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| Members of the U.S. Army 1st Calvary Division on a M1A3 Abrams tank in West Potomac Park ahead of Saturday’s parade. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) |
| “A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life,” wrote the great British author George Orwell in 1941. He argued that the “parade-step” of a national army reflected something about a country’s “social atmosphere.” The goose-step adopted by a number of fascist militaries during World War II, Orwell observed, was “simply an affirmation of naked power” and, consequently, “is one of the most horrible sights in the world.” In Washington this Saturday, we’ll get a glimpse of another version of this “ritual dance.” President Donald Trump’s long-sought army parade will rumble through the American capital. Some 150 vehicles, dozens of helicopters, various planes and 6,700 soldiers are expected to take part. There will be fireworks and flybys. “The Army’s parachute team, the Golden Knights,” my colleagues reported, “will drop into the event, delivering an American flag to Trump, who will be watching the proceedings from a reviewing stand.” The display marks an unusual moment in a country that traditionally doesn’t do the type of military parades that are annual occurrences elsewhere, with tanks rolling down boulevards and intercontinental ballistic missiles wheeled out in a show of force. To be sure, there’s widespread respect accorded to the U.S. military and its veterans in many arenas of American life, not least in arenas and stadiums where homages to the troops precede most sporting events. When Trump reportedly came up with the idea of staging his own parade after attending France’s Bastille Day celebrations during his first term, it was met with a degree of incredulity from Republican colleagues. The United States has the world’s biggest military footprint and doesn’t need a martial celebration to project its power across the globe, suggested Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) in 2018. “America is the most powerful country in all of human history, everybody knows it, and we don’t need to show it off,” he said.
Seven years later, Trump finally gets to show it off. The parade is happening on a day that commemorates the Army’s 250th anniversary and, coincidentally, Trump’s birthday. Kennedy remains skeptical — “We’re a lion, and a lion doesn’t have to tell you it’s a lion,” he told reporters this week — but a loyalist GOP won’t thwart the effort, even as it seeks to slash critical funding on all sorts of other federal programs. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin) told my colleagues that “you cannot put a price tag on patriotism. You cannot. And celebrating arguably — not even arguably — the best army that has ever existed in the history of the planet deserves attention.” This parade, then, offers a glimpse of the “social atmosphere” — as Orwell put it — of a fractious nation. The buildup to it has been marked by Trump’s bellicose speeches before troops that raised fears of the politicization of the military. There’s also the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles in reaction to public unrest stoked by federal attempts to carry out a mass deportation campaign of undocumented migrants. In the shadow of the parade, “No Kings” protests are planned across the country, including in Washington. Trump warned earlier this week that those protesting the parade are “going to be met with very big force.” Orwell’s remarks about parades were included in an essay he wrote in 1941 about the character of his own country. The Nazi war machine had trained its eye on Britain — “highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me,” the essay opens — and Orwell was thinking through why the British military did not itself choose to goose-step, a brutal move that “is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face.” He concluded that British soldiers don’t do it “because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.” Instead, the British military march is “without definite swagger,” Orwell wrote, and belongs to a society “ruled by the sword … but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.” Historians can quibble with Orwell’s reading here of British identity and history, replete with its own vast legacy of violence. But he was gesturing to a kind of civic restraint and sensibility he saw wholly absent in Nazi Germany. “Orwell is describing a world where the army has become an extension of the personal will of a dictator,” Laura Beers, a historian at American University and author of “Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century,” told me. Whatever the optics and rhetoric surrounding Trump’s parade, “we haven’t reached that moment,” she said. Still, the deployments of U.S. active duty soldiers within U.S. cities is a sign of “the sword being pulled from the scabbard,” Beers added. Trump is keen to project a certain image of dominance and strength. It’s unclear how well the message will be received — about 6 in 10 Americans, according to a new Associated Press poll, think the exercise is a waste of government funds. That may be beside the point. “The reason he is doing the military parade is not for flexing, it is to show he is willing to break norms with the military,” Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican consultant who is critical of Trump, told my colleagues. | ||||||||||||