Not My Commander
Titles Make a Difference and Words Matter
John Ryder, a good friend of mine, wrote this.
I shall be presumptuous enough to speak on behalf of all of us and to request that those individuals who have access to the public, through the press or a classroom or a place in a governing body, no longer refer to the President of the United States as the country’s commander in chief. The issue came up when earlier this week, on Tuesday during one of the initial presentations of the House Managers in the impeachment trial of the former president, one of the managers was making the case that the rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 were not told to stop by then-President Trump, who could have effectively done so because, as the Congressman said, he was their commander in chief. I have heard a number of commentators and political figures talk this way, increasingly so it seems, in recent months.
The US Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, says that “The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States…” The president is the commander in chief of the country’s military, not of the country.
This may seem like a distinction without an important difference, but I suggest that the difference is important indeed. I am a civilian and a free citizen of a democratic republic, as are nearly all of my fellow citizens. I do not stand in a relation of command with anyone, never mind with a series of commanders with ever increasing authority, on top of which sits a commander in chief. We are all subject to the rule of law, of course, and there are more than a few bodies that have the legally sanctioned role of enforcing the law – various police bodies and the several sorts of courts are the most obvious. There are occasions in which members of those bodies, in the interest of law enforcement, may instruct me to do something, and I can properly be expected to follow such instructions.
Even in such cases, though, police and judges are not our commanders. They are in fact public servants, a status attested to by the fact that in many cases they or their own superiors are elected by the public. We are expected to do as they ask when they operate in their capacity as enforcers of the law, but that is the result of the function of the law, not a command relation. In fact, no one may command me to do anything, other than in the exercise of law enforcement or in such unusual circumstances as martial law. In the normal run of things, we are free citizens, and not subjects in a chain of command.
The reason this is important to bear in mind is that if we wish to remain free citizens of a democratic republic, we ought not to feed the habit of thinking of anyone as our commander, never mind our commander in chief. The more we accustom ourselves to thinking that we have a commander, the easier it will be for that condition to come about. It ought to be obvious to all of us by now that the future of our democratic republic is not guaranteed, as it can be threatened by the forces of authoritarianism, or by people who are being misled, or by politicians who cravenly seek what they think is their own self-interest. We do not need to add to this insecurity a self-inflicted tendency to think of ourselves as subjects of a commander rather than as free citizens of a democratic republic. We can avoid doing so with a bit of careful attention.