|
|
|
|
|
|
by joshuaellinger
2086 days ago
|
|
|
Military personnel are trained to be apolitical much more than you might realize from the outside. My information is from a cousin-in-law who just retired. If a few generals who sided with the president, they would face a lot of resignations all the way down the command change. In Germany in the 1940s, Hilter got control by literally assassinating the generals who opposed his takeover to take control. But even that would have likely failed without the massive economic crisis caused by the punitive settlement of WW I and without the unusual characteristics of German society. (no, Trump is not Hilter and the US in 2020 is not Germany in the 1930/40s.) We have tested it a couple of things in the US. Truman recalled MacArthur for attempting to publicly influence political opinion. I forget about the others. So... the mostly likely thing if it is close is that it takes a while but the political establishment throws it to Biden, Trump sulks into the sunset (maybe even prison eventually), and the Republicans don't care because they have just got a 6-3 on the Court for a generation. |
|
|
Jim Webb (Marine officer who earned a Navy Cross in the Vietnam war, novelist, and a Democratic Senator from Virginia) wrote that many military people who served in Vietnam became lifetime Republicans because they blamed Democrats for starting and managing the war, and then they felt abandoned by the Democrats when elements of the party aligned with the anti-war movement.
I think many military people serving recently and serving today had their bodies battered and bruised in the Iraq war working with an unappreciative population for a poorly administered war based on a lie by a Republican administration. You don't see them going on TV talk shows to discuss this, but you do see that Virginia (which has a large and growing percentage of those people in it) used to vote Republican and now it votes Democrat.
As I told a friend, "they want to keep their pensions."