Mr. Biden's Army

An argument I can’t prove, but that feels more and more likely to be true.

In 1798, with the United States sort of vaguely engaged in an undeclared war with France, Congress approved a series of measures to grow American land forces in the event of a more serious conflict. Among other moves, they authorized a Provisional Army — not to be immediately created IRL, but raised if needed. The former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton regarded the new force as an opportunity, and maneuvered to become the de facto leader of the thing. Hamilton’s political opponents immediately saw the point of the Provisional Army Act: it would create a military arm of the Federalist Party, reliable regiments that could be used against internal enemies or in response to political instability.

“The proof,” the military historian Richard Kohn has written, “lay in section three, which allowed the President to accept any companies that volunteered as units with their own arms and equipment. The volunteer corps would be rich, zealous Federalists in unlimited numbers under Presidential command — a praetorian guard siphoning off the best young men from the militia, creating jealousy, and destroying discipline and organizational integrity.” Hamilton’s opponents correctly warned that he was “arming one part of the people to guard against the other.” A new federal army authorized for use against foreign enemies was meant, by its proponents, to be the army of a political party — with government funding.

Not much came of it. President John Adams was irritated by Hamilton more than he feared the French — in a letter to his wife, he called Hamilton “Puppy head” — and he wasn’t worried about an invasion: “At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here, than there is in Heaven.” But Hamilton stands in a long tradition: he saw the possibility of aligning government-funded organizations with party loyalty, and using the marriage of party and government to advance his own political power.

A few years later, in the next administration, President Thomas Jefferson signed a piece of legislation that seemed to point in different directions. The Military Peace Establishment Act of 1802 sharply reduced the size of an already small regular army, purging a third of the army’s officers, but it also established a new American military academy at West Point, in New York, as a pipeline for the creation of new army officers. Jefferson shrank the officer corps and provided an instrument to grow the officer corps.

Squaring that circle, the historian Theodore Crackel has argued that Jefferson wasn’t worried about the size of the army — he was worried about its political composition. Shrinking the officer corps removed Federalist officers; then a new military academy fed Republican officers into the army, turning a politically homogenous armed force into a politically mixed organization that a Republican president could trust. The Military Peace Establishment Act of 1802, Crackel wrote, “provided the administration with a means to accomplish a political catharsis of the military establishment.”

I could go on, but here’s the point (at long last): The control of government institutions has often been understood to be political, and political leaders have sought to influence the political loyalty of organizations that deliver force. Politicians want armies; they want coercive instruments to be theirs.

So it seems to me — and this is a guess, but I think it’s a good one — that we’re witnessing a conscious and deliberate political purge of coercive instruments dressed up as a public health measure. Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, Bill DeBlasio, Lori Lightfoot: they’re reading resistance to COVID vaccine mandates as a proxy for political loyalty. It’s like applying a chemical agent that makes organisms of a certain kind glow in the dark, so you can say, aha, there it is. Bill DeBlasio knows New York City will be less peaceful and more disordered if he fires a bunch of cops and firefighters over the vaccine mandates, but he also knows this:

So firing a bunch of NYPD and FDNY personnel can also look a great deal like, to borrow a description, a means to accomplish a political catharsis of the city establishment. To at least some degree, the vaccine mandate fits the shape of an identity-focused purge, leaving behind a more homogenous political machine in a giant city government.

For Biden and Austin, who opened a new administration with a military stand-down to address “extremism and extremist ideology in the ranks” — are you now, or have you ever been, a Trump supporter? — the intention to ideologically re-sort the military is an explicitly declared aim. Again, it seems very likely that the Biden administration is reading opposition to the vaccine mandate as a proxy for political alignment, and firing people for political disloyalty by dressing it up as a health measure.

It looks to me like the emerging purges of military, police, fire, and medical organizations — and, alongside those, of airlines and other private corporations — are a calculated, conscious, deliberate maneuver to produce greater political homogenization of institutions. And, as a bonus, it’s likely to distribute a good deal of the financial and professional loss into lives the Democratic-media-academic human centipede regard as, what word am I looking for, deplorable.

It looks to me like there’s an effort underway to arm one part of the people to guard against the other. As much as that’s just a guess, we have the examples to show that it happens.