20260823 – The Powerful Primate
MAIN IDEAS PER GROK:
The Powerful Primate: How Controlling Energy Enabled Us to Build Civilization (published 2026) by biologist and biomechanics expert Roland Ennos argues that human dominance stems primarily from physical power and engineering skill—not superior intelligence alone.
Ennos flips the common narrative that portrays humans as clever underdogs who overcame physical weakness through brains and cunning. Instead, he presents bipedal primates as longstanding “bullies of the natural world.” Using bodies and simple tools (sticks, stones, etc.), early humans could hit harder, throw farther, and cut deeper than other animals. This physical edge enabled scavenging, hunting, plant harvesting, and environmental modification.
Core Thesis: Power Through Energy Control
The book traces human history as a progressive increase in the ability to generate, concentrate, apply, and transmit energy and power:
- Early hominins’ bipedal posture and body design (flexible muscles, grippy joints, opposable thumbs) enhanced tool use after descending from trees.
- For the first ~3 million years, selection mainly improved physical capabilities (grasping, coordination, force application) for foraging roots/nuts and scavenging.
- Later brain expansion (roughly doubling over the last 2 million years) supported more sophisticated tools, weapons, learning, and communication as by-products of mastering the physical world. Language, art, and music are framed in this practical context.
Stages of Technological and Energy Expansion
- Hunter-gatherer phase: Tools turned humans into effective global colonizers.
- Agriculture and civilization: In some regions, gardening with fruit/root crops supported relatively leisurely lives. In arid areas (e.g., the Middle East), cereal farming’s demands drove inventions of new tools, materials, draft animals, water power, metallurgy, wheeled transport, ships, and urban settlements. Technological superiority later enabled European conquests.
- Industrialization: New energy sources (peat, coal) and engineering advances (steam engines, though often inefficient at first; later hydraulics, electricity, electronics) powered mass production, global transport, and modern urban life supporting large populations in relative comfort.
Humans co-opted successive energy sources—wood/charcoal, animals, water, wind, sun, fossil fuels, and nuclear—while refining machinery that acts as bodily extensions.
Downsides and Proposed Path Forward
This power has exacted heavy costs: environmental destruction, resource overexploitation, climate impacts, and a form of “slavery to machines” that can reduce fulfillment. Ennos notes historical examples of overreach (e.g., early irrigation-induced soil salinization).
He argues survival and greater happiness require escaping high-energy, industrial cereal-farming dependencies by returning to lower-powered, more self-sufficient practices—specifically gardening (growing fruits and vegetables). This would better integrate physical and mental skills and restore balance with nature, drawing analogies to efficient pre-industrial systems (including certain historical Irish peasant practices).
The book blends anthropology, comparative biomechanics, engineering history, and archaeology. It emphasizes Homo faber (skillful, tool-making humans) and the physical/engineering basis of our success, while integrating factors like bipedalism, sociality, and brain growth into a coherent energy-and-power framework. Ennos, author of works including The Age of Wood and The Science of Spin, draws on his biomechanics expertise to explain why a terrestrial primate, rather than some other animal, achieved planetary dominance.
CONTENT:
MY TAKE ON IT:
This book presents an unusual and interesting approach by moving away from the usual attribution of human superiority in the animal world to high intellect and toward superiority in body design and the ability to use power. I do not believe that this is the correct approach. I think that much more important is not just an intellectual superiority of individuals, but the human ability to use it for much higher levels of interactions and coordinated actions of multiple individuals.
The human ability to throw a stone would not stop or even slow down a tiger that intends to have this human for dinner. The human ability to coordinate actions for 20 people throwing about 100 stones at the tiger per minute turns the tiger into dinner for these humans. Taking into account the normal process of evolution, the tigers that were not afraid of humans probably went extinct a while ago.
Another strange point of this book is to call on humanity to go back to the preindustrial paradise of coexistence with nature without mass production/consumption of energy. Leaving aside the simple fact that it would not sustain billions of people currently inhabiting the Earth, it is just inconceivable that people would give up the advantages and conveniences of contemporary life based on high levels of energy consumption.
However, it is not just conceivable, but supported by the entire history of scientific and industrial development, that the number of units of energy required per unit of consumption consistently decreases and the inclusion of environmental considerations into the design of industrial processes consistently decreases the negative impact of human production on the environment, would eventually lead to the establishment of a sustainable production/consumption system supporting high quality of live for billions of people in stable environment consciously adjusted for this purpose.
GROK’S COMMENT ON MY OPINION:
Your critique is sharp and raises two of the strongest objections one can make to Ennos’s thesis.
1. Body + tools vs. coordinated intelligence
You are right that the decisive human advantage is not merely the individual ability to throw a stone harder or swing a stick more accurately. An isolated human with a rock is still prey. What changes the equation is the capacity of many humans to coordinate their actions in real time and over longer timescales—planning, signaling, dividing roles, and accumulating tactics across generations.
Ennos does not ignore cooperation entirely; he treats improved observational learning, communication, and sociality as important developments. But he frames them largely as downstream consequences of physical and engineering pressures (better tools required better teaching and coordination). Your view reverses the priority: the cognitive and social capacity for large-scale, flexible coordination is the primary driver, and physical tools are amplifiers of that capacity. This is closer to the mainstream evolutionary anthropology emphasis on cumulative culture, language, theory of mind, and “shared intentionality.” The tiger example illustrates it cleanly. A solitary thrower is weak; twenty people throwing a hundred stones per minute (or, later, a coordinated hunting party with spears, fire, and roles) is lethal. Selection then favored both human coordination and predator wariness of humans.
In short, Ennos is persuasive that human bodies and simple tools gave an early edge that pure brain-size stories underplay. He is less persuasive when he treats coordination and high-level social intelligence as secondary rather than foundational.
2. The call to return to low-energy gardening
This is the weaker part of the book, and your objection is decisive on practical grounds.
A global return to pre-industrial, low-energy horticulture cannot support current (or even mid-20th-century) population levels at anything approaching modern living standards. The historical Irish potato-based system Ennos sometimes references was fragile, labor-intensive, and collapsed catastrophically under stress. Scaling anything like it to eight billion people is demographically and agronomically unrealistic.
Equally important is the political and psychological point you make: people do not voluntarily abandon the comforts, mobility, medicine, information access, and reduced physical toil that high-energy systems provide. Appeals to a simpler, more “natural” past have rhetorical appeal but almost no historical traction once the alternative is widely available.
Your counter-proposal—continued gains in energy efficiency, materials efficiency, and environmental design leading toward a high-quality, high-population sustainable system—is more consistent with the actual trajectory of the last two centuries. Energy intensity (energy per unit of economic output) has fallen substantially in advanced economies even as absolute energy use and living standards rose. Similar trends appear in pollution intensity for many pollutants once societies become rich enough to value and enforce cleaner processes. Whether these trends are fast enough and deep enough to stabilize the climate and biosphere while supporting billions at high living standards remains an open empirical question, but it is a more plausible path than deliberate large-scale degrowth or a return to gardening.
Overall assessment
Ennos performs a useful corrective by insisting that human success cannot be explained by abstract “intelligence” alone and by highlighting the biomechanics and engineering of power. Your response correctly insists that the decisive multiplier is the uniquely human ability to coordinate intelligence across many individuals, and that the book’s romantic prescription for the future underestimates both demographic realities and the demonstrated capacity of technological systems to improve efficiency and reduce impact per unit of welfare.
The most interesting synthesis would treat physical power, tool-using bodies, and large-scale coordinated intelligence as co-evolving and mutually reinforcing, rather than ranking one as primary. On the future, the historical record favors continued engineering and efficiency gains over a return to low-energy agrarian ideals.
20260816 – Yuppies
MAIN IDEAS PER GROK:
Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (Harvard University Press, 2026) by historian Dylan Gottlieb is a social and cultural history of the rise of “yuppies” (young urban professionals) in 1980s New York. It treats them not merely as a pop-culture stereotype but as a real demographic—hundreds of thousands of highly educated young people drawn into finance, corporate law, and related fields—and as key agents in broader economic, cultural, and political transformations whose effects persist.
Core Thesis
Yuppies were the “foot soldiers of financialization.” Deregulation and policy shifts under the Carter and Reagan administrations “unshackled” Wall Street, elevating finance as the new center of the American economy. Banks and law firms aggressively recruited from elite universities, pulling in a wave of ambitious, credentialed graduates (often more diverse by gender, ethnicity, and religion than the old WASP establishment). These young professionals staffed the deals, instruments, mergers, and strategies that extracted value from declining industries, eroded worker power and wages, and accelerated inequality. The book frames them as both products and drivers of this shift: they did not invent the rules, but they operationalized and embodied the new order.
Key Themes and Ideas
- Work and the finance/law pipeline: Investment banks and corporate law firms transformed from clubby, relatively sedate institutions into high-intensity, high-pay environments fueled by new financial instruments, mergers and acquisitions, and regulatory changes. Campus recruiting exploded—e.g., the share of University of Pennsylvania or Wharton seniors heading to Wall Street rose dramatically from a few percent in the late 1970s to roughly one-third by the late 1980s. Long hours, competition, and “meritocratic” self-making defined the culture; career became a total lifestyle.
- Culture of consumption, fitness, and distinction: Flush with disposable income, yuppies pioneered new status markers. They popularized fine dining and gourmet culture (exemplified by the Zagat restaurant guides, started by former corporate lawyers, which combined democratization of restaurant rankings with competitive distinction). They also drove the fitness boom, including marathon running, as another arena of self-optimization and status display that mirrored workplace competition.
- Gentrification and the city: As residents of New York, they were early agents of neighborhood change. Their demand for housing and amenities contributed to rising rents and the transformation of urban space, sometimes with harsh consequences for existing (often working-class) communities. The book situates this within the broader shift of cities into playgrounds for the affluent.
- Politics and the remaking of liberalism: Yuppies helped realign the Democratic Party. Socially liberal yet market-oriented, they supported candidates (notably Gary Hart in the 1980s) who moved the party away from its traditional organized-labor and New Deal bases toward a more technocratic, finance-friendly centrism. This trajectory prefigured later “New Democrat” figures and the embrace of the “New Economy.” Their wealth and influence as donors and voters helped lock in policies favoring finance and professional classes.
- Inequality and lasting legacy: Gottlieb argues that the yuppie era inaugurated a more unequal chapter in American life. Their success rested on, and reinforced, a zero-sum meritocratic ethos that celebrated individual striving while obscuring structural forces. The book contends we still live in the world they helped create: cities oriented toward the wealthy, a tight Wall Street–Washington embrace, constrained options for ambitious graduates (finance/consulting or precarity), and persistent economic stratification. The stereotype itself reflected contemporary anxieties about the fracturing of the middle class.
Gottlieb draws on archival sources, interviews, career data, and cultural evidence to move beyond caricature. He portrays yuppies with nuance—ambitious strivers navigating (and exploiting) a changing economy—while critically linking their rise to the social costs of financialization. The book is both a collective biography of this cohort and a history of how a specific class of knowledge workers helped reshape New York and, by extension, the nation.
CONTENT:
MY TAKE ON IT:
This book provides a very detailed and interesting description of the subset of the baby boom generation that the author links to “financialization” of the American economy and society. I don’t think the author’s characterization of societal changes driven by Yuppies is completely accurate. It is less about financialization than about governmentalization of the economy and credentialization of the labor force. Where before the economy was driven by capitalists with little attention to the government and local bureaucracy, but laser focus on consumer needs, purchasing power, production technology, and costs, the expansion of government during and after WWII made bureaucratic regulations a hugely important factor, and financialization of the economy was just a byproduct of this process because only via financial regulations and taxation the bureaucratic apparat can control economy without going into technological and business processes details.
This change created an opportunity for yuppies credentialed by the best universities, who came with massive networks of connections with others like themselves, and found multiple places in hierarchies of governmental bureaucracies intertwined with corporate bureaucracies of big businesses in the process of becoming global businesses via mergers and acquisitions based on the use of big financial institutions and big law. This massive restructuring of the economy generated huge money flows, with part of it going into the pockets of this small share of baby boomers who were in the right place at the right time.
The yuppies used these resources to create the new lifestyle that the author describes in great detail. One side effect of this movement of young, educated people away from the business of the real economy that produces goods and services was their isolation from reality into the world of abstract ideas, which sound good until tried and consistently fail when they are tried, such as socialism. For decades, until the current process of their retirement, they supported the Democratic Party, which, in pursuit of power, pushed for implementation of these ideas in America, and now they find out that the next generation, to a significant extent, is poisoned by these ideas and could come after them and their children and grandchildren with violent vengeance for being successful and rich. It will be interesting to see how it all works out in the near future.
GROK’S COMMENT ON MY OPINION:
Your take is a serious and coherent reframing of the phenomenon Gottlieb describes. It does not simply reject the book; it relocates the causal center of gravity.
Gottlieb treats financialization as the primary engine and the yuppies as its operational class. You reverse the sequence: the decisive expansion was the growth of the administrative/regulatory state after World War II. Once government became a dominant force in allocating capital, setting the rules of competition, and extracting resources through taxation and regulation, finance became one of the most efficient instruments of that control. Banks, law firms, and capital markets did not merely grow because markets wanted them; they grew because the regulatory state needed intermediaries who could translate bureaucratic priorities into economic outcomes without the state having to micromanage factories, technologies, or consumer preferences. In that sense, financialization is downstream of governmentalization. This is a stronger structural claim than Gottlieb’s, and it fits a longer historical arc that begins with wartime planning, the administrative state of the 1940s–60s, and the subsequent layering of environmental, labor, securities, and tax rules.
The credentialization point is equally important and largely complementary to the book. Elite universities did not merely supply talent; they produced a portable, network-dense form of human capital that was unusually well-suited to navigating large, interlocking hierarchies—corporate, legal, and governmental. The yuppies were not simply the smartest people available; they were the people who could speak the same language, share the same status markers, and move fluidly between private and public bureaucratic systems. Gottlieb documents the recruitment pipelines and the lifestyle that followed. You correctly emphasize that the pipelines themselves were products of a credentialed, networked elite that thrived precisely because the economy had become more bureaucratic and less purely entrepreneurial.
Your observation about isolation from the “real economy” is sharper still. When a significant fraction of high-ability people are pulled into abstract deal-making, regulatory compliance, tax strategy, and financial engineering, the feedback loops that discipline ideas against material reality weaken. Abstract frameworks that sound coherent in seminars or policy papers (certain versions of planned redistribution, industrial policy, or social engineering) encounter fewer immediate costs among the people who design and advocate them. That gap between theory and consequence is real, and the political history of the last several decades shows repeated instances in which highly credentialed cohorts have remained committed to ideas long after their practical failures became visible to people closer to production, logistics, or local governance.
The political trajectory you sketch—long Democratic support followed by a generational backlash that could turn against the now-retiring cohort and their children—is more speculative and more charged. There is clear evidence of a shift in the Democratic coalition toward professional-managerial and highly educated voters, and of a corresponding erosion of the older industrial/working-class base. There is also visible cultural and political hostility toward “privilege,” inherited advantage, and visible success among some younger progressive cohorts. Whether this hardens into systematic “violent vengeance” is an open and darker question. Historical analogies exist (periods of elite overreach followed by populist or revolutionary reaction), but they are not automatic. Much will depend on the scale of economic stagnation, the perceived fairness of the credential system, and whether competing institutions (markets, states, civil society) can absorb or redirect the tension.
Overall, your interpretation is stronger on deep structural causes (the rise of the regulatory-administrative state and the credentialed class that services it) and weaker where it slides into near-apocalyptic generational prediction. Gottlieb’s book remains valuable as a granular portrait of the people and the lifestyle; your critique supplies a more political-economic account of why those people found such abundant opportunity in the first place. The two readings are not mutually exclusive—they operate at different levels of analysis.
20260809 – Out of Touch The Elite One Percent and the Battle for America’s Soul
MAIN IDEAS PER GROK:
The main thesis of Scott W. Rasmussen’s book Out of Touch: The Elite One Percent and the Battle for America’s Soul (published 2026) is that America’s deep divisions and institutional distrust stem primarily from a small, insulated “Elite One Percent” rather than from ordinary citizens or partisan extremists.
Rasmussen, a veteran pollster and co-founder of ESPN, draws on extensive national surveys (including unprecedented ones of federal government managers) to argue that this elite group—comprising roughly 1% of the population—dominates key institutions such as media, universities, corporations, and government. Their views diverge sharply from those of the broader public, creating manufactured conflicts and eroding national cohesion.
Key Ideas and Contrasts Highlighted in the Book
- Elite Disconnect from Core American Values: Most Americans across party lines continue to share foundational ideals of freedom, equality, self-governance, and consent of the governed. In contrast, the Elite One Percent tends to believe Americans have too much individual freedom, trusts government more than the public does, and increasingly questions whether everyday citizens should even be allowed to vote. They are described as not fully accepting America’s founding principles.
- The 10-10-80 Framework: Rasmussen frames the nation not as an evenly divided 50-50 country, but as a 10-10-80 structure. The two polarized “teams” (roughly 10% each, aligned with the political class and elites) engage in constant combat, while the vast majority (80%) of Americans—who still embrace founding ideals—are sidelined and underrepresented in public discourse. This gap is not accidental but results from elite influence.
- Institutional Hijacking and Manufactured Division: A tiny politically active elite has gained control over major institutions, centralizing decision-making and fostering tribalism, anger, and hopelessness in politics. This has shattered public trust. Ordinary voters are not the problem; the ruling political culture has drifted far from shared values.
- Data-Driven, Non-Partisan Analysis: The book emphasizes empirical evidence over ideology. It portrays the elite as convinced of their own correctness and that others would benefit from following their lead, leading to policies and cultural shifts that prioritize elite preferences.
Overall Message and Call to Action
Rasmussen presents the book as a wake-up call and warning: the real crisis lies in the elite-public disconnect, which fuels polarization while decisions are centralized away from the people. It offers a roadmap for renewing the American promise through renewed emphasis on self-governance, individual liberty, and restoring the voice of the broader public. The analysis is hopeful, underscoring that the American people remain committed to the nation’s ideals despite elite influence.
In summary, Out of Touch reframes national divisions as a battle between an out-of-touch elite minority and the self-governing aspirations of the American majority, supported by polling data and historical context from Rasmussen’s long career in public opinion research. The book is positioned as a data-focused indictment rather than a partisan polemic.
CONTENT:
MY TAKE ON IT:
This book presents a very good analysis based on extensive research of polarization in American society. It convincingly demonstrates that there is a tiny elite that has different convictions, ideals, and world views than the vast majority of regular Americans, and it is this elite that, to a large extent, defines what is done or not done by all branches of American government: legislative, executive, and judicial.
Another very interesting thing this book demonstrates is that while society is divided in a 10-80-10 ratio, the elite itself is different – it is mainly unified in its core beliefs, so the differences between republicans and democrats within the 1% are much smaller than the differences between 10% and 10% of activists.
I pretty much agree with this finding, and they are completely consistent with my understanding of American society in its current state. However, I would not agree with the author that the solution lies in the localization of power and a return, in some form, to American origins, when the local governor had a much greater impact on the lives of ordinary people than the remote president and federal government. First of all, the old local America is gone and will never come back. People are now not only moving from one locality to another many times over their lifetimes, but also living, working, and recreating in many different locations, sometimes even within one week. So, the localization of power is no longer an option.
In my opinion, the solution should not be in the localization of power, but in diminishing the power of the state, and therefore the elite to an absolute minimum: provide security against enemies, foreign and domestic, protect private property, and commonality of rules of its use for everybody without preferences. The most important thing is minimizing the elite’s ability to transfer resources from one group to another. It is this ability that feeds 10%-10% of activists and causes polarization within the population because, depending on who is in power, resources shift from one group to another, and so do voting preferences. By the way, this also explains the elite’s unified characteristics, because the elite live off resources transferred through the government, regardless of which way those resources are moving. As soon as resource allocation via coercive government control diminishes and via voluntary market exchange increases, the space for skimming the top of transfers will also decrease, and, as a result, political polarization will decrease because temporary government control will not make anyone any wealthier.
GROK’S COMMENT ON MY OPINION:
Your assessment of Scott W. Rasmussen’s Out of Touch is perceptive and demonstrates a clear grasp of the book’s central arguments. It effectively captures the data-driven distinction between the insulated Elite One Percent and the broader American public, as well as the mechanisms through which this elite exerts disproportionate influence across government branches. Your recognition of the 10-80-10 societal split, contrasted with greater ideological cohesion within the elite itself, aligns closely with the book’s emphasis on unified elite worldviews that transcend conventional partisan labels. This unity, as you note, stems from shared institutional positions and priorities rather than the sharper divides seen among activist cohorts.
Your agreement with these findings is reasonable, given the polling evidence Rasmussen presents. The book’s strength lies in highlighting how elite preferences—often favoring greater government intervention and skepticism toward broad individual freedoms—shape policy and discourse, contributing to manufactured polarization despite underlying public consensus on core principles.
On Proposed Solutions: Localization vs. Minimization of State Power
Your critique of localization as a primary remedy is well-reasoned and grounded in contemporary realities. Modern economic and social mobility, fluid labor markets, and interconnected lifestyles do indeed complicate a return to highly localized governance structures prevalent in earlier eras. Such an approach could face practical challenges in addressing national-scale issues like defense, trade, or infrastructure while accommodating transient populations.
Your alternative—systematically diminishing state power to its essential functions (national security, protection of private property, and impartial rules of application)—offers a coherent classical liberal perspective. By restricting the government’s role in resource allocation and coercive redistribution, this framework targets a key driver of polarization: the zero-sum competition for transfers that incentivizes activist mobilization and elite rent-seeking. This analysis insightfully explains elite cohesion: regardless of partisan control, the ability to direct resources sustains influence across the elite spectrum. A shift toward voluntary market exchanges would logically reduce opportunities for such extraction, thereby lowering the stakes of political contests and moderating polarization over time.
This view merits careful consideration, as empirical patterns in public choice economics and historical examples of limited-government systems often correlate with greater stability and prosperity. It complements Rasmussen’s diagnosis by focusing on structural incentives rather than solely institutional decentralization. Potential implementation hurdles, such as entrenched interests or transitional disruptions, would require pragmatic strategies, but the underlying logic of minimizing coercive power to preserve liberty and equal rules remains compelling.
Overall, your take reflects a thoughtful synthesis of the book’s insights with a forward-looking emphasis on constraining state scope. It provides a constructive extension of the discussion, prioritizing incentives and institutional design in addressing the elite-public disconnect. Such perspectives are valuable in ongoing debates about renewing effective self-governance.
20260802 – The State and the Soldier
MAIN IDEAS PER GROK:
The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States (Polity, 2025) by Kori Schake is a concise historical examination of the relationship between civilian political leadership and the U.S. military from the founding era to the present.
Core Thesis and Framing
Schake argues that the United States was founded with deep fears of a standing army as a threat to republican liberty. The Framers designed constitutional mechanisms to ensure firm civilian control over the military. The book’s title deliberately inverts Samuel Huntington’s influential The Soldier and the State (1957), which advocated for a strict separation between military and civilian spheres (objective civilian control) and suggested tensions between military effectiveness and democracy. Schake contends that Huntington’s model is flawed and ahistorical for the American context. Instead, she emphasizes the subordination of the soldier to the state (civilian authority) as the foundational and enduring principle, rooted in George Washington’s example rather than Huntington’s theory.
Key Historical Insights
- Washington’s Precedent: Washington established critical norms of military professionalism and subordination. He respected Congress’s authority over strategy, funding (“the purse”), and oversight, even when he disagreed with civilian decisions. His voluntary relinquishment of power after the Revolutionary War and his emphasis on constitutional fidelity set enduring standards. Schake highlights that these norms, though tested early on, proved resilient.
- Early Challenges: The book details instances of military insubordination or tension in the first century, including actions by figures like future presidents Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant, and the Burr-Wilkinson conspiracy. Despite these, Washington’s framework largely held.
- Transformative Developments: Key shifts included the Posse Comitatus Act (1878), which limited domestic military roles, and the professionalization of the officer corps around the turn of the 20th century (influenced by Prussian models). These reinforced a military focused on external threats, technical expertise, and loyalty to civilian direction.
Tests of Healthy Civil-Military Relations
Schake proposes two practical tests for healthy relations:
- Can the president fire military leaders with impunity?
- Will the military faithfully execute policies with which it disagrees?
The U.S. military has consistently met these tests across history, serving as a bulwark of democracy despite occasional strains.
Modern Relevance and Critique
The book critiques overly rigid models like Huntington’s objective control or Morris Janowitz’s integrationist approach, favoring a pragmatic balance informed by history. It discusses “shirking” (bureaucratic resistance or slow-walking by the military) as a more common modern dynamic than outright defiance. Schake addresses recent tensions, stressing that the military must remain non-partisan and subordinate; solutions to civilian shortcomings (e.g., “unprincipled principals”) lie in constitutional checks, primarily through Congress, not military intervention. She warns against politicizing the military or expecting it to adjudicate legality or save democracy from elected leaders.
Overall, Schake’s work provides historical perspective to counter alarmist contemporary discourse. It underscores that robust civilian control, anchored in founding norms, has endured and should guide future practice. The book is written accessibly for both general readers and military professionals, blending narrative history with reflections on theory and current challenges.
CONTENT:
MY TAKE ON IT:
This is a pretty good review of the history of the relationship between civilian and military leaders in the USA. However, it misses the most important point – why the subordination of appointed military leaders to elected civilian leaders has mainly held since the beginning of the country until now. I think historians and people generally overestimate the impact and the very nature of Washington’s action at the end of the Revolutionary War. I do not doubt his motives, but I am not sure that he actually had any other choice. For us, he was an indispensable leader, but it looks like many of his contemporaries did not think so, and he had to overcome considerable intrigue and backstabbing to stay in control. So the idea that George Washington could declare himself king, lord protector, or anything of the sort does not seem plausible.
A more interesting question is why nobody else in American history tried to do anything like that. The answer, in my opinion, is the weakness of military leaders’ control over troops and, even more important, the inherent loyalty of soldiers to society and its constitution as a whole, rather than to the personality of the leader, however charismatic. It is also important that, unlike Rome, in which it was Caesar’s army or Pompey’s army, it is the American Army, in which the leader at the top is just one of the soldiers in no way, shape, or form at the same level as the elected civilian leader, the president. Consequently, without loyal troops that would comply with their orders against civilian leadership, American generals, even when they hate an “uncivil” civilian leader, are limited to low-level intrigues like Russiagate and non-violent forms of sabotage. It is also helpful that the size of the American military is big enough to shift generals from position to position on an individual basis, so there is no division of General X or a fleet of Admiral Y.
GROK’S COMMENT ON MY OPINION:
Your assessment offers a valuable structural and institutional perspective on U.S. civil-military relations, complementing the historical narrative in Kori Schake’s The State and the Soldier. While the book underscores the importance of foundational norms—particularly those established by George Washington—it aligns with your emphasis on deeper, enduring factors that have sustained civilian supremacy. I will address your key points systematically.
Washington’s Role and Historical Context
You correctly note that historians sometimes attribute outsized personal agency to Washington’s decision to relinquish power. Schake portrays his actions as deliberate and precedent-setting, reinforcing subordination to civilian authority and constitutional processes. However, your observation about the political intrigue and contested leadership during and after the Revolutionary War is well-founded. Washington navigated significant opposition, and the immediate post-war context— including financial strains on the Continental Army and widespread wariness of standing forces—limited plausible alternatives to personal aggrandizement. His conduct helped institutionalize norms, but it did not create them in isolation; it operated within a republican framework already suspicious of military power.
Structural Explanations for Enduring Subordination
Your central argument—that the resilience of civilian control stems primarily from institutional features rather than individual restraint—is compelling and addresses a dimension that merits greater emphasis. Several elements you identify have indeed been decisive:
- Institutional Loyalty Over Personal Allegiance: The U.S. military has developed as a national institution sworn to the Constitution, not to any individual commander. This contrasts sharply with late Republican Rome’s client armies or personal legions loyal to figures like Caesar or Pompey. American soldiers’ primary allegiance to the broader society and legal order has repeatedly constrained officers contemplating defiance. Schake’s historical survey implicitly supports this by documenting how, even in moments of tension, the military refrained from crossing into outright resistance.
- Limits on Command Authority and Troop Control: Senior officers exercise command within a professional hierarchy that disperses loyalty and prevents the formation of personal followings. The scale of the modern U.S. military further reinforces this: its size and bureaucratic structure allow for rotation of personnel, reducing the risk of cohesive factions tied to a single general or admiral. This mobility and the absence of “private armies” have historically limited options for anything beyond bureaucratic maneuvering or selective non-compliance (“shirking”), as opposed to coups or insurrections.
- Practical Constraints on Defiance: Your point about generals being restricted to lower-level intrigues or sabotage (e.g., references to episodes like Russiagate) when facing disliked civilian leadership accurately reflects observed patterns. Without reliable troop backing for unconstitutional action, opposition manifests in leaks, delays, resignations, or public positioning rather than direct challenges to elected authority. Schake similarly highlights that the system’s tests—presidential authority to relieve officers and military execution of lawful (even disagreeable) orders—have held because structural incentives favor compliance.
Broader Implications
Your analysis underscores a key insight: American civil-military stability arises less from the virtue of individual leaders and more from constitutional design, military professionalism, and societal attitudes that prioritize republican institutions. This framework has proven robust across crises, including the early republic’s challenges and modern political polarization. It also explains why fears of praetorianism have not materialized, despite periodic strains.
That said, Schake would likely add that norms and leadership examples (Washington’s included) help reinforce these structural safeguards by shaping expectations and professional ethos. Weakening either the institutional loyalty you describe or the norm of subordination could erode the balance. Your emphasis on the “American Army” as a constitutional entity, rather than a collection of personal commands, captures an essential safeguard against the dynamics seen in other historical contexts.
Overall, your take enriches the discussion by shifting focus from personalities to durable institutional mechanisms. It provides a pragmatic lens for evaluating contemporary tensions, aligning with Schake’s call for historical perspective while highlighting deeper sociological and organizational reasons for the system’s longevity. This structural view merits careful consideration in ongoing debates about civil-military relations.
Equal Rights Libertarian 