Military stands tall, gains respect by standing back

This week, a discredited Congress (13% confidence rating, according to Gallup) examines the behavior of a discredited former president (61% disapproval rating, according to the Quinnipiac poll) in an impeachment trial that will shape the future of the American presidency (39% confidence rating) and will be reported by the nation’s newspapers (24% confidence rating) and its television news outlets (18% confidence rating).

On the sidelines of this struggle among the unpalatable chronicled by the untrusted -- unlike Myanmar, where a military coup toppled the government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi -- is the nation’s military.

Its confidence level as measured by Gallup is at a stratospheric 72%, almost as high in this coronavirus era as nurses (checking in at 89%). That rating places the military 32 points higher than the Supreme Court and 30 points higher than organized religion. It’s as if an entire nation were screaming, in the timeworn, slightly rote phrase, Thank you for your service.

And for your restraint. Amid the country’s election postpartum drama, the military stood tall for standing back.

Indeed, three weeks before the election, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “we have established a very long 240-year tradition of an apolitical military that does not get involved in domestic politics.” When Donald J. Trump contested the election results and word swirled that the president was contemplating military involvement, all 10 living former defense secretaries signed an op-ed asserting that “efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”

A generation ago, at the beginning of the Reagan era and with the memories of Vietnam still fresh, only half of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of respect for the military. As that rate now approaches threequarters of Americans, the military is enjoying something of a renaissance in respect.

Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served in the Gulf War, the Iraq War and Afghanistan and was Trump’s national security adviser, believes the comeback began with the military expeditions in Grenada (1983) and Panama (19891990).

Both Gen. McMaster and former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, a military brat who served in Vietnam and later became a prominent leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, believe Americans have come to distinguish between the political leaders who begin wars and the military personnel who fight them.

“This new respect for the military is no surprise to me, and it’s well deserved,” Kerry said in a telephone conversation the other day. “Both the military and the country writ large learned the lesson of Vietnam, which is don’t blame the warriors for the war -and don’t forget to be grateful to the warriors. Ever since then, the country has had a change of attitude about people who serve.”

Though activists deplored the disproportionate rate of African Americans in the Vietnam War, Blacks generally have found the military to be one of the few institutions in American life that provided a dependable ladder of social mobility.

Part of trust is respect. The latest Gallup study of business and industry sectors placed farming and agriculture at the top of the respect list, with the grocery industry close behind. Perhaps in our coronavirus retreat, we have seen fresh virtue in these sectors. The healthcare industry moved from the third-lowest rank to the middle of the pack, the first time in two decades that it has won a positive ranking from Americans. No explanation needed there. And dead last is the federal government. That, too, needs no explanation at a time when the virus has spread throughout the country.

And so in an era when the country is in a spiritual if not an economic depression, we find ourselves -- Republicans and Democrats -- taking succor from the fifth and sixth lines of “The Marines’ Hymn”:

First to fight for right and freedom

And to keep our honor clean.