An Ominous Precedent for the Left’s Politicization of the Military

By Jacob Hornstein

Sunday, May 26, 2024

 

The American military is in crisis. Recruitment is down overall, impairing readiness. Lack of interest from conservative demographics is driving much of the decline. Within the ranks, the departure of right-leaning officers and servicemen put off by vaccine mandates and left-wing political trainings has shifted the military’s composition left at the expense of service quality.

 

These are unique challenges. But they are not unprecedented. In fact, they closely parallel an event little-known in America: the conspiracy of the Left in France’s Third Republic to decatholicize the country’s military. This effort had disastrous consequences — consequences we could learn something from today.

 

Under the Third Republic, France was extremely polarized between republican Left and monarchist Right. While the Left dominated among intellectuals and eventually most of French society, the military remained a bastion of religion and conservative thought.

 

This orientation was never tolerable for the Left, but republicans lacked the power to act. Military promotions were theoretically apolitical, and the best officers tended to be from conservative Catholic families. Thus, despite a slew of left-wing victories after 1877, the military’s right-leaning culture persisted.

 

The Dreyfus Affair provided impetus for a change. When Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused of spying for Germany, leftist intellectuals proved his innocence. Because senior military officers faked evidence for political and antisemitic reasons, the affair damaged the military’s credibility. The military’s staunch anti-Dreyfusardism convinced republican elites that the military’s conservativism reflected counterrevolutionary attitudes that threatened the republic.

 

To “republicanize” the military, the French government recruited a network of Masons to secretly develop a card system on military officers, in what historians call “the Affair of the Cards.” While officers with republican tendencies were promoted, officers deemed politically unreliable were held back. Criteria were often arbitrary. Factors as minute as regularly attending Mass could cripple an officer’s career.

 

The American military has never developed a popular perception for being politicized in the way that the French military in the late 19th century did. But there are still similarities between the two situations. For example, the American military has also traditionally drawn from a more conservative base than the country overall. Many service members come from “military families.” There are also strong parallels in each institution’s perception on the left. Left-leaning media outlets have long faulted the military on grounds of alleged widespread racism, sexism, violations of church-state separation, and even rape culture.

 

À la the Dreyfus Affair, protests in summer 2020 after George Floyd’s death and January 6 marked a turning point for the relationship between the military and the Left. Eliminating supposed grievances that — we were told — had been tacitly accepted became a moral imperative. President Biden’s Day One Executive Order 13985 mandated diversity and inclusion training for all federal employees, including the military. Vaccine mandates led to the discharge of more than 8,000 active-duty service members.

 

These actions had an effect that was soon hard to ignore. By September 2021, Foreign Affairs was running headlines on “Why Conservatives Turned on the U.S. Military.” In 2022, the Army, Navy, and Air Force all missed their recruiting goals by as much as 25 percent, leading an Army official to state that “there’s a level of prestige in parts of conservative America with service that has degraded.”

 

Is it fair to characterize this as an analogue to the “Affair of the Cards?” Certainly. While in neither case were officers openly punished or rewarded for their beliefs, in both cases the previously apolitical military became politicized, shifting the composition of the military leftward. And in both cases, the shift was induced by cultural watersheds.

 

The Dreyfus Affair convinced French republican elites that the French military was a hotbed of reactionary sentiment that threatened the republic. The events of 2020 and 2021 convinced the Democratic elite that bigoted tendencies in the military posed an existential threat. Fifteen Democratic senators wrote in 2021 that “white supremacy” in the military “threaten[ed] to rupture civil-military safeguards.”

 

In some senses, the comparison is imperfect because the current effort looks worse. The Affair of the Cards was secret until its discovery. But today’s effort at rooting out political wrong-think in the military has been overt. We know from leaked trainings that service members are being encouraged to adopt left-wing cultural practices such as avoiding gendered language. Senior officers are setting quotas for the demographics of military officers.

 

The Dreyfusard Left could point to genuine reactionary sentiment in the military as justification for its efforts. For example, many military officers did hold the French republic in contempt. But there is no legitimate basis for allegations of systemic white supremacy in the U.S. military. Surveys have found that veterans are no more likely to support extremist groups than the American public is. Further proof of this came when defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to launch a military-wide “stand down” to combat extremism was contradicted by a DOD-commissioned study that found no evidence of disproportionate military extremism.

 

Politicization is bad in itself. Its national-security implications are also troubling. By definition, when one prioritizes anything other than quality, an inferior product results. France learned this in 1914, when generals promoted by the Affair of the Cards were disproportionately represented among those fired for incompetence in the opening months of World War I. Americans should hope that we don’t have to face a similar reckoning. We can avoid, or at least mitigate, such a fate only if the left-wing politicization of the military ends now.