For much of Vargas Llosa’s life, Peru was governed by an authoritarian presidency. However, liberal democracy and the rule of law would eventually triumph. During an event at Princeton in 2009, Mario Vargas Llosa celebrated the victory of freedom in Peru: “It is so strange and so beautiful, what has happened to us in recent days, to notice that the crew spoken about in the press and by the people in the street with respect and admiration is a civilized nation, facing its path with dignity and courage, and where a civil court judges and condemns the crimes of a dictator.”

In Latin America, memory regularly faced off with what Vargas Llosa called “dreams.” Vargas Llosa’s great gift as a writer was not denying dreams to his readers, but asking them instead to make reality a priority in their cultural, social, and especially political memory. In an era when authoritarians and leftists judge modern liberal society against an idealized or demonized past, the late Vargas Llosa’s literary canon is more important than ever.

Mario Vargas Llosa lived his early years with his mother in the city of Arequipa. Circumstance and geography prepared Mario for his careers—as it were—of literary genius and marital strife. Arequipa earned a reputation as Peru’s cultural heart in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What it lacked in size and commerce compared to its larger sister to the north, Lima, Arequipa made up for in the arts and literature. Books entered into Vargas Llosa’s blood early. So too did the idea of hopeless romance. His parents’ contentious relationship kept young Mario from even meeting his father until he was ten years old. Vargas Llosa moved with his mother to Lima when his parents reconciled during his adolescent years, but the most formative episode of his teenage life occurred when he matriculated at Lima’s most prominent military high school, Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado.

Military education, and the idea of hardening boys into men, marked the Latin American elite in the twentieth century. Vargas Llosa disliked Leoncio Prado from the outset of his time there, and left the school before he graduated to indulge an interest in journalism. Leoncio Prado left its mark, however, in the form of Vargas Llosa’s first novel, The Time of the Hero. The novel, set in a military school in Peru, is in many ways the most autobiographical of Vargas Llosa’s books. Masculinity, militarism, and the nature of social orders are all probed by the then 27-year-old writer who reacted so strongly against military authoritarianism to the point that he sympathized with Fidel Castro.

For Vargas Llosa, the paradox of a military-based masculine order—the based and red-pilled order of mid-century Peru—was that it was not a real order at all. It was a series of failed attempts to create stability based not on law but on raw human willpower. Peruvian critic and writer José Miguel Oviedo noted that, to some degree, in Vargas Llosa’s political economy the price of a military order was “treason,” the path of justice was that of debasement, and reparation for crime was the commission of another, subject only to moral, but not legal, sanction. “A clean conscience,” the cadets know, “might help you in heaven, but it won’t help your career.” A militarized social order, and by proxy an overly realized political masculinity, was a return to a state of nature shorn of the rule of law. Militarized Peru claimed to be an order where all “believe in the regulations,” but what really mattered was how someone interpreted those regulations.

During his sojourns in Spain throughout the 1960s, Vargas Llosa threw off his infatuation with Marxism and became that rarest of things for a twentieth-century Latin American: a man of the secular center right. Vargas Llosa positioned himself as a critic of both Marxism and Catholic traditionalism because he deemed them forms of authoritarianism. His 1981 masterpiece, The War of the End of the World, was set in the messianic Canudos rebellion of 1896–97, when traditionalist Catholics in Brazil’s rural interior took up arms against the newly formed Brazilian republic.

In the novel, the Canudos rebels’ traditional utopianism, or utopian traditionalism, is made more explicit in the comparison between the prosaic modern Brazilian republic’s inability to summon the type of enchantment the mysterious and charismatic folk preacher, The Counselor, regularly does as he envisions an apocalyptic confrontation with the newly declared Brazilian republic. The Counselor brought about miracles. “He turned the wolf into the lamb, he brought him into the fold. And because he turned wolves into lambs, because he gave people who knew only fear and hatred, hunger, crime, and pillaging reasons to change their lives, because he brought spirituality where there had been cruelty.” The republic—the conservative-liberal republic of the 1890s was hardly a social democratic state or even an irreligious one. Yet it was seen by the rebels as anti-Christian, precisely because it sought order in law rather than a politics of enchantment. The Canudos rebels believed the Brazilian republic sent “army after army to these lands to exterminate these people. How has Brazil, how has the world been overcome with such confusion as to commit such an abominable deed? Isn’t that sufficient proof that the Counselor is right, that Satan has indeed taken possession of Brazil, that the Republic is the Antichrist?”

The weakness of the Canudos rebels was not even the desire for re-enchantment, so much as it was the rejection of the epistemology that developed in the modern era. Towards the end of the novel, a journalist says of a character, “He never once lied deliberately, he just didn’t know he was lying.” The words, written 45 years ago, seem eerily relevant for a society that can receive a million different narratives around one event by going to Facebook or X. Men didn’t write what they saw, but what they “felt and believed, what those all around … felt and believed. That’s how that whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it.” Despite the seeming futility of discovering the truth in a society with en masse epistemological fracture, Vargas Llosa doesn’t let hopelessness have the last word. “Cynicism is no solution, either.”

Vargas Llosa’s most productive literary period, at least with regard to his fiction, occurred before he entered Peruvian high politics, but he maintained an interest in politics as a writer. In 1983, the Peruvian government appointed him to head an investigation into the deaths of journalists in the commune of Uchuraccay. Moves in to electoral politics followed. In 1987, he formed Movimiento Libertad (Liberty Movement) as a classical liberal party. Vargas Llosa loathed the economic nationalization that occurred in Peru during the 1980s and sought to implement badly needed free market reforms in Peru. The country’s hyperinflation in the decade at one point reached 7000 percent. Liberal parties, particularly center-right liberal parties that advanced openly liberal economic agendas, historically struggled in Latin America, but real gains in liberalization and democratization in Peru under the presidency of Fernando Belaúnde allowed some market reforms to flourish. Years of military rule and the persistent violence of the Shining Path Marxist rebels convinced Peruvians to give another leftist the presidency, in the person of Alan García.

García’s relatively open corruption soured the Peruvian on leftism, and the 1990 election seemed poised to deliver Vargas Llosa the presidency. In the first round, he finished in first place and seemed poised to become president. His opponent, Alberto Fujimori, ostensibly a center-right neoliberal, lambasted Vargas Llosa’s program of privatization and market reforms in the second round. Vargas Llosa barely secured one-third of the votes cast. What made Vargas Llosa’s defeat so painful, certainly for economic liberals, was the degree to which Fujimori gained votes from those who would otherwise have supported economically leftist candidates. Vargas Llosa’s defeat in Peru a quarter-century ago foreshadowed an analogous situation in the United States, where a fusionist party of economic liberals and social conservatives gave way to a cultural and social moderate committed nonetheless to economic nationalism. Vargas Llosa’s defeat, and Peru’s eventual slide into authoritarianism under Fujimori, undoubtedly prepared Vargas Llosa (by then a Nobel Prize winner) for the last act of his life: the great liberal sage of an entire hemisphere.

The potential rise of authoritarianism became a sort of obsession for Vargas Llosa later in life. His non-fiction lacked the beauty and subtlety of his fiction, and the crankier side of his personality—he could be cantankerous, and famously punched his then-friend Gabrial Garcia Marquez over a woman—seemed more evident. But even this more real and brusque non-fiction served a purpose. Vargas Llosa noted the innate tendency towards autocracy in humans. “To present dictators as a phenomenon,” he told the aforementioned audience in Princeton, “seems to me to be a great mistake. It is an unconscious defense mechanism to say, ‘This man is not like us.’ But the terrible thing about dictators is that they are like us.” Tyrants “come from the place where we are all from, and they behave like ordinary human beings until they attain power. It’s power that brings out the monster, but we’re dealing with the monster that we all carry within us.” Dictators were simply “everyday people who have been turned into monsters by power. It’s preferable to limit a system that doesn’t allow all of the power in a society to be concentrated in one person, because in that moment, it’s when the monster comes out and lives within all of us.”

Vargas Llosa’s warning came in 2015, a decade before his death, but only a few years before a resurgent worldwide populism, predicated on perceived failures of the liberal order, laid the groundwork for a new authoritarianism. The liberal memory of rising standards of living was replaced by a populist one that saw “carnage” as the only outcome of the Cold War and liberalism’s victory over totalitarianism. Memory, wrote Mario Vargas Llosa in his 1987 novel The Storyteller, “is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

The death of Vargas Llosa robbed the Ibero-American and Western literary world of not only one of its greatest storytellers, but also one of the storytellers most willing to duel with politicized memory, from both the right and the left. Vargas Llosa became the great right liberal novelist of the last six decades because his care for the truth of the human condition trumped even the supposed memories a people had, or thought they had. Literature, and particularly the novel, served as his vehicle to give his readers a true vision of the humanity, more hopeful than those who offered the grim societal carnage that autocrats used to seize power, and more real than those utopian fantasies that drove the Latin American left throughout his career. Through literature, Vargas Llosa offered something enduring and hopeful. “No matter how ephemeral it is,” he wrote in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, “a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”

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Starmer’s retreat to ranting is an attempt to stymie criticism and hopefully mitigate the damage from what has become a considerable political liability. The criticisms have mostly been leveled at the Labour Party of the Blair era, for mismanaging the law enforcement response and covering up the scandal’s scale. In fact, Labour governments have for some time tried to proscribe press freedoms in the name of getting the “the right” or “true” information to the public. Great Britain’s constitution is such that there is no press freedom outside the freedoms granted by parliament, and Britain’s dystopian-sounding Counter Disinformation Unit, or National Security and Online Information Team, operates without serious legal challenge. In the United States, the First Amendment supposedly precludes the American republic from replicating Britain’s disinformation board, but that did not keep the Biden administration and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas from creating what the Homeland Security department termed its “Disinformation Governance Board” in the spring of 2022. Conservative and libertarian Republicans in Congress raised enough public pressure to force Mayorkas to kill the board just a few months after it was announced, but even in the United States, government desire to control the press and public speech has reached new heights with the era of mass social media.

There have certainly been examples where the spread of conspiracy theories and false information has proved harmful—one thinks of the 2016 Pizzagate incident where a North Carolina man was imprisoned after firing a rifle at a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant he believed was hiding a pedophile ring. But the idea that governments are more trustworthy than the citizenry or the free press is specious, particularly in light of worldwide government mismanagement of the covid pandemic and how basic civil rights have been curtailed across the West by governments left, right, and center. In the United States, the press understood itself until very recently to be a check on state power and to hold state declarations accountable, not to be a vehicle for state-codified information.

The American republic’s executives and legislature largely understood that the press’s imperfections and speculations served a vital role in maintaining the energetic vigilance of a free democratic and democratic people’s natural rights. That the people and the press might sometimes be imprudent was not a reason to curtail press or speech freedoms or to subordinate them to state control. In 1795, President George Washington told Gouverneur Morris that in a government as free as the United States, “where the people are at liberty, and will express their sentiments oftentimes imprudently, and, for want of information, sometimes unjustly, allowances must be made occasional effervescences.” Washington, interestingly enough, did not use the occasion to complain about the press’s freedoms. A free press, he conceded, made occasional messes.

The messiness of the press prompted the first president not to make excuses for government intervention, or for government misinformation, but instead to make it clear that press and speech freedoms did not give the government license to ignore its own corruption. Washington called a free government that guaranteed free speech his “political creed” and told Morris that so long as he presided over the government, he would not suffer “any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity, or will give sanctions to any disorderly proceedings of its citizens.”

Washington made an important distinction between speech and “proceedings” that typified the free American republic’s response to public speech. Writing itself was not considered violent; a quick look at what was published in the Federalist Era about George Washington himself—partisans accused him of being an agent of Britain, and of selling the country to British commercial interests—is proof enough of that, as was the combative and contemptuous civil and political reaction to John Adams’ ham-fisted attempt to curtail the press freedoms Washington had sought to uphold. Riots could be prosecuted; newspaper articles could not be.

The American press’s very multiplicity of opinion in fact strengthened the liberties of the United States and guarded them from tyranny. Whatever minor—and they were in fact minor—occasional social upheavals that stemmed from a free press were small prices to pay for the maintenance of a free republic. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that Americans, far from seeing the press as a tool in maintaining the republican order, understood the press as a tool for its subtle changes in the political and social orders that kept revolution at bay. It was never the Americans’ intention, he wrote in Democracy in America, to find “a permanent state of things with elements which undergo daily modifications; and there is consequently nothing criminal in an attack upon the existing laws, provided it be not attended with a violent infraction of them.” Citizens of the United States were “moreover of opinion that courts of justice are unable to check the abuses of the press; and that as the subtilty of human language perpetually eludes the severity of judicial analysis, offences of this nature are apt to escape the hand which attempts to apprehend them.”

American government’s commitment to press freedoms has always been the most tenuous in wartime. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt in particular treated the press high-handedly with only cursory legal and political challenges, but they did so with the support of majorities in Congress. Others, like George W. Bush during the Iraq War, remained strikingly willing to allow the press to operate freely in wartime and in war zones. Still, though, even when the American government engaged in high-handed treatment of the press, they never posed as the ultimate arbiter of truth. What makes the approach of modern European governments different from time-honored American law is the idea that the government should oversee the press, rather than sometimes war with the press itself.

H. L. Menken once quipped that it was the right and duty of the press to commit lèse-majesté, to insult the government and to challenge its declarations. The American press has traditionally seen itself less as an instrument of policy, but more as the voice of a free people—at times in opposition to the federal government’s will and at times for it, but not subservient to it.

The traditional relationship between the press and government was put to the test in recent years, especially during the coronavirus epidemic. Instead of assuming its combative and oftentimes antagonistic posture towards state pronouncements, the mainstream media often accepted wholesale government talking points, with hardly any pushback. Media acting merely as a government information service kills the people’s belief in a free press, because instead of one institution being proved to be misleading—the government—the government and the press were now seen to be untrustworthy together.

The collusion between the press and the government did not happen overnight, of course. The seeds were laid in World War II, when government censorship and federal oversight of the press was justified in the name of national security. Before the 1940s, openly partisan media was the norm. The Chicago Tribune, for example, was famously a Republican newspaper. “Neutral” press was an impossibility, because the press, like the people it reflected, had political opinions the government honored through the First Amendment. The rise of television networks, and the ossification of the press’s relationship with the federal government, created the circumstances for an ostensibly free press to act like a de-facto state press during Covid. Misinformation has been, if anything, a free people reclaiming true press freedom over and against a state-managed press.

British historian and writer James Bryce wrote in his opus The American Commonwealth that while the American press might not be “above the moral level of the average good citizen,” it was undoubtedly above the moral level of the partisan and hyper-corrupt machine politics that defined urban centers of the United States during the Gilded Age. “Taking the American press all in all,” he wrote, “it seems to serve the expression … of public opinion” more than European presses did. The American reading public had a “superior independence” to the reading publics of Europe. The American reading public in 2025 still has, and demands, its superior independence in ways that modern Britons do not, and Americans should be grateful for the now over two centuries of political and social catechesis the First Amendment has offered.

Undoubtedly, the American press is an imperfect mess, and Elon Musk is almost certainly not on the moral level of the average good citizen. But the standard for the maintenance of the free press in the United States isn’t moral perfection, or even getting the “right” “information” to the public. The point of a free press is a free press, even if it is a complete mess.

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Trump of course is hardly the first American to be accused of Caesarist tendencies. Two centuries ago Andrew Jackson ran for president of a distinctive brand of American politics that eventually bore his name and has endured into the twenty-first century. Walter Russell Mead notes that in domestic politics, historic and latter-day Jacksonians “are skeptical of big business, hate the political and social establishment, and demand ‘common sense’ solutions to complex problems.” Jacksonians then and now “support the military but not an officer class seen as distant from the values and folkways of the nation—West Point stuffed shirts in the nineteenth century, woke generals’ today. They assume the political class is deeply and irreformably corrupt.” To these dispositions Jacksonians wedded an affinity for “strong leaders, even those like George Washington and the two Roosevelts who come from elite backgrounds and whose policy preferences don’t always align perfectly with Jacksonian ideas.” Though Mead says Jacksonians are also “deeply skeptical of most politicians,” their loyalty once won is “enduring.” 

But Jackson’s coalition included more than his so-called Jacksonian base. He was also supported by a conservative element that nonetheless was wary of the Tennessean’s worst excesses. Planters in the Tidewater states and middle-class businessmen in northern cities joined Jacksonian farmers to make Jackson president twice. In 2024, Trump’s neo-Jacksonians similarly joined with Reaganites and devotees of George W. Bush to deliver him the election.

No figure loomed larger as an exemplar of conservative opposition to Jackson within his own coalition than Tennessee congressman and frontier hero David Crockett. While Crockett agreed with much of Jackson’s agenda, he nonetheless defied the seventh president when he acted autocratically or unconstitutionally. Perhaps the nearest approximation of this in our time was former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, whose principled conservatism never slipped into pining for the affirmation of the American Left. Sasse, like Crockett, left Congress—but in both cases, their constitutionalism and willingness to defy popular presidents remain vitally important for the maintenance of a constitutional republic.

The 1828 electorate that voted Andrew Jackson into the presidency featured the widest franchise yet in a general election. Jackson earned 55 percent of the vote and carried a healthy majority of states. Perhaps more important than even the vote was the general perception that Jackson was a man of the people, protecting them from the wiles of a corrupt elite. That this supposedly corrupt elite included pious and almost pedantically moral outgoing president John Quincy Adams seems not to have occurred to the Jacksonian coalition. Jackson scholar Daniel Feller notes that Jackson’s followers felt a personal connection to him, and he used that dexterously to his political advantage. Jackson “melded the amorphous coalition of personal followers who had elected him into the country’s most durable and successful political party, an electoral machine whose organization and discipline would serve as a model for all others.” 

In other words, Jackson’s supporters’ fanaticism meant that the militia general-turned-president enjoyed incredibly wide latitude in presidential action that his predecessors, with the exception possibly of Washington, did not. Jackson’s aggressive and sometimes combative personal conduct, combined with his equally belligerent politics, united his enemies. Feller rightly states that Jackson’s “controversial conduct in office galvanized opponents to organize the Whig party. The Democratic party was Jackson’s child; the national two-party system was his legacy.”

Few politicians in Tennessee dared defy Jackson even before he gained the presidency—so when Tennessee assemblyman David Crockett did just that, it was obvious to Tennesseans that Crockett’s political guiding star was more than the personality of Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s political machine regularly attacked opponents with what bordered on unprecedented character assassination. In 1824, Crockett ended up on the wrong end of that machine by supporting incumbent US Senator John Williams over Jackson. Crockett biographer William C. Davis writes that Tennessee’s election for US Senator—in 1824 state legislatures chose US Senators—”proved to be embarrassingly close, and Crockett repeatedly took a lead in supporting Williams.” Jackson won narrowly “and Crockett, though friendly to Jackson’s presidential aspirations, made no effort to downplay his opposition.” 

Crockett’s support for Jackson’s presidential ambitions remained steady despite the former’s support for Jackson’s opponent in the Senate election. Crockett’s political future looked bright. He won a seat in Congress and took his place in the House of Representatives in March 1827. Crockett’s personality and ambitions fed his desire to be liked, but this desire to be liked did not induce Crockett to publicly disavow enemies of Jackson, nor did Crockett’s people-pleasing lead him to cease social discourse with Jackson’s enemies. In 1827, Jackson nursed his seething hatred of Henry Clay, who he believed robbed him of the presidency in a “corrupt bargain” struck with John Quincy Adams to make Clay Secretary of State in exchange for Adams becoming president. Crockett visited a chief ally of Clay in Tennessee, John Patton Erwin, in the fall of 1827. Crockett admitted his support for Jackson and the Jacksonian program but told Erwin he was not going to be a toady for Jackson. He committed to “pursue his own course.” 

Far from being an overly independent congressman who defied the president routinely to curry favor with opposition figures, Crockett proved to be an enthusiastic Jacksonian. He took up some of the more controversial and unorthodox Jacksonian causes. Crockett proposed abolishing the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he accused of being an institution that did little more than babysit the sons of wealthy Americans. He disliked giving pensions to prominent military officers’ families, which he believed Congress could not lawfully do. Insofar as the Jacksonians were undermining a debased elite, Crockett saw them as agents of constitutional government.

Yet these years of relative support for Jackson, were not enough to keep Crockett in the good graces of Jacksonian voters or even the president himself. No position of Crockett’s enraged Jackson, and Jacksonians broadly, more than his vote against the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Jackson had been pushing the bill as a signature piece of legislation that he hoped would, in his words, save Indian nations by getting them out of the way of white settlement. Crockett loathed the act and campaigned against it, even as he ensured his constituents he bore no ill will towards the president. Crockett maintained that the law was simply unjust, and it was his duty to oppose it. His constituents punished him by electing his opponent in the 1830 midterms, although they sent him back to Washington as their congressman two years later. 

By 1833, Crockett—despite remaining a committed political Jacksonian—openly defied Jackson, particularly because of what he believed was the president’s unconstitutional veto of the Bank of the United States. Crockett never embraced the bank, and was not a “bank man,” but he was convinced that the Bank’s charter was constitutional and that Jackson acted outside of his authority when he vetoed its recharter in 1832. Jackson’s veto convinced Crockett “that Old Hickory had become a tyrant, abetted now by having Van Buren as vice-president, obviously the hand-chosen successor.” During the 1834 congressional canvas, “Crockett spoke out strongly for rechartering the bank and holding onto its deposits,” and accused Jackson “of seeking to close the bank in order to take control of the deposits himself to use for the purpose of ensuring Van Buren’s succession.” The United States, he declared, could “be a nation of laws or have a despot.” Crockett, still actively supporting the bulk of the Jacksonian political program, nonetheless answered Jacksonian newspapermen who questioned his intelligence by mocking Jackson. “It is objected to me that I want learning. Look to your President. Look to your President I say. What does he know?” 

Voters in Tennessee—loyal to Jackson—finally sent Crockett packing for good in the fall of 1834. When he left office in early 1835, Crockett apocryphally quipped: “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.” Where Crockett did not go was over to the opposition or to the press to make himself a darling of the Whig Party. He did, in fact, go to Texas, where he now lies buried after his death fighting the forces of the Mexican dictator at the Alamo in March 1836. 

Crockett’s resistance to Jackson helped sustain the burgeoning Whig opposition to Jackson after 1835; but in many ways, Crockett can be called an early Whig, despite his longtime support for much of the Jacksonian program. In our own time, congressmen willingly supporting presidents’ policies while also defying them when necessary seem in short supply. The electoral consequences, it seems, are just too high. David Crockett was a loyal Jacksonian, who seemed willing to pay the price for principled opposition to his when it came time to. His name and reputation are relatively well known, almost two centuries after his death. People remember Crockett; the mass of Jacksonian flunkies have faded into political oblivion.

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But instead, the soldiers were angry. Some were downright furious.

The Continental Congress, the erstwhile government of the newly independent United States, had been slow (even negligent) in paying the army. As a cost-saving measure, Congress stopped paying the army in 1782. The guarantee of life pensions, offered by Congress during the Revolutionary War to keep officers in the army, was nowhere to be found.

A group of officers, enraged at the perceived shameful treatment of the army by Congress, began preparing ways to find redress. Without informing the army’s high command, they circulated an unsigned letter urging a meeting at Newburgh in March 1783, ostensibly to discuss a range of possibilities including marching on Congress. George Washington caught wind of the meeting, which he called irregular and disorderly. He ordered the officers to a second meeting, overseen by a high-ranking officer. He also ordered a written report of the meeting, hinting that he himself would not attend.

When the second meeting occurred on March 15, the resentful and fuming officers were stunned when Washington himself appeared and asked to speak. Washington understood the officers’ frustrations but rebuked any attempt to coerce the civilian government with military force. Anyone “who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood” should, he demanded, be opposed by the army. Coups, Washington made clear, would not only never be instigated by his army, they would also be opposed by the army. The civilian government of the United States must be protected, even when it acted inconsistently or imprudently.

After speaking, Washington took a letter out from a member of Congress of his pocket. He looked at it for a moment and held it uneasily. Slowly, he pulled his reading glasses from the pocket and haltingly put them on. Most of the soldiers had never seen Washington wear them. “Gentlemen,” Washington said gently, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” The sight of a greying and aging Washington—loyal to the government as ever—shamed the conspirators, many of whom began to openly weep. The Newburgh Conspiracy was dead, and so was the first major threat to civilian government in the new republic.

The legacy of the Newburgh Conspiracy is often treated as a part of Washington’s personal legacy, and for good reason. Washington’s actions between 1781 and when he became President in 1789 prepared the way for constitutional government and the maintenance of civilian leadership throughout American history. Washington’s good example, however, was not the last word on the question of the military’s relationship to politics. While Americans have elected generals to high office since the eighteenth century, they have simultaneously retained a sense of caution regarding military men.

Following Washington, it took three decades before the next general made a serious bid for the presidency: Andrew Jackson. Political opponents, and even some of his supporters, had concerns over the elevation of a general to the chief executive. Henry Clay asked, somewhat sarcastically, if killing 2,500 British soldiers meaningfully qualified someone for the presidency. William Henry Harrison’s record was scrutinized when he ran in 1840, not only for being a military general but for being a general without a significant victory to his name. When Zachary Taylor ran in 1848, his surrogates argued that his lack of political experience made him a superior candidate (Taylor claimed to never have voted before because soldiers had to be above politics).

The generals elected to the White House in the Early Republic understood the tension between the enduring civilian government and the military’s subordination to that civilian government. Few ever appeared in uniform unless they were speaking to veterans, and even then, most chose to wear the black broadcloth suits of a civilian.

When Jackson assumed the presidency in 1829, he walked to the capitol in his inaugural parade with a few aged Revolutionary War veterans. William Henry Harrison included a few military units, mainly for their bands. Zachary Taylor’s inauguration appeared decidedly unmilitary, despite him only being a few months out of the army.

The militarization of American society became more pronounced after the Civil War, and that continued into the twentieth century. The mass volunteer mobilizations and the unpopular but enduring draft imposed by the federal government of the United States during the Civil War made the army a fact of life for more men and women than it had ever been before: 2.2 million men served in the Union army. This represented a massive percentage of men under arms, given the North’s 1861 population of 31 million. The war’s conclusion saw parades in Washington DC of the victorious Federal Army. Those parades were far and away the largest military celebrations held in the United States to date. The Grand Army of the Republic became a major fraternal organization. By 1890, its membership peaked at half a million men.

The process repeated itself in the aftermath of World War I and more particularly after World War II. The era of total war militarized societies in ways the Founding Fathers could not have imagined. The military’s raw size in manpower numbers meant that most men of military age by 1950 had some experience with at least one of the United States’ armed services. Armies performed political and societal purposes in ways they never had before. Military service became a marker of basic civic participation. Blue star and gold star families marked their losses publicly.

Military service was so synonymous with basic civic participation that candidates for office made it a foundational aspect of their public service. Every president from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush had some active duty military experience. Whereas in the Early Republic, military service was regarded with suspicion, by the middle of the twentieth century, it was seen as normative and even necessary. The eighteenth-century republic’s fears regarding professional soldiers, standing armies, and their intrusiveness into civilian politics gave way to an expectation of and even comfort with military men at the helm of civic and political life in the United States.

Generals became more ubiquitous in political life, and so did the military’s presence in civil religion. Dwight Eisenhower’s election brought a general to the presidency for the first time in sixty years. But as President Eisenhower meticulously delineated the civilian government from the military. He never appeared in uniform and was careful not to staff the government with too many military men.

Eisenhower in fact became suspicious of the ties between the military and both American politics and the economy. In his farewell address in January 1961, Eisenhower warned of the emerging military-industrial complex. Few in power heeded the general’s admonition. Since the Cold War, policing, federal and state politics, infrastructure maintenance, and even research have seen an increased presence of the American military. Civic activities at professional sporting events are completely dominated by the presence of military imagery and often time military personnel.

Candidates for office in both parties regularly tout their military service as evidence of their ability to “lead” in their campaigns for higher office. This disposition to give governance over to the military has been particularly pronounced on the American right in the era of Donald Trump, who made a point of including an outsized number of generals in his administration. Trump quickly learned that American generals and soldiers, even those who serve politicians after their retirement, are often uncomfortable with partisan politics.

The lesson of Washington at Newburgh is not, however, simply that generals and soldiers should not be partisan. The lesson is that military men are not necessary or even preferable for the maintenance of a republican society. The American constitution and the republic it governs do not need “leaders”—they need citizens. The continued preference and often fawning partiality American voters show military men are not the fault of dutiful veterans who run for office, but it nonetheless feeds a broader political and cultural vice whereby Americans treat military men as uniquely suited to govern them. Indeed, no less a military man than Dwight Eisenhower saw society’s militarization as deeply problematic.

So, while we appreciate the American military and its role in maintaining the liberties of the United States when necessary, we might also look to Washington and remind ourselves that we don’t need the military in politics. Our history of appreciating military men is worth keeping. So too is our history of suspicion about their broader role in politics and society.

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