The Citizen Republic: A Stupid Idea That Won’t Die
Billy, don't be a hero.
Anybody serious in their thinking will conclude that there is something wrong with democracy. A subset of this group will conclude that some amount of those problems can be solved by restricting the franchise. A subset of that group will conclude against all available evidence and intuition that the best way to restrict the franchise would be to limit the vote to veterans.
Service Guarantees Citizenship
The Citizen Republic concept originates with Robert Heinlein’s 1959 book, Starship Troopers. It’s defined most simply as a militaristic form of democracy, where full citizenship can only be gained though military service. The voting franchise is limited to full citizens, and they are the only ones allowed to hold public offices. In the 1997 movie, Mobile Infantry recruits mention that citizens have their education paid for by the Federation and are permitted to have more than two children. Though not mentioned, it can be inferred that veterans have their healthcare provided by the state.
The reason for only allowing veterans to vote is summarized in the movie’s second scene:
“Something given has no value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived. […] A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his life, a civilian does not.”
Whenever Starship Troopers is discussed, controversy emerges as to whether the Terran Federation is fascist, the book is fascist, the movie is fascist, as to the nature of satire, or the possibility of “missing the point” by enjoying it. Ideas like “media literacy” and “death of the author” are for the next article. For now, we can say this: there has never been a fascist power that did not practice universal conscription. Also, as Jeff Riggenbach notes, Heinlein’s political views were “largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time.”
Civilian control over the military is a concept often taken for granted. Definitionally, the state is the entity with a force monopoly in a territory. The military is the part of the state which wields the most force, securing territory from other states. If a critical mass of the military decided that it should be in charge, it would be in charge. In statecraft, this is universally considered a problem that must be solved. France, the first nation to practice universal military conscription, specifically forbade anyone active in the military from voting or holding office.
In liberal states, the solution is universal ideological education, intensified for servicemen and officers, and supplemented with comprehensive loyalty oaths. Promotion to General ranks requires Senate approval, and the President has unrestricted authority to relieve officers of command. As an additional carrot, officers retain security clearances on retirement, and can obtain lucrative private sector jobs in the military-industrial complex.
In less liberal states, more invasive methods are required. In the USSR or China, political commissars were embedded into all ranks of command, with authority in extreme cases to summarily execute disloyal officers or have their families arrested. In the Third Reich or the Islamic Republic of Iran, paramilitaries like the Schutzstaffel or Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps select recruits specifically on the basis of ideological loyalty.
I’m Doing My Part
The Federation’s paramount virtue is responsibility. A citizen accepts responsibility for the safety of the body politic. Career Sergeant Zim emphasizes the voluntariness of Federal Service in his first sixty seconds on screen.
“Any time you think I’m too tough, any time you think I’m being unfair, any time you miss your mommy, quit! You sign form 1240-A, you grab your gear, you take a stroll down Washout Lane!”
There are no medical discharges in the Mobile Infantry. You finish early by quitting or dying. In the book, soldiers can resign right before battle. The Federation assigns multiple amputees to finish their term of service as recruitment officers.
“Good for you! Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today.”
Maimed veterans are called up as reserves: Johnny finds himself under the command of his high school history teacher sporting a prosthetic arm.
The sole qualification for service is the mental capacity to take the oath. After an aptitude test, it’s the state’s responsibility to find or create a job for every volunteer, even it’s “test subject.” Seven years after the book was written, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lowered military mental standards to induct recruits with IQs as low as 66. The IQ range below 70 frequently changes name, as every term assigned quickly takes the form of a pejorative and then a forbidden slur. In the book, a mobile infantry recruit collapses during training. He refuses to quit and is reassigned as a naval cook. Mobile Infantry is co-ed, with women taking combat roles in mixed-gender units. Whether this indicates the exceptional abilities of Federation women, or the prioritization of virtue over ability, I leave to the reader.
In real life, this means that those who are female, obese, or intellectually or physically disabled, face less physical risk when volunteering for Federal Service. You take the test and get folded into the federal bureaucracy, where a job must be created for you. After carrying out your service sorting mail in the veteran’s hospital for “not less than two years and as much longer as may be required by the needs of the Federation,” you are a Full Citizen, with all the privileges and honors implied.
Meanwhile: fit, intelligent men are incented1 to avoid Federal Service, lest they be shunted into the hazardous duties only they can perform. Why risk that, when you can redirect your talents towards productive private sector employment as a tradesman, athlete, architect, or other Ayn Rand novel protagonist? The only obstacles would be if, say, higher education was untenably expensive. Or it might be difficult to secure affordable business loans or mortgages without the subsidized rates veterans receive.
The long term outcome would be kakistocracy, rule by the worst, with the franchise based on getting paid the GS scale. Legions of physically and mentally unfit federal employees voting themselves generous social benefits at the expense of a disenfranchised mass of the highly productive, whose only path to political representation was gated behind participation in whatever nonsensical war this sort of government might feel like initiating.
I’m From Buenos Aires…
Most who endorse the Citizen Republic fall into one of two camps. The first are veterans. Often you will find such people were part of the personality cult of Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis. They are often proudly anti-racist, notwithstanding the racialized abuse men cheerfully hurl at each other as a matter of basic locker room talk. They often respond to race issues by saying that in the military, “the only color is green.”
The second cohort is drawn from the coalition of antimodernist post-libertarians, Catholic integralists, and assorted “geeks for monarchy” called the “Dark Enlightenment.” This group takes a more skeptical view of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, though oddly not the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act. For them, the appeal of the Citizen Republic is that it could freeze or even roll back the composition of the American electorate which is trending increasingly non-white. After all, 68.9% of active duty members don’t identify with any form of racial minority group, which is almost two whole percentage points above the 67% of the electorate that was non-Hispanic White in 2018.
The expectation is that a government such composed would “roll back wokeness.” This is wrong. It is true that in 2016, active servicemen supported Trump over Hillary 40-20. But they supported Biden over Trump 41-37. What veterans proudly boast, but reactionaries don’t acknowledge, is that even before recent initiatives to acquire more pregnant pilots, the military was not only historically diverse, but often at the cutting edge of diversity initiatives. Zooming in on one branch, in 2022, Blacks were 12% of the population, but 23% of the Army. Meanwhile, non-Hispanic Whites were 59.3% of the population and 53.6% of the Army. In 2016, the Defense Department had the highest percentage of employee campaign donations going to Trump… less than 16%, with 84% of employee donations going to Clinton. Take note that all federal employees would count as conducting Federal Service, and so all federal employees would be Full Citizens in the Citizen Republic.
The most overwhelmingly “veteran” congress on record was the 91st Congress of 1969, with 75 of 100 Senators and 327 of 435 Representatives as veterans. It was a veto-proof Democratic majority. Supermajority-veteran Congresses passed the 1964 Civil Rights act, the 1965 Immigration Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Community Reinvestment Act, Johnson’s Great Society, and any other “woke” laws you can name. And it was the military in those days which enforced school integration at gunpoint from Little Rock to Boston.
Would You Like To Know More?
In a military of professional citizen-soldiery and not aristocrats with purchased commissions, officers trend to the left of their subordinates. The proud son of Union General Arthur MacArthur Jr., Douglas MacArthur personally invited the founder of the ACLU to Japan to help reorganize their government, even though the HUAC warned that Robert Nash Baldwin was a known (anti-Stalinist) communist. Also consider: as believers in The Cause frequently remind us, Robert E. Lee himself was more of a paternalist than a violent white supremacist, opposing slavery in his private correspondence and freeing his slaves in his will.
From Harry Truman to George HW Bush, America had an unbroken string of veteran Presidents. In most cases, it was the US Navy Reserve, but that still counts. Colonel Harry S. Truman desegregated the military. Lieutenant John F. Kennedy weaponized the FBI, the IRS, the FCC, the DNC, and the National Council of Churches to silence conservative radio. Commander Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Captain Ronald Reagan signed off on amnesty for three million illegal aliens and tripled the national debt.
When someone praises the Citizen Republic, they may think or pretend that it will be administered by a “Based” aristocracy of Warrior Scholars. They say it will be ruled by an imaginary James Mattis. What they’d get is Mark Milley, John McCain, Dan Crenshaw, and the non-imaginary James Mattis.
In 2020, Mattis made the brazenly absurd claim that the President, an elected official, calling for the military to do something about the riots destroying the country that summer was compromising civilian control over the military! Trump was undermined by his generals throughout his presidency. Mattis did everything possible to delay and undermine potential withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria. Officers regularly denounced him in the press for “sowing divisiveness between military ranks” and “getting intelligence briefings from Fox News.”
Retired officers like Admiral McRaven all but called for Trump’s removal from office, claiming he wasn’t doing enough to protect “the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Rohingyas, the South Sudanese and the millions of people under the boot of tyranny.” Trump was shocked to discover on taking office that the Joint Chiefs were unanimous in their commitment to protecting every border on Earth but the one between the US and Mexico. Officers publicly gaslit the President and the public for doubting their loyalty to him. After the free and fair 2020 election, magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic published glowing endorsements of General Mark Milley for “protecting the constitution from Donald Trump” by literally consulting with the Chinese behind his back.
It’s not wrong to want a better ruling class. It’s not wrong to question liberal democracy. It’s not wrong to enjoy Heinlein’s books, or Verhoeven’s movies. If Verhoeven wanted to make an aesthetic parody of fascist propaganda, but you like that aesthetic, it’s OK.
But make no mistake, the system outlined in the movie wasn’t bad because it’s fascist, it’s bad because it’s unsalvageably stupid.
Thanks for reading to the end! I’ll have a second part out soon, where I’ll take an even harder look at the sorts of people who push these nonsense ideas. In the meantime, I’d greatly appreciate if you shared the article. You’d be doing your part!
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Incent: to motivate.
Inventive: that which causes motivation.
Incentivize: to motivate.
Why not go deeper with “Incentivizer: that which causes motivation.”
Excellent point. While I understand the sentiment behind the "citizen republic", actually limiting the vote to the military is a terrible idea, as you have so well pointed out.
My primary issue with your piece is that it melds the book and movie depictions of citizen republic together. Considering that the movie is intentionally antagonistic to the theses of the book, the mangled mashup depicted here is easy to criticize.
In the book, the MI is not co-ed, active military cannot vote ("if they let the Roughnecks vote, the idiots might vote not to make a drop"), and retirees are not recalled for service. Critiques of Heinlein's citizen republic must be aimed at his proposal where "every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage." Pointing out that service in the US military is often not difficult or that officers are liberals (which is due more to their college education than their commissions) do not refute him. He takes pains to emphasize that citizens are not smarter, more self-disciplined, more virtuous, or trained to vote well, so pointing these facts out again does not refute him.
Your two actual criticisms, who would volunteer and veterans voting for veterans benefits, are reasonable and should have been the root of your argument. Although to be frank, I fail to see how veterans voting for veterans benefits is any different in principle than an unlimited democracy voting bestowing itself outlandish benefits that it cannot afford or the elderly voting to expand Social Security.