A War the Majority Chose Is a War You Can Fight

Free societies are bad at fighting wars, and they know it. They start them reluctantly, doubt them while they are being fought, and abandon them before they are finished. Their enemies, who are usually not free, count on this. It is a real weakness, and it has a specific cause that is not the one usually named.

The usual explanation is that free people are soft, or that a free press undermines morale, or that democracies cannot stomach casualties. I do not think any of these is the mechanism. The mechanism is that in a representative regime nobody knows whether the war is theirs.

Whose War Is It

Consider how a representative regime goes to war. A small group decides. It may consult the legislature, which is another small group. It presents the public with reasons, some of which are true. The public did not choose the war, was not asked, and cannot tell from the outside whether the stated reasons are the actual ones.

And the public has learned, from a long record, that the stated reasons often are not the actual ones. Wars have been started for the benefit of arms manufacturers, for the political survival of a leader, for control of a resource, for a faction inside the government. Not every war, but enough of them that the suspicion is rational, and every citizen carries it into every war.

So a citizen asked to support the war, to pay for it, to send a child to it, is asked to do so on trust in a small group that has betrayed that trust before. The doubt that undermines free societies in wartime is not doubt about the enemy. It is doubt about their own government. And it is well founded.

What Clarity Would Mean

Now imagine a war the public decided on directly. Not consulted, not informed after the fact, but asked, with the question on the table and the arguments in the open, and a majority saying yes.

Some things change immediately.

The question of whose war it is has an answer. It is ours. Whatever the reasons for it, they are the reasons a majority found sufficient after hearing the case against. Nobody can later say the war was foisted on the country by an interested minority, because the minority did not get to decide.

The suspicion that poisons wartime discourse loses its object. You can still argue that the majority was wrong. You cannot argue that you were tricked, because you were in the room.

And the enemy's calculation changes. An adversary who counts on a free society's doubt is counting on the gap between the government and the governed. Close the gap and the doubt has nowhere to live. A war the majority chose is a war the majority will see through, or end by the same means it started, and either way the decision is legible.

The Objection That This Makes War Easier

The obvious worry is that a public that can vote for war will vote for it too readily, on a wave of anger, without the deliberation that representatives are supposed to supply.

I take the worry seriously and I think the record answers it. Publics are not, historically, the eager party in wars. Governments are. The wars that were popular with the public were, for the most part, wars the government had spent months preparing the public for. Left to itself, a population that bears the cost of war is cautious about it, precisely because it bears the cost. Representatives who bear little of the cost and gain from the position of wartime leader are the ones who need restraining.

Nor does direct decision remove deliberation. It requires it, in public, in front of everyone, rather than in a cabinet room. The case for a war that cannot survive being made to the people who will fight it is not a case that deserves to win.

Defending a Way of Life

There is a further reason this matters, beyond any single war.

Free societies will have to defend themselves, sometimes by force, against other forms of government and other cultures that would end them if they could. That is not a pleasant thought and it does not go away for being unpleasant. A society that cannot decide clearly to defend itself will, eventually, not be defended.

What direct decision supplies is exactly the thing that is missing now: a way for a free people to go to war as a free people, with the decision made by the people who will pay for it, and therefore with the moral standing to fight it and the resolve to finish it. The alternative is what we have: wars declared by a few, doubted by the many, and lost in the space between them.