Constant War Has Fucked Us Up

I meant for these entries to examine the ways Madison and Hamilton were prescient. Instead I find myself starting with an area in which Hamilton was startlingly naïve.

For some time the President has been claiming (and so has his echo chamber) that Congressional Democrats had access to the same intelligence he did when they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq—and they thought Saddam was a threat too, blah blah. A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service issued yesterday shows that’s not true.

The point here is not that the President is a liar. We all know the President is a liar, except those whose cognitive dissonance won’t allow them to accept the fact. The point is that Congress now allows the President to operate essentially without oversight. From the report:

Perhaps, in part, because of these differing legal views, the executive and legislative branches apparently have not agreed to a set of formal written rules that would govern the sharing and handling of national intelligence. (13) Rather, according to one observer:

The current system is entirely the product of experience, shaped by the needs and concerns of both branches over the last 20 years. While some aspects of current practice appear to have achieved the status of mutually accepted "policy," few represent hard- and-fast rules. "Policy" will give way when it has to.

That’s fucked up. It means the President can do whatever he wants, and tell Congress whatever he feels like. And yes, the fault does lie with Democratic Congressmen as well as Republicans—for so badly abdicating their oversight responsibility.

The Federalist doesn’t deal directly with the issue of launching unnecessary wars of aggression, because at the time the Constitution was drafted the United States was far too weak to consider such a thing. But it does consider, at length, the threat to liberty posed by standing armies in times of peace.

In Federalist 26, Hamilton answers this fear by pointing to Congress’s power of the purse:

The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not AT LIBERTY to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.
…
Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community REQUIRE TIME to mature them for execution. An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose, not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be persevered in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it presumable, that every man, the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives, would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country?

Apparently so.

I almost don’t blame the President for this one. He believes he should have absolute power. Judicial oversight is just an annoyance to him too. But Congress is supposed to stop him.

The reason I say Hamilton was naïve here is that he seemed to assume that the people would always view the military with suspicion and fear. Yet as he himself wrote in Federalist 8:

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
…
The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power.

Maybe he failed to foresee how effectively or persistently propaganda could make us afraid, how sixty-five years of near-constant menace (the Nazis and Japan, the Communists, and now Al Qaeda) would make this country venerate the military above nearly all other institutions. But it’s where we are now, and it’s a problem.

Update after I thought about this more:
No, Hamilton was just being super-naïve. This country has always venerated its military to some extent. Our first president was a General, after all.