There has been a good deal of talk about guns, most of it cheerful, in this year’s presidential campaign. Both candidates for the vice presidency have boasted of their service in the armed forces—Tim Walz in the Minnesota National Guard, JD Vance in the US Marines—and both have been photographed with guns. Kamala Harris confessed that she owns a Glock and added, “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot”—a statement uttered in a sociable tone and punctuated by laughter. Harris, like Walz and Vance, was adopting the posture of the happy warrior; and that title, in so many words, has been conferred on all three in various journalistic puffs. Indeed, of the four persons on the two major-party tickets, only Donald Trump has failed to associate himself with that description; but he is likely to have refrained less from principle than from a canny judgment of its implausibility in his case. Trump is a kind of warrior, but nothing about him registers as happy. The closest he comes is a show of extreme momentary satisfaction.
Why are people so interested in “the happy warrior”? The United States at present is the main weapon source and financier of apparently interminable wars on two continents. The actual warriors fighting for Israel, Ukraine, and Russia, and for Hamas and Hezbollah, go on being killed and maimed by the tens of thousands only because Washington has resolved that it is in its interest to subsidize wars by client states. Anything less happy would be hard to imagine; but the good of these wars is a point of pride for American politicians, from the president on down (with few exceptions in either party). The bought-and-paid-for slaughter has required an immense continuous donation from American taxpayers, and yielded exorbitant benefits to the US weapons industry—a strange bargain for a democracy, but the commitment passes for patriotic since it involves no official loss of life by Americans. We have no “boots on the ground.” In this light, it might be said, the politicians are extraterritorial happy warriors, applauding from the sidelines.