Eisenhower and the Threat of Military Overreach

In a timeless and ominously prophetic speech, Eisenhower left the nation after his eight years in office with a warning that no one at the time understood the significance of. Although Eisenhower had been at the very heart of America’s military might during World War II, he believed that what he and other American Americans had witnessed during that time was fundamentally different from the military industrial complex of the early 1960s. He started his speech with a warning against overly simplistic constructivist ideologies that replaced the slow relentless drive required to maintain freedom with a short term sprint that would supposedly catapult the world into a new era through either innovation or social progress. He denied that government research and coercive innovation were the solutions to safeguarding the liberties that had been paid for so dearly. He cautioned that the military industrial complex created a peacetime infrastructure of combat that had never existed before. While he recognized that the threat of the Soviet Union needed a counterpart, he also realized that the tension of keeping a massive operational arm of the government alive in peacetime while also maintaining liberty required a strong and educated populace who could push back on potential over-reach.

Eisenhower‘s first point to push back on quick fixes and portray good governance as the long and painful process that it is is a needed message for today. Agricultural progress, social growth, and military strength all come secondary to the maintenance of individual and communal liberties. He was clearly picturing technocrats who held a dream of progress above the traditional liberal principles of freedom. He recognized that rather than being one breakthrough away from the end of history, rather we are only one generation away from dissolution of all the liberties that World War II was fought for. His long-term, rather than short-term utopian mindset is exactly the sort of message that is needed today to walk our financial system slowly and painfully back to reality and to connect civic ambitions with the needs of citizens.…