The defense of a nation is a ferocious task (in both senses of the term), which is why, as President Lincoln grasped, war may be the ultimate test of whether a nation can long endure. Asked during the Civil War to rid the federal army of General Grant, whose personal conduct had become an embarrassment to the Union, Lincoln famously responded: “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
It is becoming increasingly apparent that this martial quality – what the Greeks called thumos, or spiritedness – has gone missing in certain quarters, which can no longer fathom its place in the civilized world. In postmodern Europe, this is an old story. As early as 1899, the British political theorist Bernard Bosanquet wrote that “the members of a civilized community have seen nothing but order in their lives, and could not accommodate their action to anything else.” More than a century later, the old continent has lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously called the “tragic sense of life.” It has been replaced by a therapeutic mindset that is allergic to the warrior ethos – a symptom, no doubt, of their traumatic historical experience in the last century, but also, perhaps, of their stilted commitment to the liberal ideal.
Yet the United States, rumored to cling stubbornly to the old verities, has not proved entirely immune to this “progressive” dispensation. The idea of escaping power politics and casting off national sovereignty is a temptation to which America is also vulnerable. The political left – let us acknowledge plainly – is not alone in seeking this outcome, but it has supplied the heaviest lifting for it. (Not for nothing did George Orwell write, in his 1942 essay on Kipling, of the “pansy-left circles” that could not see that “men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”)
This anti-war and post-national sensibility bids us ask: What is the use of power in an age of globalization? This position was ably demonstrated in the left’s general response to the box-office hit “American Sniper.” The ramshackle New Republic ran a witless review by a Penn State professor whose failure to see the film didn’t stop him from denouncing it. No one was surprised when left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore unburdened himself of the view that sharpshooters are “cowards.” Taking a cue from Flint, Michigan’s favorite philosopher, Lindy West argued in the Guardian that “the real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him like a hero?”
After watching “American Sniper” on the evening of its release on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I raced home and plucked down from the shelf a book that I suspected might help answer that question. Imperial Grunts is an original study of the stewards of U.S. global hegemony – a fortiori, the American empire – by the foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan.
Kaplan observes that American military culture is still powerfully shaped by the Indian wars of the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century. The imperial exercise in pacifying “Injun country” – America’s historical “heartland” west of the Mississippi River – required less a mass conscript army than an expeditionary force, which in turn depended not on citizen soldiers but on “cavalry officers and pathfinders” who “enjoyed the soldiering life for its own sake.” This frontier ethos may seem an odd fit with a global superpower in the twenty-first century, but as Kaplan notes, “the grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial.”
Seeking to come to grips with the primal sense of liberty animating these warriors, Kaplan quotes the British war historian Sir Michael Howard, who (in The Invention of Peace) argued that early America’s “optimistic ecumenicism” – its belief, borne of the Enlightenment, in the inevitable progress of mankind – “was largely limited to the north-east of the United States. Further west and south,” quite another spirit began to predominate that inured Americans to violence.
The experience of settlement, frontier defense and territorial extension was producing a war culture. … It assumed no progress toward a peaceful global society, but a continued struggle in which the use of violence was justified by individual conscience and brute necessity. … A century or so later, when global organization began to appear possible and necessary, the image that came to many American minds was not that of balancing power between states, but of protecting law and order against its disturbers …. by a sheriff with his posse comitatus. If human corruption and inefficiency made this impossible, it must be provided by the efforts of a few good men following the dictates of a moral law within.
On the surface, it might appear that “American Sniper” conveys the ferocity of this war culture, but it ultimately flinches from doing so. It is unsullied by any thorough examination of the traits and values that, in the eyes of our post-national elite, mark men like Chris Kyle as social inferiors. This omission seems to have been deliberate. In an interview with Jake Tapper, Bradley Cooper denies (as Clint Eastwood has denied) the centrality of Kyle’s worldview in “American Sniper”: “I don’t see this as a movie that promotes conservative values.” Instead, Cooper said, the film is a “character study” of a soldier at war and a veteran at home. This strikes me as being a distinction without a difference. Wouldn’t a genuine character study delve into the deeper recesses of a man’s personality, no matter what such an exercise might turn up? Ultimately, you can’t be one type of man and a different kind of soldier.
And what it might have conjured was the perennial tension in a democratic republic between the soldier and the state (to borrow the title of Samuel Huntington’s classic 1957 study on civil-military relations). Kaplan, in his sequel to Imperial Grunts, devotes a few words to this pregnant subject. In Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, he writes that liberal societies often rely on conservative military establishments to defend them, and the United States is no exception. The military establishment, culled from an older, harder – if not quite hard-hearted – America, “may lack the sensitivities and social graces of the cosmopolitan classes whom they protect.” Just so.
The uncouth and unyielding men who generally rally to the colors make for a culturally alien specimen in much of modern America. They may have never laid eyes on the Metropolitan Opera, but they know what Martin Peretz, the longtime editor of the New Republic, meant when he said that, for its own good, “liberalism stops at the delicatessen door.” They don’t give a damn if they aren’t loved or even understood by many of their own compatriots, much less the rest of the world. They are sentinels hellbent on preserving a precarious order, who care only that they are feared by the nation’s enemies.
This is the story of Chris Kyle, it seems to me, but it is not quite the story of “American Sniper.” Instead, the filmmakers chose a path of less resistance, as Washington Post critic Alyssa Rosenberg notes, consciously excising those elements – a fervid and sometimes militant Christianity, in addition to a boorish contempt for the Iraqi people – that place Kyle outside the ideological consensus, “that make him a harder sell.”
After arguing (I think persuasively) that “American Sniper” didn’t fully grasp the nettle, Rosenberg raises a poignant question for the filmmakers that applies just as much to you, dear reader: “Do they want to honor the man, but only the parts of him they find admirable? Or do they truly want to understand him, even if they cannot like everything they find?” Speaking only for myself, I’d like to understand and honor the man, even if I cannot like everything I find.
Reflecting on the character of Chris Kyle, I’m put in mind of the words of Pericles, as recorded by Thucydides during the Peloponnesian War: “For there is justice in the claim that steadfastness in his country’s battles should be as a cloak to cover a man’s other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as an individual.”
So why are “simplistic patriots” treating Kyle like a hero? One answer is that there’s a keen appreciation among American patriots – simplistic or otherwise – that men like Kyle are at once incurably necessary and desperately hard to find. It goes without saying that he was no plaster saint, but there’s a deep sense among legitimate patriots that such hard men provide the buffer between civilization and barbarism.
May we never be without them.
The power of facing 