This is Democracy – Episode 8: The Military and Democracy

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Introduction with many voices: “This is Democracy”- a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of “This is Democracy.” Today we’re talking about one of the most important and difficult issues to talk about in a democracy, which is the role of the military. What role should the military play? The United States, over the course of its history, has developed an incredibly large and frequently deployed military force, and a military force that plays many roles at home, including an economic role within our society. Today we’re going to talk about how the role of the military has evolved in American society, we’re going to talk about how we should think about it today, and what are some ways and paths forward as we contemplate strengthening our democracy and improving the relationship between the military and our democracy. We have one of the most interesting and exciting people with us here, my good friend Aaron O’Connell. Aaron has an appropriately checkered career for this topic. He is a PhD in history who has served valiantly in the Marines and in many diplomatic roles for the military, including in Africa. He also served in the National Security Council for President Obama and President Trump, and he has written a fantastic book on the history of the Marines and American democracy as it relates to the Marines. And we’re fortunate to have him now as a professor at the University of Texas, where he teaches military history. Aaron, welcome to the podcast.
Aaron: Thanks for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Suri: Before we go to Aaron, as always we have our scene-setting poem from Zachary. How are you this morning, Zachary?
Zachary Suri: I’m good.
Dr. Suri: So what is your poetry this morning?
Zachary: My poem is called “America” and it’s about what my view of America is.
Dr. Suri: Great. Well, let’s hear it.
Zachary: America, you are going to school in a hundred degrees and taking the bus home stop by stop. America, you are the soldiers lined up under the airport awning, sitting on olive green duffel bags. America, you are the broad breath of interstate 35 that cuts through my city that keeps me away from the others. America, you are the librarian exposition with the silent reading room that bores me into working. America, you are the hot bike rides along the lake front, along the city paths. America, you are my books stacked precariously from floor to immeasurable height. America, you are the slop top, this ink, this paper. America, you are the long marches to the capitol building holding up banners against the asphalt oven. America, you are not this. America, you are not Vietnam. America, you are not Afghanistan. America, you are not Iraq. America, you are not the cold faces, the silent stares in the television. America, you are not the gasping voices linked by a poor signal to my radio. America, you are not this and you never will be anything but the soil I sift, the air I breathe, and the rivers before my eyes. You are the song that is always sung. As we pray we are in tune. But America, you may be lost but my God we are here to find you.
Dr. Suri: That’s very moving. Why the mentions of Vietnam and Afghanistan in particular?
Zachary: Well, I mention them because it felt like just something that had not really been said that… Well, something that had never been said so outright that America, you are literally not, physically not these other places. I thought that was really important.
Dr. Suri: Do you think we forget?
Zachary: Yeah.
Dr. Suri: Well, that’s a good place to start with our discussion with Aaron O’Connell. Aaron, one of the dilemmas the founding fathers have, and many 18th century thinkers, is how do you build a democracy when you also have a military? Because of course, historically, military institutions have not been conducive to democracy. So how did the founding fathers think about this?
Aaron: Yeah, it’s a great place to start and thank you for the poem, Zachary. I loved it because when you said, “America, you are not Afghanistan, you are not Vietnam, you are not Iraq,” that’s of course true but there’s an interesting link between the founding of our country and those military operations still happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which is, the United States begins under occupation. There are soldiers quartered in the United States by the British trying to put down insurrection. The Americans and the founding fathers don’t like that one bit, and that actually helps characterize the national identity that will come into being shortly thereafter. So during the Revolution, we had an army and a navy and both were quite small and frankly not very good [Dr. Suri laughs].
It’s an acknowledged military fact that the continental navy does nothing really substantial to help when the American Revolution, and the continental army does better but it’s the militia that does the most. It’s ordinary people taking up arms, organizing themselves militarily. That has some of the most strategic effects during the course of the war. So when the founders are thinking about how should we design this country, they have a great fear of standing armies, they think that leads directly to autocracy and to imperialism. And so they don’t actually even create an army, they just leave the power in the Constitution to raise an army and to maintain a navy. So the rules are there in order to allow it, but they genuinely think that a tiny military force will be adequate because all they have to do is prevent against invasion and deal with what they called natives, the Indians.
Dr. Suri: So how does this relate to the Second Amendment, which always comes up in this context?
Aaron: That’s exactly, it’s a great question. The specific wording of the Second Amendment is to preserve the capacity for a militia so that when you need it, you’re citizens, but if we are invaded or there is danger on our shores, you have to participate. That’s why the Second Amendment says, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free people.”
Dr. Suri: Excellent.
Aaron: So that leads to a very interesting thing for contemporary debates about gun control, which is that the people in the militia had to own arms and indeed they had to tell their officers in the militia who had them, and yes they wrote it down on lists. They had to have gun registration because the militia was a citizenship obligation. But the point is, in those early days, that there really is enormous concern about having too much control in the federal government over the guns.
Dr. Suri: But also a registry of who owns the guns, that’s interesting. Now, the War of 1812 is a moment often skipped in history discussions, but of course the United States is fighting another major war with Great Britain. How does that affect the development of American military activities?
Aaron: It does change things. You have, effectively, two political parties shortly after the Revolution and into the War of 1812. And the one that is more interested in greater state power, in greater state resources, and indeed a larger navy and a greater military are the Federalists. And the Federalists argue vociferously for more funding for national defense, which Democratic Republicans fight back very successfully. When the British burn Washington almost to the ground, this finally causes a sea change, a paradigm shift occurs where people say, “This is far too small and far too weak,” and so you get a major funding increase for the navy and you also get a professional curriculum at West Point. This is when we start building professional solders, where people realized you cannot rely on the neighbors with the guns, you need professionals to do this.
Dr. Suri: Now that seems to run against the idea of a militia, doesn’t it?
Aaron: It does and it’s meant explicitly to run against the militia. It becomes quite obvious that we need at least a cadre, at least a small group of professionally trained soldiers in order to keep us safe. And it is from the 1816 Act and ones that follow that you really start getting funding devoted to maintaining some degree of army and navy all the time. It is not large but it is capable in doing the limited tasks to which to is assigned.
Dr. Suri: So we have a permanent modern military in that sense.
Aaron: Yeah, no one would call it modern if you looked at it in comparison to today but you do have officers and ships and artillery and a belief, a professional belief that this is a professional trade, a craft, and people need to learn the skills to do it properly.
Dr. Suri: Interesting. And as we get into the Civil War, the Union army and the army of the Confederacy, these are still largely draft armies, right? You have a small cadre of officers, but it follows this model, is that correct?
Aaron: That’s correct. The Civil War is notable for how far behind the army and the navy were, compared to European armies, but that’s relevant. The reason that European armies are so advanced, and Napoleonic tactics are so clever, is because of Napoleon, it’s because of large-scale warfare on the continent which is a near-constant at the time.
Dr. Suri: But we have the frontier. How does that relate?
Aaron: The frontier sort of changes the way we think about militaries and violence. So civil/military relations, we like to think about it being, “Oh, our general is influencing our president too much.” Sure, that’s part of civil/military relations. So too is the way that ordinary people think about the military and ordinary soldiers and corporals and sergeants think about the country. Sure, that’s civil/military relations. But a broader way to think about it is that civil/military relations is how the American citizenry thinks about war and the military. And there is near-constant warfare against non-white peoples since initial colonization. You can pick the end date but it’s at least until 1894 when the frontier is closed and almost all Native Americans are husbanded onto reservations.
So that culture of constantly being at warfare with quote unquote natives actually is very important in the development of national character in the 19th century. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most famous and beloved presidents we have who did certainly any number of quite impressive things, also did some surprising things by today’s standards. He penned the multivolume “The Winning of the West” which argues explicitly that what makes American character, the American race as he calls it, so special is that through constant conflict with Indians, killing Indians on the frontier, we have become a hardier, manlier people. So when he’s talking about the strenuous life, he’s talking about soldierly virtue that comes from the centuries-long internal colonization of the continent as we move Native Americans aside so we can have the land for our use.
Dr. Suri: And what about Jim Crow in the south? Is that also the efforts to use military force, or police force at least, to hold freed blacks and others in their place? Is that part of the story too?
Aaron: It is. It depends on how you want to scope the topic. Oftentimes, people who serve in police forces are veterans of the military so in a sense the police are often almost as analogue to the military. They’re either war veterans or are more likely to have family members who are veterans, and so we sometimes think of them similarly. But they’re very much not the same and it’s important that we keep them separate. Surely the US government, the state, used organized violence to keep down non-white peoples through the 18th and 19th centuries and parts of the 20th century in this country. That is an acknowledged historical fact. The military didn’t do too much of that, and in some strange ways the military was more progressive racially than other parts of society at different times, particularly in the navy where, if you were a skilled seaman in the 18th century, you could absolutely have a position of some responsibility on a navy ship. That doesn’t change. The navy gets more white supremacists in the Progressive Era and in the 1910s than it ever was in the 1840s and 1850s.
Dr. Suri: And in some ways you can argue there’s too much American military in the frontier in terms of the killing of Indians and too little in the south after the Civil War. One of the problems is that the Union army leaves so soon and allows these other forces to bring violence upon those who have been given their rights but not practicing their rights. So let’s move to the 20th century. How does this change with World Wars I and II?
Aaron: Well, the major change is that the nature of industrialized warfare means much larger armies. So in World War I we conscript 5 million, eventually 16 million people will serve in World War II, not all drafted.
Dr. Suri: Just so people understand, because we don’t have a draft now, these conscription laws actually pulled in all citizens. It was very hard to get out, or is that not true?
Aaron: That is not true. It is true that there was a broad call for men, had to register, and then could be called up. But there were, as with all other things political, there were all kinds of interesting exemptions. The ones we don’t typically talk about enough is farm labor. Farm labor had extraordinary exemptions because you needed to keep feeding the country. But there were a number of qualifications for people who were essential to the community or married at the start of World War II. Married men were not drafted. That changed later. So it was always selective and politically inflected. That’s fair to say, but the state asking the very people it protects to join in that protection on a large scale changed the way average citizens thought about their military and thought about their government. And it had actually in a lot of ways a salutary effect.
When you come back from World War II, where there is a job crunch, there’s a housing crisis, and every single man on the street you see, there’s a decent chance he’s served in uniform- that does two things. The first is it dismantles the military mystique in a positive way. You can no longer say, “Look at this soldier who sacrificed for us,” without even knowing if perhaps he was an admin clerk who never left New Jersey. Because everybody had- almost all the men had served and that led to a real kind of, “Look, let’s not talk so sweet about the army or the navy or the air force.” It had its failings too. So that was a positive thing. At the same time, it also created a narrative that’s still with us today that the people who do a certain kind of labor for the state, namely serving in the military, have really the right to kind of dictate terms in our political and cultural life. “Hey, we saved you. We did this for you. And so it’s only reasonable that we be rewarded, if not financially then culturally. If not in terms of jobs, then in terms of prestige.” So that exists all through the Cold War. The Cold War is the story of foreign policy written by veterans. If you think of the people making the decisions, almost all of them–
Dr. Suri: And writing the history, too–
Aaron: And writing the history too. Almost all of them have experience in warfare. And then, as you mentioned, the draft is abolished in January 1973 and things change.
Dr. Suri: Before we get to that, I think you’d agree one of the most important 20th century statements about this dilemma between a growing military and its relationship to democracy comes from none other than Dwight Eisenhower. The only man since William the Conqueror to successfully cross the English Channel using military force. The commander of allied forces, of course, in Europe during World War II and president of the United States through most of the 1950s. And we’re going to play a clip from his really famous and still very, very relevant Farewell Address. This is January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower.
Eisenhower: A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known to any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone, more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office in the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Dr. Suri: So this is a powerful speech, Aaron, isn’t it?
Aaron: Sure is.
Dr. Suri: He uses this phrase “military industrial complex” what does Eisenhower mean by that?
Aaron: Yeah, it’s the most famous part of the speech and there he was concerned about two things, one was the increase of corporate influence into the halls of government, quite literally the arms manufacturers would say, “No, no, you need seven planes, not five” right?
Dr. Suri: (laughs)
Aaron: And the converse of that is he was worried that if the federal government just spends so much on armaments, it will ultimately have a stultifying effect on the economy. So when he’s talking about a democratic processes and our structures of our society, he’s worried that we’ll spend– we’ll become a garrison state if we spend too much on armaments and moreover, we would become a corrupt state if we allow the people that make those armaments to constantly dictate what we need and of course you know this, but your listeners may not, the original concept was the military industrial congressional complex. He was quite deliberately concerned about how Congress was under the influence, the lawmakers, the holders of the purse, but he took that out at the last minute.
Dr. Suri: So there’s also a spiritual element to this, which people often forget when they talk about it, right? Is that important?
Aaron: I think it is and Eisenhower may have been speaking using the sort of conventional notion of spiritual, but I think it’s more helpful to think of it as, what are the cultural effects of constant preparations for warfare of having a large, organized military and so on and so forth—
Dr. Suri: And perhaps undemocratic effects, right?
Aaron: Well that is certainly what he was thinking about, right? So these are men who just came out of winning wars against totalitarian militarist governments, their deliberate message they took away was that if you give control of the state to a small group of people and they want to make war, they can group together all the resource, extract those resources, and create large armies and he was very worried about that and he was obviously worried about that in the Soviet Union as well.
So the question for him is how to prepare for possible conflict, deter the Soviet Union and China, while at the same time not destroying the economy, the politics, and the culture of America because what was well-known to Eisenhower, but is less well-known today is just how much people’s adulation of the military can really be turned towards other products and purposes. So people’s well-meaning sentiment of thanking the military for putting their lives in harm’s way for the collective defense is of course a laudable trait and a characteristic, but as soon as it starts being re-appropriated for other purposes or being demanded of people almost as a form of a price of entry for being an American, Eisenhower would have considered that undemocratic and I think I do, too.
Dr. Suri: So that’s probably where we should transition to the present, have we fallen into that today?
Aaron: Oh, I think absolutely. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Obviously Zachary won’t remember this, as will not most high schoolers or even college students today as all of them don’t remember a time when the United States wasn’t at war, right?
Dr. Suri: Right, right.
Aaron: So we have been in a state of constant conflict for seventeen years now and that changes the way Americans interact with their military and the military interacts with America. So our veterans and our active duty forces, indeed even our reservists, all have something on the order of a first-class platinum card citizenship in our country and that’s not how the country was designed. I mean is it okay to let the military board first on an airplane as a thank you? Yes, it’s the same way it’s okay to let, you know, pregnant mothers have a better parking spot so that they can get to the grocery store when it’s difficult, those kinds of things are fine, but when the military or people who have served in the military have, sort of, unimpeachable credentials to speak on what counts and what’s– on foreign policy, on the way that we treat our soldiers, or indeed other nations oversees, then I think something is wrong. And I speak as one who is often given the deference of “Well, I’m sure you know” just because I’ve served in the military and that’s not really healthy for our country. Citizens must not defer the hard work of thinking about and making a judgement about the use of lethal force when it’s done in their name, they must not defer those questions to “Well I’ll let the experts decide.”
Dr. Suri: Why has that happened?
Aaron: Part of it is just the small size of the military today, I think. It’s not, it’s actually not very large, it’s spread out all over the world, that’s certainly true, we have hundreds of bases in other countries, but the full force is just about 1.4 million people that’s active and reserve, which is about, you know, one half of one percent of the population– so it’s very small. And that’s good in a lot of ways, that’s cost-effective in a lot of ways. You shouldn’t have extra military just sitting on-hand for no reason– (Dr. Suri laughs) but it also then makes us a bit of a rare breed, right? In some quarters—
Dr. Suri: An elite class.
Aaron: An elite class. Where I grew up in the Northeast, you know, I was practically an albino, an albino buffalo, they were like “There is one! There’s a person in the military, that’s unusual.” So that coupled with specific policy choices after September 11th, which said, “American people, you don’t need to change anything, you don’t need to do anything, and we’re going to cut your taxes instead of raising them.” All of those things gave– effectively disconnected the citizenry from the wars we’re fighting in now and so if that’s happened then of course the citizens want to support the military, want to participate in their democracy, and so they usually do that by being gentle and uncritical. We don’t need to go into all of it, but a lot of this also has to do with backlash after Vietnam where we really, almost ripped the national contract in half by drafting people, sending them to war, and when they came home they faced intense criticism sometimes for fighting in that war.
Dr. Suri: Right, so we’ve almost gone the opposite direction now, where we’re uncomfortable offering any critical thoughts unless we’ve actually been there ourselves, right?
Aaron: I think it’s fair to say that criticizing the military remains the third rail in American politics, more than almost anything else. If you want to see a politician go down, find footage of him or her critiquing with emotion some problem of the military or of our foreign policy and it is immediately transformed into an attack on the troops, which then raises up the specter of Vietnam.
Dr. Suri: And conversely, hugging the military provides a justification for all kinds of other bad behavior, doesn’t it?
Aaron: Well that, the expression that the, you know, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” preceded September 11th—
Dr. Suri: That’s Samuel Johnson in the 18th-century.
Aaron: But it exists even today and with good reason.
Dr. Suri: So let’s spend the let’s couple of minutes then, talking about, I think, what’s on the minds of many of us. If we recognize what you’ve said so eloquently and with such a strong factual basis here, about the changing role of the military, going from being an element of a larger mosaic to now being in some ways, a large– a small, but elite part of our society and in some ways our relationship between democracy and military having broken down in some ways, how should we begin to talk about this? How can young people who have not served or have served, but only in a small ways– how should we begin to talk about this in a way that’s respectful of those like yourself who have served, but also respectful of our democracy and the need to institute some, perhaps, serious reforms that members of the military might not always support? How do we talk about this?
Aaron: Right, right. Well I think we should start with the fact that I hear just as much complaining inside the military of people saying, you know, “For god sakes, people just defer to us and they actually push us into politics where we don’t want to be.” So I think there is room for citizens to– if not push back isn’t the right term, to engage critically with the military and to insist that they have the right to do so since, in fact, they, the citizens, are funding the military and the military operates on behalf of the citizenry. So I don’t think you’d actually find too much pushy back inside the military for citizens to say, “Hey, wait a minute, you’re accountable to me” that’s appropriate.
Dr. Suri: Well what I’ve confronted though, is even with military officer, in my courses, when I say critical things about the war in Iraq and I try to be respectful because I think that we should be respectful to the valiant, courageous service of many of our service men and women. Nonetheless, when I make a statement such as “We did not win the war in Iraq” there’s often quite a lot of push back from those who were there.
Aaron: Yes, I think that also is part of a broader cultural divide and probably both sides have something to work on here. The– it’s true that the, nobody likes to have their work second-guessed—
(laughs)
Dr. Suri: Professors—
Aaron: Professors included, but at the same time, there’s an added element of difficulty when the military is talking about a war that hasn’t gone well, right? We’ve lost people in it, we’ve lost friends, we’ve experienced things that make it hard to acknowledge political realities, if those political realities seem to sort of carry a message of “It wasn’t worth it. We shouldn’t have done it.” that gets transformed, in one psyche that gets transformed into “My friend died for no reason” pretty quickly.
Dr. Suri: Sure.
Aaron: Now, that’s actually a problem for the military more than it is for the citizens. The citizen should say, “I’m not talking about the friend of yours that died, I’m talking about the specific choice to start a war” right? So I– this is a strange piece of advice, but I would almost, sort of, like to issue a clarion call to the untrained, non-military civilian to demand their right to speak on issues of foreign policy and to demand their right to speak on the role of the military– its budget, its personnel, its organization, its acquisitions. And if military members do push back in those conversations, keep in mind that they’re doing the same thing that all experts do. They say “Wait a minute, you don’t know about plumbing, I’m the plumber, this is the way it is” right? Or, “You don’t know about roofing, I’m the roofer, this is the way it is,” that works on the specific topic of expertise, but it doesn’t work when it moves beyond that.
And so you can say, “You may be the roofer, but I own the house and I’m making a decision here. So I’m deciding whether or not I’ll pay you for job X” that’s appropriate also with the military. Just because somebody served in Afghanistan, does not mean that they know everything about the War in Afghanistan. If you’re asking them, “How was the weather in Helmand?” They are exactly the right person to ask. If you are asking them, “What are the larger dynamics between the various factitious Pashtun tribes and how will that effect an overall political settlement?” I don’t think a corporal in the marines will have any special insight on that and should not be able to hide behind some narrative that “I was there and so therefore I have, really the authoritative statement on the subject.”
Dr. Suri: So for my last question for today, Aaron, do you see us moving in that direction? I mean, in some ways, I’m very optimistic because I think we’re seeing a whole new generation of people get into politics who share these concerns about the ways we’ve used our military– some are veterans themselves, but they do seem to be raising these questions in a way that an older generation hasn’t. Do you think that’s fair? Is there a generational issue here?
Aaron: I’m sure there is and I think the farther we get away from Vietnam, the better for thinking about civil-military relations. Here’s sort of the irony of it all, we’re in a lot of ways, victims of our own success. So in the typical things Eisenhower was talking about for militarization, or militarism, he was talking about economic effects and political effects and then cultural effects. We have a very sustainable defense budget model– I know it’s enormous, it’s the largest in the world, it’s 700 billion, people are almost astonished by that number—
Dr. Suri: It’s so much money.
Aaron: It is so much money. It’s also only 17% of the federal budget and about 3.5 to 4% of GDP, which in the broad scheme of how nations carve up the pie for guns and butter, that’s actually a very sustainable number. We can keep paying that—
Dr. Suri: Yeah, we were up to 5% through much of the Cold War, right?
Aaron: Oh geez, no, of 10% by ’53, at the height of Korea, right?
Dr. Suri: Right, right.
Aaron: We also have a sustainable personnel model. It isn’t very big and when the economy is doing very well, as it is now, it’s a little hard to make the numbers for recruiting, but in any other times it’s just fine, there’s a normal HR problem of keeping it sourced with people for pay that they deem acceptable for the work they’re doing. And so that could go on, almost beyond the view and the understanding and the common sense of the viewer. Where it’s not sustainable, unfortunately, is in things that are extraordinarily complex like defense acquisitions where the way we buy our things is just foolish and perhaps how often the President ends up using the military overseas for problems that are not fundamentally military problems.
Dr. Suri: Right, without a declaration of war.
Aaron: Certainly without a declaration of war and also often without an end date, or without a clear objective stated and named and accepted that is something the military can do. So that can’t keep going on, I would challenge your listeners, they can look it up if they don’t know, how many countries is the United States using direct lethal force in right now? In other words, where we are dropping the bombs, I know the answer, do you?
(laughs)
Dr. Suri: Great. Zachary, before we close, your thoughts, do you see your generation asking these tough questions, or are you too afraid to talk about these issues?
Zachary: I mean, this is probably the one time that I wouldn’t be very optimistic, but I don’t really think that my friends really think about this issue very much. I think there’s still a lot of, like, people, like a lot of deference towards servicemen even within my grade and a lot of people are talking about other political issues, but no one’s really talking about– And I talk about it with my friends sometimes, but no one– very few people that I know agree that the military is, shouldn’t be put on like a high pedestal like we do today.
Dr. Suri: Well maybe one of the lessons today then is that this history that Aaron has gone through, incredibly rapidly and eloquently– that this history is really helpful because I think what we’ve covered today so well are the ways in which the military has always been essential to our democracy, but its place has changed over time in a way we often don’t comment upon and it’s probably the most patriotic thing to say “Look, this is what the founders thought, we’re not going to go back to that, but let’s use that as a baseline and let’s critically evaluate where we are.” Respectfully providing the coverage and attention to the valiant service of men and women from our society, but also asking about the ways that this force has been used and the ways it fits into our democracy today. One of the most important parts of our show is actually learning to talk about these kinds of issues and thank you, Aaron and Zachary for being a part of that today and thank you for joining us on “This is Democracy.”
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Speaker 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at HarrisonLemke.com.
Speaker 3: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.
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