BOB ABERNETHY, host: In Pakistan, the U.S. government’s use of armed drones to target militants continues to strain relations between the countries. In the past, the administration has avoided talking about its drone program, but on Monday (April 30), a top White House official strongly defended use of the controversial technology. At the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, called weaponized drones both legal and ethical and said their use is consistent with the country’s right to defend itself:

John Brennan: “There is nothing in international law that bans the use of remotely piloted aircraft for this purpose or that prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield.”

ABERNETHY: For more on this, Kim Lawton is here. She is managing editor of this program. We are joined by Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School and author of The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama. He joins us from New Haven. Professor Carter, welcome to you.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN CARTER (Yale Law School): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: John Brennan said that the use of drones is legal, perfectly legal. You agree with that?

CARTER: I think the administration is right. We’re a nation at war, and in time of war a belligerent certainly has the right to target the leaders of the other side who are in the chain of command, and that’s what we are doing.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: But if the battlefield in essence here has become the entire globe, how does that change the moral calculus of when and how the U.S. uses force justly?

CARTER: Well, I think you’re right that the more important questions are the ethical ones, and one of the ethical questions is how big the battlefield is, because the administration claims the right to target leaders wherever they may show up in the world. A second moral problem that arises is the problem of civilian casualties. Even if we have the right to go after leaders of Al Qaeda, we have to do it, both as a matter of law and as a matter of ethics, in a way that minimizes civilian casualties. The administration doesn’t actually count civilian casualties, so we don’t know how many there have really been. Mr. Brennan says that there have been times that they haven’t actually taken the shot because civilians have been in the line of fire, and if so, I’m glad to hear that, but I still think that we’d be better off if we could have a conversation in which we could talk more about the civilians who are killed. And there’s another ethical problem that we don’t spend enough time thinking about, and that’s the way that the drone war goes away from the front pages. It’s not on the evening news. In Iraq, we’re on the evening news. In Afghanistan, it’s on the evening news. With the drone war, it’s done in secret, it’s clandestine, it’s hard to keep track, and we really should know what’s being done in our name.

LAWTON: What kind of moral oversight would you like to see taking place surrounding this?

CARTER: At minimum, we members of the public ought to demand as much disclosure as possible from both our government, and also that the media cover the drone wars as closely as we cover other wars. There’s no greater and more difficult moral decision a nation makes than killing other people, and it’s quite important, if we are going to do that, that it remain in the forefront of our consciousness, that we not be distracted by other issues.

ABERNETHY: How do we know how many civilian casualties there are? Isn’t that a big danger, that this—that the use of drones will spill over and there will be a lot of civilian casualties?

CARTER: Because the administration doesn’t tell us when there are civilian casualties, or how many, it’s very difficult to keep track. We tend to rely on sources on the ground, some of whom have their own agendas and want to exaggerate it for one reason or another. But if we don’t know how many civilians are dying, we really can’t give a good assessment of the ethical principles that are underlying these attacks.

ABERNETHY: Professor, just very quickly, why now? Why did the administration come out with this now?

CARTER: There have been a lot of voices, including my own, that have been urging an open discussion of this. Because the administration has not acknowledged in the past that this drone program even exists, it’s hard to have public conversation about it. Now we can have an ethical conversation about it, and it’s high time that we do so.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and to Stephen Carter of Yale University Law School.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Kashmir has long been known for its peaceful vistas but for the 13 million inhabitants this mountainous region has been anything but peaceful. It is one of the world’s most militarized places. India alone has an estimated 600,000 troops in the part it controls, four times the number of American soldiers who were in Iraq at the height of that war. Although it has a two-thirds Muslim majority, Kashmir as a whole is quite diverse, the southern region mostly Hindu, the northeast Buddhist. But for six decades this province with a land mass the size of Idaho has been bitterly fought over by India and Pakistan.

It all dates back to 1947, when the departing British decided to partition the newly independent India. Muslim majority areas were to form the new republic of Pakistan. But Kashmir had a Hindu ruler, and he opted under pressure to join India. That set off the first of three major wars between India and Pakistan, ending in a ceasefire with India controlling about two-thirds of Kashmir, Pakistan most of the rest. The so-called “line of control” that divided Kashmir has served as an international border for 65 years, but Kashmir has festered as a sore point between the Islamic republic of Pakistan and mostly Hindu India.

Although the conflict has long been cast in religious terms, Joseph Schwartzberg, a leading scholar on Kashmir, says it’s more complicated than that. And within Kashmir, he says, there’s a long tradition of tolerance.

PROFESSOR JOSEPH SCHWARTZBERG: The Hindus frequently attended religious ceremonies that were held by Muslims, and the converse was also true. In terms of actual day to day religious practices it was a fairly eclectic area, and the type of strident militaristic Islam that we think of when we think of, say, the Middle East—that was not present in Kashmir at all.

DE SAM LAZARO: That began to change in the 1980s in Indian-held Kashmir with more religious tension and extremism. Schwartzberg blames corruption, non-functioning local government, and meddling from India’s capital Delhi in local elections.

SCHWARTZBERG: India is a pretty good functioning democracy in most parts of the country, but with respect to Kashmir it was exceptional. They felt that they couldn’t afford to lose elections. They managed to rig election after election, and the people simply got fed up. In 1987—and it was a pretty corrupt administration, so the people just had it— they initiated a series of demonstrations which were put down with a heavy hand, and in 1989 it really got out of hand, and the Indian government moved in in force.

DE SAM LAZARO: The clampdown triggered a militant separatist insurgency—or vice versa, depending on who is telling the story. India has blamed Pakistan, especially its intelligence service, and Islamist extremist groups. Pakistan says it offers only moral support for the insurgents. Groups like Human Rights Watch blame militant groups, but they also finger Indian security forces for widespread abuses under the guise of rooting out militants. India insists that most are infiltrators from Pakistan-held regions and beyond. Tens of thousands of civilians have died or gone missing. Kashmir’s grand mufti, the top religious leader recognized by India’s government, also blames both sides for excesses, and his numbers are much higher.

BASHIR UDDIN AHMAD (Grand Mufti): Since 1989, when the situation became more critical, hundreds of thousands of people are missing and hundreds of thousands more have been killed. We have no knowledge of where they are. The killing continues unabated, and the situation is still simmering.

DE SAM LAZARO: In recent years, the Kashmir dispute has taken on a new dimension as India has announced plans to build several dams, seeking hydro-electric power for its fast-growing economy. But Kashmir’s rivers also irrigate the breadbaskets of both India and Pakistan. So far there have been no problems sharing the waters under an internationally brokered treaty in 1960. However, Pakistan says the Indian dams could affect seasonal water flows to its farmland.

KAMAL MAJIDULLA (Pakistan Presidential Advisor): It’s devastating, because if the waters are not available to me in the quantities that I need them at the time that I need them, then I’m looking at a very low productivity of my agricultural sector.

DE SAM LAZARO: Pakistan has taken its protest to arbitration provided for under the Indus water treaty. India insists it is in full compliance. However, the fact that India, being upstream, could in theory manipulate flows could be politically toxic, particularly after the severe floods Pakistan has endured in recent years.

Hafiz Saeed is a man the US government has branded a terrorist and for whose capture it has offered a $10 million bounty. Saeed has blamed India for worsening the flooding. Pakistani presidential advisor Kamal Majidulla says such rhetoric resonates among farmers who are hurting.

MAJIDULLA: The farming community, which otherwise could look after their children, are unable to do, so the children have been going off and staying in madrassas instead of going to the local school system, because the madrassas feed them. I’m not saying all madrassas are bad. They do perform a social function, and some of them perform a very good social function, but a fair number of them are not. And this is where the cannon fodder comes from. So there is a direct linkage between water availability, low agricultural productivity, and the rise of terrorism.

DE SAM LAZARO: Officials in India’s capital Delhi say the Pakistani fears of water treaty violations are overblown. Ashok Jaitly, a scholar at a Delhi-based think tank, says the bigger threat is poor conservation and water mismanagement on both sides.

ASHOK JAITLY (Energy Resource Institute): If you had a cooperation based on good scientific river basin management of the Indus basin, and that’s where the Indus water treaty does not provide for it, it only provides for sharing of water. It does not provide for scientific integrated river basin management. If you could have that, then I think a lot, I won’t say all the problems would be solved, but a lot of the problems between India and Pakistan would be resolved, or could be resolved.

DE SAM LAZARO: Back in Kashmir, long squeezed as its two nuclear armed neighbors fight over it, Mufti Bashar Uddin says growing numbers want no part of either.

MUFTI UDDIN: As a religious leader, I would tell the people that if the option of independence is offered, that would be the best bet for Kashmir.

DE SAM LAZARO: That seems highly unlikely—both India and Pakistan reject the idea. So, to most analysts, does any quick resolution of the Kashmir stalemate. In recent months, there’s been a thaw in relations between India and Pakistan, with proposals to vastly increase the amount of trade across the border. Coincidence or not, Kashmir has enjoyed one of its quietest periods in years. The natural beauty is once again luring tourists. In 2011, more than one million visitors came here, most of them Indian. It remains to be seen whether and how much more tourism and commerce can repair 65 years of suspicion and upheaval.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

The United States has decided not to act unilaterally to protect rebellious Syrian communities from the atrocities of the Syrian military. By the time the international community organizes to take remedial action against Syria’s armed forces, the regime’s tyrannical oppression will be largely accomplished.

According to the teachings of the Christian just war tradition, whose norms have been selectively incorporated into international law and secular political morality, the United States has good reasons for rejecting unilateral intervention in this case. By heeding these reasons, however, the president and citizens of the United States accept a terrible cost. The number of Syrians already killed by the Syrian government (well over 7,000, by U.N. estimates) will continue to grow. The degradation of the insurgents will be prolonged.

This situation places American citizens of conscience in a difficult position. Can the United States ever be obligated in justice to refrain from a military action that could save thousands from murder, degradation, and rapine? Is it possible in justice to accept the deaths of so many? The answer, at least for those citizens whose consciences have been formed by the norms and expectations of the Christian just war tradition, is clearly yes. But how are we to think about the consequences of this judgment? For weeks the major national newspapers have included articles about the mounting deaths and suffering of ordinary Syrians. These articles implicitly pronounce a familiar imperative: something must be done. But in the face of this imperative, we are compelled by another: force is justified only where there is reasonable hope of doing more good than harm. How are we to respond honorably to such conflicting imperatives, especially when the human costs are so high?

An exchange last week between Senator John McCain and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta captures the moral complexity of the situation. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary Panetta suggested that a unilateral attack on Syria would cost too much in American lives, in collateral deaths among Syrian civilians, and in future disorder. Senator McCain responded by asking pointedly: “Tell us how long… the killing would have to continue, how many additional civilian lives would have to be lost, in order to convince you the military measures…necessary to end the killing…[are justified]? How many more? 10,000 more? 20,000 more?”

The implication of Senator McCain’s question was clear. When the United States has the military power—particularly, the air power—necessary to stop the tyrant, how callous must we be to refuse to use it on behalf of vulnerable communities devastated by their own government? Secretary Panetta, whom no one would accuse lightly of callousness, responded wearily that such an attack may only be undertaken with a clear view of its probable consequences.

On the terms of the Christian just war tradition, Secretary Panetta’s position clearly has the right of it. Centuries of accumulated Christian moral reflection have taught that a just war requires three things: proper authority, just cause, and right intention. Using force to protect civilians from mass atrocity would undoubtedly constitute just cause. An attack on Syria, however, fails at present to satisfy the other two criteria. There is little consensus at home or abroad that the United States should intervene. The criterion of proper authority is not satisfied simply by widespread approval of an action. Nevertheless, within the contemporary context of international institutions, the criterion requires solicitude toward the judgments of other states. This solicitude is necessary not only to ensure that other states will cooperate by not interfering, but also to ensure that a use of force is perceived as—and is in fact—a contribution to international peace and stability.

While United Nations Security Council resolutions are neither the first nor the last word in political morality, they do function to address this basic concern. Many Americans welcome the concern for international institutions implied by this interpretation of proper authority. The rub is that it will sometimes require binding a benevolent government’s hands by the competing judgments of recalcitrant and self-interested authorities in other states, such as Russia and China.

At a minimum, the requirement of right intention demands that a government actually act upon the just cause that provides the initial justification for war. More broadly, however, the demand for “right intention” places an act of war within the purview of the virtue of prudence. Some Christian thinkers have made the demands of prudence explicit by requiring that a use of force be proportionate, a last resort, and have a reasonable hope of doing more good than harm.

As Secretary Panetta rightly suggests, unilateral intervention in Syria fails the test of prudence. From his testimony, he clearly believes all reasonable political efforts have not yet been exhausted and the prospects of doing more harm than good are very great. In particular, he suggested that intervening in Syria would likely do more harm than good for Syrian civilians, at least for the present moment.

The consequence of this, of course, is that the United States accepts the deaths of the Syrian civilians and rebel fighters currently being slaughtered by their government. It is not an indifferent acceptance, nor even a passive acceptance, but an acceptance all the same. We should not be confused when our president or one of our representatives declares the situation in Syria “unacceptable.” The situation is, of course, unacceptable, yet… And it is here, in this disorienting place where we find ourselves compelled to accept the unacceptable, that we leave the comfortable realm of well-worn moral principles and confront the deeper dimensions of our situation.

The great Christian theologian St. Augustine of Hippo confronted this situation in one way when he laid the foundations of Christian moral reflection on war in the fourth century. Writing in his “Reply to Faustus the Manichean,” Augustine asked, “What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling.” Augustine’s view is startling. He suggests plainly, and in a troubling tone, that war is not justified principally to save people from being killed. Such killing is evil, to be sure, and to be prevented when possible. But war is not, on Augustine’s view, a matter of humanitarian intervention. For Augustine, war is justified–if at all–as a means of punishing and containing the lust to dominate that threatens public safety everywhere. This view may sometimes justify what is now called “humanitarian intervention,” but only if such an act justifiably serves public order.

For Augustine and the Christian tradition that descends from him, the slaughter of innocent civilians is just as evil as it seems. These individuals are more valuable in the eyes of God than every hall of government and military monument on the whole earth. But human politics is not a practice born in heaven. It is a practice that takes place within the horizon of a time when the full truth of humankind is, as Augustine might say, clouded by pride and distorted by lust. The most that can be hoped for here is to contain and minimize human degradation by creating a broad public context in which ordinary persons may endure life’s suffering, savor its joys, and confront their deaths in relative peace. The treacheries of human injustice, on this view, cannot be policed all the way down into every poverty-stricken corner of this sad world. And for this reason, Augustine thought, resignation, endurance, and prayer—including lamentation—are practices as important to human social life as any right-minded effort to battle evil with justice.

Augustine and his ilk could embrace this view in part because they believed in a transcendent God who would restore a broken humanity and resurrect the dead. Many Americans cannot accept this view. But surely rejecting this transcendent hope does not leave us only with the view that human effort knows no intrinsic bounds. Many human rights activists argue that any refusal to intervene with force on behalf of the vulnerable is a moral failure. Accusations of callousness abound. Such boundless moralism, however, seems as committed to a transcendental mythos about human moral possibilities as traditional theism.

There is no honorable way to stand before the ghosts of the unjustly dead without shame. Nevertheless, there is admirable honesty in a clear-eyed acknowledgment of limits.

Howard Rhodes has taught at the University of Iowa and is currently is a J.D. candidate at Duke University School of Law. His research interests include the ethics of war, international humanitarian law, and religion and international relations.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is a scene more than a few Americans are familiar with: standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the DMV. This one is in Sumter, South Carolina.

Woman in DMV line: Oh, that’s your birth certificate?

SEVERSON: Amanda Wolf has been waiting over 6 months to get the proper papers so she can finally get a photo ID.

AMANDA WOLF: I was adopted in Georgia, and my name was different on my birth certificate, and plus my birth mother and birth father was on the birth certificate, so we had to go to Vital Check, and with Vital Check you have to have a major credit card, which I don’t have.

SEVERSON: And so it went, on and on. Amanda had a student photo ID when she lived in Florida and used it to vote when she moved here, but not anymore—not under the state’s controversial new voter ID law that was fashioned after an Indiana law the Supreme Court upheld in 2008. State Senator Chip Campsen sponsored the South Carolina law.

STATE SENATOR CHIP CAMPSEN: And the court has concluded that whatever those hurdles you have to clear to get the ID necessary to vote…

SEVERSON: …is worth it.

CAMPSEN: It is worth it, that is correct.

SEVERSON: It is those hurdles, critics say, that will keep some eligible people who lack the proper ID from voting. The South Carolina law requires a state-issued photo ID, a military ID, or a passport. Amanda finally qualified for a photo ID after she got some free help from a retired judge. Attorneys often charge as much as $1800 for the service.

WOLF: To get a photo ID in the state of South Carolina you have to have your birth certificate, a Social Security card. You have to have your marriage license if you’ve been married. You have to have a divorce decree if you’ve been divorced, and it’s just one thing after another after another, and a lot of the stuff is really difficult to get a hold of.

SEVERSON: Barbara Zia is the co-president of the South Carolina League of Women Voters.

BARBARA ZIA: The League submitted our comments, along with other organizations to the state, contending that the law was discriminatory and that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of eligible voters would be disenfranchised.

SEVERSON: State Representative David Mack:

STATE REPRESENTATIVE DAVID MACK: It’s horrible. It’s designed to suppress the vote of people of color. People of color and poor people, that’s exactly what it’s designed for. There’s no documentation of fraud as relates to voting, and there has been no problem with fraud as it relates to registering people to vote,

SEVERSON: You don’t think people are going to be disenfranchised?

CAMPSEN: No.

SEVERSON: At all?

CAMPSEN: No. The state has to assure that the folks that are casting votes at the polls are actually casting votes that are legitimate, and they are actually individuals who they say they are, who they are supposed to be.

ZIA: There are no documented cases of voter fraud by impersonating somebody else to vote for decades in South Carolina. We’ve talked with the state elections commission. They know of none, and they’ve gone on record saying that there is none. So we say it’s a solution in search of a problem.

MACK: If there were cases of fraud they would have been front page news throughout the state of South Carolina and other places, and it’s just not a problem.

SEVERSON: State Senator Campsen insists there have been cases of voter fraud, and there are some that are still under investigation. He says that it would be contrary to human nature if there wasn’t voter fraud.

CAMPSEN: And I know this: Human nature being what it is will steal. I lock my house. My house has never been broken into, but I lock it, and I don’t have to have a thief break into my house and steal something before I’m justified in locking my front door, and so human beings will steal my car, they’ll steal my money, and they’ll steal my vote, too.

SEVERSON: Braden Bunch owns Brick’s Place. He was the head of the Sumter County Republican Party until recently. He thinks requiring photo ID to vote is only common sense.

BRADEN BUNCH: It’s a pragmatic step in order to fix the possibility of irregularity or even just getting rid of these old wives’ tales out there, that all kinds of fraud and deceit is going on. If you have this in place those stories go away.

SEVERSON: What’s happening here is part of a national trend. Altogether 34 states have introduced photo ID legislation. Critics say nationwide it could keep millions from voting. South Carolina’s own study says African Americans are most likely to be impacted. That’s why the Justice Department has put it on hold while it investigates. Barbara Zia says the law will also make it more difficult for the elderly, the disabled, and students whose IDs no longer work to vote. But, she says, it will definitely impede minorities the most.

ZIA: And many South Carolinians, especially citizens of color, were born at home and lack birth certificates, and so to obtain those birth certificates is a very costly endeavor and also an administrative nightmare.

SEVERSON: South Carolina is one of several states, mostly in the South, that because of a history of discrimination is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get clearances from the Justice Department whenever changes are make to voting laws. Dr. Brenda Williams has registered hundreds to vote. She says the new legislation is reminiscent of the Jim Crow laws that legalized discrimination against African Americans even at polling places until they were abolished by the Voting Rights Act.

DR. BRENDA WILLIAMS: There was a poll tax back during those days, and African Americans had to pay a tax. African Americans were penalized when they went to even register to vote at the courthouse. They were given literacy tests and had to guess how many marbles were in a jar and different things in order to deter and disenfranchise as many people as possible.

SEVERSON: Does this remind you of that?

WILLIAMS: Yes, this is just déjà vu.

DONNA SUGGS: I ain’t never had the opportunity to vote, and I wanted to vote, and I cried because I didn’t have the papers to vote.

SEVERSON: Donna Suggs has been a nurse’s aide all her life.

SUGGS: I had no birth certificate.

SEVERSON: Well, can’t you just go apply and get a birth certificate?

SUGGS: No. I was born by a midwife in Hartsville, South Carolina, and they didn’t report my birth.

SEVERSON: In the South in particular births among African American’s were not sometimes recorded in court houses. They were recorded in family Bibles, and often a midwife did not record them at all. Donna was finally able to get a photo ID after an attorney helped her get her birth certificate free of charge.

(to Donna Suggs): Now that you’ve got your photo ID…

SUGGS: You want to see it?

SEVERSON: Sure, I do want to see it.

SUGGS: Okay.

SEVERSON: So now she is officially Donna Suggs.

REV. JAMES WILLIAMS: Disenfranchising someone, yes, it is a moral issue.

SEVERSON: United Methodist minister James Williams pastors two churches and operates a funeral home. He says he knows that many of those in his congregation and those he buried never had a birth certificate. In his view voting is sacred, and depriving someone of that right is morally wrong.

REV. WILLIAMS: Jim Crow has changed. Jim Crow no longer wears a white sheet. Jim Crow no longer rides in a buggy. Jim Crow now is in a $3,000 suit driving a Mercedes Benz. The tactics to keep oppressed has changed. They no longer beat you over the head with a stick. They beat you over the head with legislation.

BUNCH: It is not harder for a black man to vote than it is for a white man to vote. We all can walk down to the polls together and cast our ballot. It’s that simple.

SEVERSON: If you all have a photo ID…

BUNCH: Well, and the point being is that it is an equal burden on a white man to get an ID than it is on a black man to get an ID.

SEVERSON: That may not be quite accurate, but there is little chance that the South Carolina legislature will amend the voter ID law unless the Justice Department finds that a significant number of South Carolinians will be deprived of the right to vote.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Columbia, South Carolina.

Should the American people harness their admiration for the military to revitalize the virtues of democratic engagement? Can we harness this admiration without undermining our ability to keep our militaristic overconfidence in check, especially in the face of increasing economic and military competition from China and beyond?

President Obama’s State of the Union address frames his understanding of the challenges and opportunities we face with the suggestion that emulating the virtues of America’s armed forces would enable us to become a more cohesive and mission-focused community. The challenges he notes are well-known—economic stagnation, declining standards of living, gross inequality, and decreasing confidence in our power both to improve our lot at home and maintain our influence abroad. For the president, however, America’s economic and geopolitical prospects are better than many believe. What we should really worry about is the increasingly prominent role that political cynicism and cultural and religious difference-mongering play in our political life. As the president rightly understands, cynicism about Washington rarely translates into energetic local efforts to address the inequalities in our midst or to put constructive pressure on our representatives for “nation building” here at home. With noteworthy understatement, the president suggests that our tendency to “obsess over [our] differences” is undermining our ability constructively to confront our challenges and opportunities. The problem is as much about our political culture as it is our political policies. The president suggests that the military provides the nation and its leaders a much-needed example of joining together in trust to accomplish a common mission.

What are we to make of this claim? To an extent, President Obama is simply calling for more cooperation in American politics. This is a valuable point, as far as it goes, but is uninteresting. If we take President Obama to suggest something bigger, then we may understand him as echoing ideas from the roots of American progressivism and replaying some of its dilemmas. John Dewey once argued that Americans were the inheritors of a democratic faith in our ability to redress social problems through conversation and cooperation. This faith, Dewey argued, is implicit in our very way of doing things, despite the still-powerful, obfuscating influences of superstition, moralism, and ideological rigidity. What we need, Dewey claimed, is to make this faith “explicit and militant,” to embrace it self-consciously as a source of our common resolve (John Dewey, A Common Faith (Yale University Press, 1934, p. 87)). Made militant, democratic faith can propel what William James once called “the moral equivalent of war”—the marshaling of civic passions for a cohesive social effort against the sorts of inequality, hopelessness, and degradation many Americans now face. For Dewey, however, democratic militancy was deeply distrustful of American militarism. War, Dewey recognized, can lead to forms of social and political discipline that are antithetical to democratic cooperation and exchange. For the democratic tradition descended from Dewey, therefore, the challenge of American life is to identify forms of democratic solidarity that do not feed off militarism abroad.

President Obama plays on these ideas—with a twist. For the president, the end of the war in Iraq, and our decreasing commitment in Afghanistan, provides more than a much-needed infusion of investment dollars that we could turn toward more productive purposes. It allows the nation to turn its militant energies from imperial policing abroad and refocus them at home. By nursing our admiration for our military’s virtues, he suggests, we can transform our beleaguered democracy into a more cohesive and mission-focused political community. Further, we can transform our admiration for the military vocation into a greater estimation of our own vocation as citizens.

The realism of this suggestion is immensely attractive. Rather than condemning the militaristic energies that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan, the president attempts to redirect those energies to more democratic purposes. William James would have been proud. Yet there are dangers here. The president’s vision of a militantly democratic community—a community characterized by at least some of the martial virtues—depends implicitly on the very militarism that the president was widely admired for criticizing. The mission-focused social cohesion that he seems to propose is fed on a diet of military exploits, of Navy SEALs working as a team to kill terrorists in far-off places.

Unless the president is merely cheerleading for more “teamwork” in American politics—an idea scarcely worth hearing—he is suggesting we buy an expanded sense of and passion for citizenship with the coin of militaristic enthusiasm. Instead of taking the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an opportunity to rethink the vice of militaristic overconfidence, President Obama proposes simply to reduce American military action to a minor drama that gives the larger drama of domestic democracy its energy. As long as the military drama remains minor—for example, with small special operations units engaging in targeted strikes—it provides the necessary thrill without provoking the more destructive forms of solidarity to which militarized societies are prone.

The problem with this view, as I see it, is that, once the bitter lessons of the Bush-era wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are old news, there will be little to prevent an American society fed by militaristic enthusiasm from giving in to the temptations of military power. Especially in future periods of uncertainty and threat, a political society that sustains itself through an embrace of martial valor will seek to discipline itself in ways more in keeping with war than democratic ideals.

Democratic citizenship undoubtedly requires courage, selflessness, and teamwork. It takes courage to make yourself vulnerable to viewpoints with which you seriously disagree. It takes selflessness to make the care and upkeep of the community a priority alongside the demands of earning a living for oneself and for a family. It takes teamwork to organize people effectively to make a difference in the life of a community, especially in the face of entrenched interests. But one may well question whether it is plausible or desirable to promote these virtues by harnessing the nation’s admiration for the military.

Howard Rhodes has taught at the University of Iowa and is currently is a J.D. candidate at Duke University School of Law. His research interests include the ethics of war, international humanitarian law, and religion and international relations.

One of the more boisterous moments of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech came when he stated his belief in what Abraham Lincoln believed before him: “That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” The House chamber erupted with applause and shouts of approval—none louder than from the mouths of Republicans.

But this moment was little more than another lesson in party difference. The speech actually confirmed Obama’s belief that there is a lot people cannot do better by themselves. They cannot fund massive and necessary public works projects; they cannot fund equally massive research breakthroughs like those connected to natural gas extraction; they cannot be counted on to levy fair taxes; and, as he observed several times, they cannot be trusted to uphold sound financial rules and practices.

In contrast, the GOP response from Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels confirmed that Republicans believe there is little government can do better than the individual: “government is meant to serve the people rather than supervise them.” This is Party Politics 101. To borrow from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Democrats have faith in the “better angels” of the federal government while Republicans trust in the “better angels of our nature.”

Both parties trust in the better angels of the military. Obama opened and closed the speech with resounding praise for the military’s teamwork and self-sacrifice, and he called for Congress and America to emulate both traits. There is much to admire about the armed forces and the veterans who serve in them. Yet we should honor their service without elevating them beyond reproach. Otherwise we patronize our veterans—as Obama did when he said, “they exceed all expectations;” lack “personal ambition”; “don’t obsess over their differences.” We neglect the reality that “war is hell. ” And we obscure the undemocratic nature of the military. The democratic system may at times feel like hell, but it is one made from the luxuries of debate, disagreement, compromise, and representative government, not chain of command and direct orders.

By Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, after four years of bloody civil war, he no longer spoke of the “better angels of our nature.” Instead he asked for “malice toward none” and “charity for all” in an effort “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and establish “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Our crisis is ideological civil war, and like his predecessor Obama urged the nation toward political cooperation in service to an “America built to last.” But he argued that its longevity depends upon whether we “settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by” or for a country “where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” This economic wound will not heal without profound disagreement—that is the nature of democracy—but Obama hopes that we might bind it charitably and without malice.

Our disagreements about it and the other major issues of the day have devolved, however, into silliness, even absurdity. We are a nation of finger pointers, unrelenting, disingenuous, and uncharitable in laying blame at the feet of others for the political and economic disarray of our times. But, as Obama has argued throughout his presidency, if Democrats and Republicans see angels when they look in the mirror and demons when they look at each other, then we cannot expect that the “state of our Union will always be strong.”

The scariest commentary on our natures is that there are national leaders and everyday Americans who believe in political angels and demons, and there are those who do not but allow the charade to go on anyway.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College and associate professor of history at Boise State University.