Can the U.S. military hold the line in the gathering political storm?

Addicted as Mattis is to reading history, the possibility will not have escaped him that our troubles may escalate to violence and that the armed forces are civil strife’s final arbiter. He also knows that, even in our cold civil war, the armed forces cannot be neutral. Yes, the armed forces are America’s most respected institution. But the ruling class uses them to wage wars of which most Americans disapprove as well as to prototype the engineering it wishes to enforce on society in general. With military rigor, the armed forces enforce political correctness to advance or hold back (commissioned officers especially) in responsibility and rank. Officers trained not to dream of transgressing any of the countless directives concerning “diversity” and “sensitivity” have been presenting the American people with images of ships running aground and into each other as well as of prisoners taken without firing a shot and bowing to Iranians. What does “holding the line” mean? To what are the military, and we, to hold?

We can count on the ruling class making this question ever more problematic. That is because there is literally no end to the impositions political correctness will put on the military and on society at large. Not so long ago, because the military believed that enforcers of oaths must be held to their own word, it punished officers for marital infidelity. The courts found this a violation of basic rights. More recently, courts have discovered a basic right to declare one’s own gender, regardless of personal plumbing. Because the ruling class conditions acceptance into society on acceptance of its impositions of P.C. fads, the military bowed and obeyed. What will officers have to swear or forswear tomorrow? No one can guess what the next imposition will be, or the one after that, because each imposition is less about the item being imposed than it is about the imposition itself. Thus the ruling class reiterates its power over its subjects by inflicting acceptance of ever new humiliations.