The Problem Is Bigger Than That

Why do you talk to us about laws? We carry swords.
- Pompey the Great

In general, I have no complaints about the ideas Sandy Levinson and Jack Balkin expouse in this post. But the larger constitutional problem we now face is both different from and more intractable than what they describe here. When I think about our constitutional problems - and I think they are substantial - I'm reminded of the Great One's saying above. I fear that we are at the middle of a process that could destroy republican government in the United States. I don't normally make such melodramatic statements. To see why I do so today, I will indulge one of the oldest cliches used in talking about our country: a comparison with the Roman Republic. Believe me, I would spare readers here this if I thought I could, but Madison and Hamilton were right to draw on Roman history for parallels to our own.

The Roman Republic fell, in large part, because the armed forces lost their connection to the citizen body and its representative institutions. This occurred for three interrelated reasons. First, the army became an autonomous professional organization. The Roman army was originally a citizen body with a small cadre of long term professionals. Marius - it was his fault - created an independent force that accquired a corporate identity. As such they lost the ties that had bound them to the citizens; the soldiers "found a home in the army", to use the old GI phrase, and the citizenry lost their stake in controlling the scope and number of wars as military families became an identifiable class among them. And, of course, the army became a permanent lobby in favor of state expansion.

Second, Rome began to interfere more and more in the affairs of its neighbors. The destruction of their great commericial and military rival Carthage created unforeseen economic and political opportunities for Rome. As Rome got richer, the degree of income differentiation grew as well; the gap between patrician and plebian grew along with the city's economy. Politics, always dominated by the partricans, became more and more their playground, where the unrestrained use of their wealth and increasingly disproportional electoral mechanisms undermined both the legitimacy of the state and the participation of the plebian masses in politics. The creation of foreign policy crises - the Romans were past masters at that - became a way to insure economic growth and shore up legitimacy by the glory of conquest and the economic exploitation of new territories.

Third, as Rome became more involved in her neighbors's business, the politicians in the city began to see that foreign affairs offered an unparalelled political opportunity. The military was now used regularly as a tool to increase the extent of state power by foreign conquest. These operations were characterized by independent commands with both military and political responsibilities controlled by politicians that used them to establish the military reputations needed to consolidate political power and insure electoral success. The result was that the armed forces began to transfer their loyalties from the squabbling politicians back home to the commanders in the field; commanders who could insure the army's organizational security and who could lead.

One of those commanders, Julius Caesar, finally ended the farce that republican institutions had become. Caesar and his successors kept the old forms and ruled absolutely within them. The patricians got political stability and security for their status, the plebians got the illusion of control over the nobles and a supposed champion, the army got the whip hand over the state. And the republic was reduced to an empty shell. In a more modern context, Marx describes the process pretty well in 18th Brumaire. He, of course, saw the paralells clearly.

Sounds a bit too familiar for comfort to me. Of course, the US is a far cry from the Roman Republic institutionally; the Romans would have recoiled in horror before a state engineered to be as structurally inefficient and as decentralized as ours. The separation of powers alone would make the task of a new Caesar much more difficult. But only more difficult, not impossible. The quote above shows the crux of the matter: we have allowed the development of increasingly autonomous armed forces, given them and their commanders political independence in foreign adventures, and allowed their loyalties to be tied more and more to the executive. This has been going on for some time and has been recognized before. The difficulty now is that the liberal foreign policy consensus that bound the executive and the legislature to a common course - and thus made control of the military much easier - has now been seriously undermined. Paradoxically, it was that very consensus that by sanctioning undeclared foreign wars eroded our capacity to insure loyalty of the armed forces to civilian and, specifically, democratic control.

What it boils down to is pretty simple: constitutions don't mean much if the capacity of representative institutions to control the military becomes tenuous. The Great One was right. We need to find a way - and I mean right now - to reverse present trends if we want a republican government for our grandchildren. I'll post on that later.

- Tracy Lightcap

Comments

[Allen]

great post!

[George]

Hey Tracy,

You make some good points in bringing historical perspective to our current military engagements. But my sense is that elite theory is probably a better fit for current events. It may be that it is simply the military elite's "turn" for awhile. Business had the 90's all to itself, and the 60's and 70's were times when the military had to "share" with government elites. Just a thought (and bastardization of elite theory - to boot).

One other thought, the large number of callups from reserve and guard ranks means a lot of folks in the theater of war are less tied to the military and its elites than we might expect. It has certainly created training problems and probably chain-of-command discipline problems as well. Any disconnect between commanders and representatives may be lessened by the actual folks in the field.

George

[Ramsey]

Two years since the last post?!? I'm a month into Con Law and ready to chime in.