Cato Institute senior fellow Benjamin Friedman highlighted the disturbing aspect of Obama’s rationale, noting that the president “has adopted the notion that military culture is better than that of civilian society and ought to guide it.” That view, Friedman warned, is fundamentally “authoritarian.” While Americans have certain things in common and have some mutual obligations, “that doesn’t make the United States anything like a military unit, which is designed for coordinated killing and destruction.” And it’s a good thing that American society is not like a military unit, Friedman argued, since that model is anathema to individual liberty.
But the State of the Union was not the first time that Obama has acted as though the military model is his ideal. In words and actions alike he seems to see himself as the commanding general, and it is everyone else’s job to follow orders. His speeches to Congress on proposed legislation have been replete with curt demands to “pass it now” or “pass it right away.” There is an underlying impatience with dissenting views—indeed, with the entire legislative process that the Constitution requires. The high (or low) point of that mentality came during a speech to Congress last year on the president’s “jobs bill,” when he insisted on immediate passage even though the provisions of his proposal had not even been drafted yet.
Obama’s generalissimo attitude was also on display in the 2010 State of the Union address, when he publicly rebuked the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision in the Citizens United case that struck down restrictions on campaign spending by independent organizations. With the justices in attendance, as was usually the practice, Obama rallied his congressional troops for a standing ovation in support of his attack on the court. That was an ugly, utterly unprecedented display of disdain toward an equal branch of government.
But the president’s crude invocations of a military template and his call for American society to conform to that ideal do more than just underscore his authoritarian personality. They reflect a much deeper problem since his strategy is designed to exploit a growing tendency in American culture to worship the military and martial values—especially the emphasis on unity, order, and decisive action.
The temptation might be to think that this cultural militarization is a post-9/11 phenomenon, but that assumption would be wrong. The reaction to 9/11 has made matters much worse, but as Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich showed in his important book The New American Militarism, this is a trend that has been building for several decades. Columnist George Will has reminded readers that in his first inaugural address, Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded executive power to deal with the Great Depression “as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe” and that America needed to “move as a trained and loyal army” to combat the nation’s economic woes.
