining and bonding institutions is the military.
In at least one way, it is obvious that the military is exceptional. It can do what otherwise is irredeemably foul, and that is kill. Its ability to do so, however, is circumscribed by war, which most societies, rightly or wrongly, treat as a separate ethical state. If all the exceptions that a liberal society granted to its military began and ended with each war, then the military as an institution would hardly endure. Instead it would come and go episodically, like weather, rather than establish itself as what the founders apprehensively called “a standing army,” or a permanent feature of the non-militaristic American landscape.
Nor are such exceptions to the liberal ethos limited to war. Society has granted them to the military even in times of peace. Nowhere is that exception inscribed more clearly than in American law. The American military enjoys unique legal license to trespass on the autonomy of its servicemembers. In 1953, in Burns v. Wilson, the Supreme Court acknowledged that “the rights of men in the armed forces must perforce be conditioned to meet certain overriding demands of discipline and duty.” The military, it ruled in that same year in Orloff v. Willoughby, was “governed by a separate discipline from that of the civilian” and so ought not be judged in liberalism’s exigent light.
Such deference survived even the anti-institutional blowback of the Vietnam years. In 1974, in the consequential case of Parker v. Levy, the Court extended a qualified deference to the military regulation on matters of speech. The military’s necessarily illiberal character, the majority opinion read, “may render permissible within the military that which would be constitutionally impermissible outside it.” The Court later clarified what was “within” and what was “outside” of the military institution by ruling that court martials had jurisdiction over servicemembers irrespective of whether their actions bore on military duties. In the intervening years Courts have largely sustained such deference.
Jurists are not alone in granting the military license to deviate from the liberal tradition. Public intellectuals have made similar allowances on social and cultural grounds, carving out in the American imagination an exceptional space for the military to treat the individual in ways otherwise apparently antithetical to the country’s individualist ethos. Perhaps the most direct articulation for such allowances arrived in 1957, just as the corresponding caselaw was emerging from the Supreme Court. It came in the work of a young political scientist named Samuel P. Huntington.
In the public square today, those who know Huntington know him most often for his later writing on civilizational analysis and international affairs. But in the military and the academic field of civil-military relations he is almost exclusively read for his first book, entitled The Soldier and the State. He wrote it to provide Americans with a theory by which they might understand the new peacetime standing army that was garrisoned across the country. (That theory proved illiberal enough to lose Huntington, at least for several years, tenure at Harvard University.)
The Soldier and the State contains much good, but the book runs aground on the question of the military’s character. As Huntington tells it, the demands of war shape man differently than those of peace. Whereas peace and markets reward the individual, war punishes the individual, teaches him that only to the group goes the victory. From war the military man emerges a “conservative realist,” a natural type elsewhere but the odd man out in America. If such a type and its discourse contrast sharply with America’ founding documents, that contrast is not lost on Huntington. He somewhat haughtily lamented that the American military had to serve a flawed Constitution and the liberal tradition contained therein, though he conceded there was plenty to admire in both.
Either way, as Huntington saw it, this mismatch put Americans in a tough spot. They had to either compel their military to adopt their liberal values and thereby risk rendering it ineffective or accept a standing military that did not share the values that they and their founding documents purported to be universal and according to which American society lived. Americans could not escape this dilemma by simply reducing their interwar military to a threadbare operation, as was their traditional approach. The threat of Soviet aggression loomed too large. Nor could Americans ignore the dilemma and return to their televisions, for the recent crisis of Douglas MacArthur’s removal had also proven the problem of civil-military relations was no academic abstraction.
Given these threats, and liberalism’s purported irreconcilability with the military, Huntington figured that the best plan was to cloister the military in its garrison and thereby wall it off, for its own good, from the rest of American society. In this redoubt the professional military could tend to itself until American society gained the conservative realist character that Huntington deemed less threatening to the integrity of the martial ethos, at which point it might be safe to reemerge. If cross-contamination were to occur, Huntington hoped it would be the military that made American society more conservative, and thereby tame the universalizing foreign policy he then saw as rampant. Until then, best to keep the military bottled and apart from the “garish individualism” that obtained in wider society — in his startling words, like “a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.”
But such apparent differences between America’s military and America’s liberal heritage obscure more important affinities between the two. Huntington misses or understates these affinities, as do the contemporary “post-liberal” critics of liberalism. First, rather than produce citizens at odds with the country’s founding liberal tradition, the military has reliably returned to its society men and women of the most Tocquevillian bent. Second, the ethos of the American military has never matched the Prussian ideal that Huntington sketches in his book. Since its establishment at the country’s founding, the American military has differed from its European ancestors, in ways that only make sense if one understands the military as a partner to the American founding rather than a bastard of it.
Consider the sort of citizens that the American military has historically made. They are not illiberal, but they are usually institutionalists. The reason for this is plain. The military, exempt from the occasionally overriding individualist imperative that can, if unchecked, corrode an institution, becomes a complement to the society it serves, an essential vessel for the sustenance of an institutionalist ethos. In moments of national need, the military’s ranks swell with everyday Americans so that it might meet the challenges that await it. Within garrisons and camps and depots those Americans meet an institutional sensibility otherwise scarce. Many learn it well. Then, when the moment of need passes, they are discharged, and they take that ethos — and its natural understanding of community and solidarity — home with them.
One can see this pattern of institutional seeding by military veterans throughout the history of American civil society. The associative compulsion that Tocqueville detected among Americans in the early 1830s was by and large limited to New England’s small towns. In the words of the historian William Carey McWilliams, as the decade wore on and the country expanded under President Jackson, the “local world” was “losing its previous force as a shaper of individual personality.” As “localities became ineffective, the individual was left to his own devices” to contend on the prairie.
Instead, the sorts of self-organized participatory civic groups that communitarians now regard with understandable nostalgia emerged in the wake of the Civil War as a result of that war’s unprecedented military mobilization. In a masterful account of membership in American civic life, Theda Skocpol has charted an explosion of such groups from 1860 to 1899. Many of them were launched just after the war’s end. These groups included the country’s first insurance-oriented fraternal group, as well as the soon-to-be massive Knights of Pythias, the National Grange, and the nationally chartered American Red Cross.
The postwar timing of America’s civic boom was not a coincidence. Many Americans in both the Union and Confederates armies, as well as in the attendant bureaucracies, had gained from their service (in Skocpol’s words) “ideals, network connections, and models of citizen organization that encouraged ambitious association building long after the fighting ceased.” The nature of meritocratic military leadership, particularly in the Union Army’s many volunteer formations, inspired good faith engagement between Americans and in their national project. That faith lasted long after shooting stopped.
Mass mobilization again fortified American civil society during and after the Great War. From the returning doughboys arose the American Legion, perhaps the century’s most effective federated national membership group. So did the American Farm Bureau Federation. Even those groups that predated the war were strengthened by their contact with the military throughout it. For lack of a great federal bureaucracy, groups such as the Red Cross, the Knights of Columbus and the Young Men’s Christian Association supported soldiers and saw their rolls expand a great deal when the war was over.
In these organizations one sees the military’s fingerprints everywhere. Their structures were all clearly borrowed from federal service, if not the garrison itself. Groups had clear hierarchies made up of officer positions. They were federated and numbered in a pyramidal structure much like an army unit. Officers’ duties and transfer of authority were solemnified via ritual. And association life, as Skocpol writes, “invariably stressed that the new officers must conscientiously learn their duties and set aside selfish, individualistic urges in order to redeem the trust placed in them.”
The similarities between army and association life were not merely structural. They were also aesthetic. Groups ranging from the Junior Order of United American Mechanics to the Eagles to the Loyal Order of Moose to the Order of the Sons of Temperance had membership badges that called to mind soldiers’ decorations. Standards and badges very often featured the American flag arrayed as if on a military crest. They marched often in local parades. Their manuals and ritual scripts and oaths were explicitly patriotic, down to regular pledges of allegiance. This was all done with the aim of preparing members, per one handbook that borrowed language directly from battle, “for a wider field of action.” All this was not militarism, it was communalism.
American life was again rejuvenated by a massive transfusion of veterans into society following World War II. These veterans, like their predecessors from World War I, returned home in most cases — but not all — better socialized, more comfortable with responsibility, and better at communicating. They also re-entered society more trusting of their fellow Americans, despite vast differences in background owing to hardship and purpose they had shared throughout the war. (The sensitivity to their needs of American society upon their return is another matter.) They were, in short, fully prepared for active citizenship.
What followed was a golden age of American association. The political scientist Suzanne Mettler has found that virtually every measure of social capital soared after the war, supercharged by the G.I. Bill. Religious affiliation soared by almost fifty percent. Fraternal organizations ballooned. Veterans flocked to professional organizations, labor organizations, parent teacher associations, and Lions Clubs. They gave life to now-canonical American youth groups such as the Little League and the Boy Scouts of America. They joined together across class divides and racial divides. They organized translocally, and in virtually all civic organizations, they quickly acceded to positions of leadership.
This civic renaissance took the form of the Quonset hut. The government had commissioned droves of these expeditionary shelters for its far-flung war and in peace there were plenty to go around. “Vetvilles” comprising endless rows of Quonset huts sprang up on campuses from North Carolina State to Colorado State to St. John’s University on Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn. There were Quonset hut dance halls, Quonset hut furniture stores, Quonset hut churches. A young veteran named Gerald Ford ran his first congressional race from a Quonset hut campaign headquarters. Everywhere the huts’ telltale arc traced veterans’ diffusion, a ready metaphor for the structure that the American military contributed to liberal society, giving rise to something of a Quonset democracy.
There were no doubt economic factors apart from military service at work in the postwar growth of American civil society. But in her work Mettler controls for the socioeconomic characteristics that might have moved Americans to associate with each other, including not only wealth but the degrees and vocational training veterans got after the war. The results suggest that both military service and the use of the G.I. Bill predicted whether one associated with his fellows after the war. In interviews these veterans explained their joining ways by saying that, for having passed through the military and its attendant programs, they felt a sense of duty to their country. An ethos in a man is a fickle thing to measure, but pervasive comments such as these suggest that an institutionalist one formed.
It is not only in its effect on society that the military has proven itself liberal. The American military is also liberal, or republican (for our purposes, these terms are interchangeable), in nature. It has been since its first conception. We know this in part because the Founders and subsequent reformers alike have left records of their intentions to raise a republican army. We also see it in the design that followed from those decisions. The liberal tradition can be read in everything from the division of power over the American military to the source of its officers’ commissions to the doctrine which governs its soldiers in the present day.
One need not read further than the Constitution to discern the American military’s republican character. The founders divided power over the military between a single Executive and a Congress. The former is named as commander-in-chief and so has the many substantial powers implied by that great word, command. But the founders vested in Congress varied and real powers too, not only to declare the wars in which the military might fight, but also to fund or defund that military, to advise on and consent to the appointment of officers in and over that military, and to author the regulations which govern that military. This division, derived explicitly from the liberal writers of Europe, Samuel Huntington grudgingly conceded as the “structural constant.”
American society also commissions its officers in a fundamentally republican way. When the Founders ended noble title in the Constitution’s first article — one of their greatest revolutionary and liberal gestures — they ended with it the traditional manner of picking military officers back in Europe. The work of historians such as William B. Skelton has shown that the American military, however imperfectly, deliberately adopted a new and liberal model. That model empowered the governed via republican legislatures to grant commissions. If at first this model served local patronage networks, those networks at least arose from an equality of conditions, rather than from a title to which one was born. But as decades wore on and the military became professionalized, the patronage systems fell away, and the military increasingly certified the merit of the officers picked by a depersonalized, uniform system.
Even before the Constitution’s ratification, the codes governing the American military reflected the liberal character of the American revolution. George Washington, the first commander-in-chief, was a self-studied adherent of Enlightenment ideas of soldierly conduct. Less noted in popular memory than his Christmas raid on Trenton across the Delaware is the fact that afterwards he directed the humane treatment of the Hessian mercenaries who were captured, a move which surprised some but was in keeping with his broader insistence on a decency towards prisoners and civilians, which the British failed to reciprocate. That insistence imprinted itself even on Washington’s more zealous subordinates. When, for example, Anthony Wayne seized Stony Point after a bloody melee, the redcoats remarked upon the Washingtonian dignity with which Wayne handled those of their number who were taken prisoner. These revolutionaries were sincere.
Such episodes were not mere flukes of revolutionary sentiment. Washington and then Jefferson, under whom the American military professionalized, were both readers of Grotius and Emmerich de Vattel, the two great Enlightenment theorists of law in war. As the military matured, it codified this liberal heritage. Its General Regulations, issued in 1821, led with an epigraph from Vattel and enshrined his ideas in the succeeding pages. And though at first the American military sanctioned the sort of illiberal corporal punishment common in continental militaries, such practices faded from the American military before it faded from others.
During the Civil War, the Union Army adopted a set of rules called the Lieber Code which largely censured torture, capital punishment, and the abuse of civilians. For its early distillation of such ideas the Lieber Code is still considered a monument to liberalism, and though the military often failed to meet the standards the Code set forth, particularly against native tribes on the frontier, the aspiration to humane conduct set it apart. An address to West Point cadets by a Medal of Honor awardee named Major General John M. Schofield, who would one day command the entire army, gave concise expression to that army’s republican nature:
The discipline which makes the soldiers of a free country reliable in battle is not to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment. On the contrary, such treatment is far more likely to destroy than to make an army. It is possible to impart instruction and to give commands in such a manner and such a tone of voice to inspire in the soldier no feeling but an intense desire to obey. . . . He who feels the respect which is due to others cannot fail to inspire in them regard for himself, while he who feels, and hence manifests, disrespect toward others, especially his inferiors, cannot fail to inspire hatred against himself.
Even today, cadets from the Air Force Academy to West Point to the Citadel must memorize these words. Rather than regard liberty as some remote master, the military seeks to know it intimately, by heart. When it collides with the hellishness of war, of course, the moral situation is tested and often twisted.
Perhaps, one might think, this all ended with Vietnam. After all, the Vietnam War was the last one that saw Americans conscripted into service. The veterans that returned from it did not yield the same civic returns for the country. There are at least two reasons for this. One is that though it entailed a draft, the Vietnam war effort cannot be called a mass mobilization. Chances for deferment had expanded in the years since Korea. The most fortunate Americans exploited those chances, sat out the war or protested it. Those Americans that went to Vietnam were on average poorer, less educated, and less urban than those that fought in prior wars. When they got home they were not as warmly welcomed as veterans of other wars and they were less well positioned for civic engagement.
A second likely reason that returning Vietnam veterans brought no civic boon comparable to their predecessors was that a rising anti-institutionalist culture had preempted it. This is a familiar story worth briefly revisiting. The culture of the 1960s valorized autonomy, if not disobedience, though the irony of the counterculture’s own internal conformities must be noted. The apparent failures of the government, on display in Vietnam and at home, exacerbated that reaction. The institutions that in theory inspired duty instead hemorrhaged trust at the highest rate the country had seen in decades, if not ever.
One sees this anti-institutionalist turn not only in the counterculture, but also in the survey data that was then beginning to accrue thanks to the growing field of political science. By the 1970s, parents reported that values such as obedience were in free fall among children. So was the perceived importance of manners, those social protocols that allow people to come together and live harmoniously in association. These were replaced by virtual cults of autonomy and self-direction. Put another way, the attitudes that sustain institutions were in a downswing opposite those that corrode them.
This timeline matches exactly with that sketched by the great scholar of civil society Robert Putnam. In Bowling Alone, he argued that generational turnover, rather than changes within the same people over time, best explained America’s civic withdrawal in the latter half of the twentieth century. The downward slopes on the many charts that Putnam marshals to make this point tell us above all that the associative American aged out. It is significant that those Americans were also the last generation to have experienced mass mobilization and so the last to meet, en masse, the institutional ethos of the country’s military.
The anti-institutional sentiment of the 1960s and 1970s has in retrospect been wrongly conflated with liberalism itself, with what some of the literature calls the “rights-based” variety. After all, do not both prize the individual and her autonomy? From a distance, the answer seems to be yes. But when one listens more closely to the loud anti-institutional voices of this era, one hears something altogether different. Such voices may speak of the individual, but their zeal and their disinclination to compromise are fundamentally illiberal in disposition, and would be unrecognizable to the liberal thinkers, from Francis Hutcheson on down, whom the Founders read. Such voices were instead those of an “adversary culture,” to borrow Lionel Trilling’s phrase, no less at odds with the American liberal tradition than any object of Huntington’s early aspirations.
The military survived America’s anti-institutional swing. It did so because, just as that swing began, in July 1973, the draft gave way to the All-Volunteer Force. (Samuel Huntington got the wish that he first expressed in The Soldier and the State.) The military parted ways with the American public and retreated to garrisons spread across the country. While its senior leaders remained in close touch with their civilian overseers throughout the Cold War, in the garrisons the rank and file worked in relative social isolation to repair the damage done by a long and brutal war in Asia. In doing so, the military sat out the adversarial culture blowing over American culture like one of Santayana’s creedal tornadoes.
These reforms bore fruit. After several years of highly public and bruising discussions concerning the ruin within them, the uniformed services began to recover. By 1980, the American military began to pull away from all other federal institutions in measures of public confidence. Today it outperforms them often by tens of percentage points. By 1990 the military had also pulled away from other non-governmental public institutions such as news media, labor, universities, big business, and organized religion. Today, as the scholar Peter Feaver has shown, it competes almost exclusively with “small business.”
Feaver’s analysis of this survey data finds that American respondents trust the military not just because they like the uniform, but because it retains an institutionalist sensibility, a culture of reciprocity and mutual assistance, otherwise absent from society. Respondents rate the military high for consistently enforcing high personal standards among its members. These give the military a collective and distinct quality. Firms likewise seek out veterans to hire for the sort of institution-building savvy otherwise scarce in American society, reporting them to be anomalously disciplined, moved to work hard not only by money but by an instinctive sense of duty and fellow-feeling.
One refers to studies and surveys to make credible otherwise vague claims about the military’s character. But surveys cannot give an outsider a sense of an institution. That can only be acquired through a close encounter. A stroll across a military post would make the point more powerfully. You will hear the ritual of reveille that greets each day. You will see in the sunlight that follows the varied and richly embroidered identity on flapping guidon. You will read in the street names the unambiguous sense of place. You will infer from the sag of a shoulder the punishing work hours untethered from any hope of higher pay. You will hear in caught conversations the intimacy among strangers newly met. These sights and sounds mark an institution far more credibly than any survey data. Walk out the post’s gates, and you will feel the wind of the prairie again.
What does the military’s institutional endurance mean for liberalism? Critics, be they of the Huntingtonian or Polanyian sort, likely have little trouble answering this question: it is the exception that proves the rule. The military, such critics might say, survives as a coherent collective precisely because it refuses to indulge in the same individualist conceit that inheres in liberalism, refuses to make endless compromises in the name of individual autonomy until it has no form of its own, refuses to mortgage its own history and place in the name of inoffensiveness and comfort, refuses to disassemble itself into fungible parts to a consuming market, if only so that it might encase some market or secure some central power. In short, the critics say, the military survives because it refuses to be liberal, standing stubbornly outside a liberal society.
But such a story does not hold up under examination. There is another story of America’s military and its liberal tradition, a story that better comports with the just-reviewed historical record. Time and time again a shared moral sense moved society to mobilize, both in voluntary organizations and in federal ones such as the army. These encounters reeducated successive generations in the art of self-organization and the methods of human and effective association. Liberalism did not draw from a diminishing stock of pre-liberal communal sensibility that it could not itself replenish. Rather, much of the social bonds which present-day nostalgists regard as artifacts of a pre-liberal order were instead created with the help of the military and its cousins in defense of liberalism itself. And those organizations, be they Odd Fellows Lodges or Grangers or the Red Cross, structured themselves with an aspirant eye towards America’s liberal constitution.
In light of this fuller account, one sees that the individual, though the beginning of the liberal idea, is not its only end. Likewise, in the light of this history, Santayana’s vision of American society as a doomed prairie looks wrong. One can understand why he saw the country the way he did, coming as he did from an Old World, one shaped by deeply rooted institutions that predated by centuries the American founding. But intellectually, philosophically, America is of a different soil altogether, a soil of an incontrovertibly liberal sort. The American military formed from that soil, not despite it. To the founding traditions the military has since been friend rather than foe. The facts of the institution’s structure and of its history alike make this plain.
Why do the many critics of the Constitution’s liberalism since Huntington miss the military’s role in stewarding it? Perhaps it is because they do not look to the military at all, except as an abstract entity that “secures” this or that, be it a globalist order or a capitalist market. One need only check the indices of the books: in otherwise sweeping accounts of American liberalism the military barely earns an entry. This might be an ironic consequence of the Huntingtonian America in which we now live — the military is so cloistered that critics of liberalism forget it exists. Were they to look closely, they would find that the military has proven an indispensable constitutive force of liberal society.
No doubt the cessation of mass mobilization has for the time being diminished the military’s power to seed American society with institutionalists. But the military has not lost that power entirely, as its veterans prove every day. Indeed, it seems at times as if the military is the country’s last institution standing, an unlikely yet worthy vessel for that liberal institutionalist ethos elsewhere threatened. If history is any indicator, the military will not remain this way. The need for mass mobilization will come around again, and we will become nostalgic for the all-volunteer season through which we are now living. Until then, the military gives shelter on the American prairie, so that the institutionalist ethos will still be alive when the time comes to build again.
Theo Lipsky is an active-duty U.S. Army officer. The views expressed are his and do not reflect the official position of the Department of the Army or Department of Defense.
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