American Militarism Is the Missing Element in the Creed–Nation Debate

With his usual panache, Vivek Ramaswamy, erstwhile presidential candidate and DOGE co-czar, current candidate for governor of Ohio, kicked off one of his classic Christmas agonies with a speech at Turning Point USA’s annual AmFest confab. Ramaswamy, who last year took the opportunity of Our Lord’s birthday to defend the merits of H-1B workers relative to “mediocre” Americans, enunciated an aggressive version of the “propositional” theory of America—those are Americans who subscribe to the American creed (a phrase that makes the Menckenites among us smile).

Ramaswamy’s many and articulate critics, including our own Andrew Day, have pointed out the problems a conservative might have with this very loose definition of America, not least that it tends to prioritize the interests of would-be Americans over the actually existing nation notionally served by our government. It is also historically suspect. Our traditions, liberal and expansive as they are in orientation, did come from a particular people in a particular place; regime construction does not occur in a vacuum, no matter how much the Straussians would like it to do. 

But it must be granted to the propositionists (or credalists, or whatever you want to call them—all the available nouns are phonologically repellent) that America has in fact successfully absorbed a great number of primarily Western Europeans of different languages, traditions, and religions. Here, the more zealous champions of the “Heritage American” tend to get into difficulties—it is politically unactionable to assert that anglophone, tax-paying, law-abiding descendants of the Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and so on who came in the second and third waves of immigration aren’t “real” Americans. Are you going to levy political penalties on them? Deport them? Good luck. (For one thing, your favorite magazine would be out of a managing editor.)

So why did that assimilation work, and why is it difficult or impossible to replicate? Scale is one reason; the numbers even when Coolidge issued his immigration moratorium fell far short of the Biden wave. The difficulties of assimilating larger populations, and the unusual phenomena that a nation sees when approaching the 15 percent foreign-born mark, have been well catalogued and need little repetition. 

Another aspect, however, that has gone all but unremarked is the decay of a very ancient feature of republics: the linkage between citizenship and military service. In antiquity, political rights were explicitly conditioned on an individual’s ability to take the field in time of war. Death for the polity was the highest consummation of a citizen’s life qua citizen; let’s take a look at Pericles’ Funeral Oration from Thucydides (Jowett translation), delivered in honor of the war dead:

I believe that a death such as theirs has been the true measure of a man’s worth; it may be the first revelation of his virtues, but is at any rate their final seal. For even those who come short in other ways may justly plead the valor with which they have fought for their country; they have blotted out the evil with the good, and have benefited the state more by their public services than they have injured her by their private actions.

Nor was this outlook an Athenian tic. The most common route to gaining Roman citizenship was service in the legions. Willingness to risk death for the state was the ultimate test of identification with it. It is in this sense that Carl Schmitt writes that war or the possibility of war affords the “high points” of politics: These are the instances in which the subjectivity of nationhood is made concrete and visible. You are with us, or you are with them.

It is in this tradition that the American Founding documents must be read. The Second Amendment situates the citizen’s right to bear arms within his duty in “the militia,” which was synonymous in the Anglo-American tradition with the corps of able-bodied male citizens. The democratic identification of the state—that is, the monopoly on violence—and the people was why (among other reasons) the Founders had such a leery attitude toward professional militaries. High up in the Declaration’s list of grievances against good King George: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” The Constitution very carefully mandates Congress to raise armies, but to maintain navies (which are pragmatically difficult to secure in emergencies, but also pose less threat to political life, particularly in a continental nation like the United States).

While there was some erosion of these principles over time, especially as political elites of the late Gilded Age and Progressive Era started to envision a more imperial American project, standing armies remained relatively small into the 20th century. In 1935, the army was in the ballpark of 130,000 out of a total population of 127 million. War depended on the bureaucratic descendant of the militia concept, the draft. So when the nation threw in against the Axis in 1941, the war was waged on the whole-of-society basis posited in republican government. It was in the Second World War that these newly arrived Italians and Greeks became, unambiguously, Americans—not because they subscribed to some list of abstractions, but because of blood shed for country.

The Cold War brought about a change. The military was professionalized and, even in times of nominal peace, remained very large. In 1975, two years after the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War, the standing army was 784,000 out of a population of 216 million. War became something that those people who pursued a soldiering career did, not something that was intimately linked with national will and collective effort, let alone civic duty. Wars, Schmitt’s “high points” of the nation’s politics, became something that did not involve most nominal citizens. It is perhaps for this reason, among others, that war has become more and more prevalent as an activity; it no longer concerns most of the nation. The crucible for defining a national citizenry has been broken. No wonder immigrants in the postwar period have not assimilated so thoroughly.

A return to the militia theory is ideal, but probably impractical; modern international relations posit standing armies, and it is difficult to imagine the United States taking the plunge to see what happens. (Not least among the many pragmatic problems is that the military as it exists is enormously popular with the voting public.) Given that the probably unconstitutional, probably illegal standing army looks to be here to stay, the statesmen among us who aren’t friends of militarism might consider returning to the roots of republican ideology by instituting a national service requirement. Not only would there be fewer frivolous wars if people’s own children were on the line rather than strangers’; those who came through it would have an irrevocable claim to being real Americans.

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