Veterans sit at the center of America’s democratic crisis.
Les Leopold reviews Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon’s Courage or Complicity: How Veterans are Responding to the Assault on Democracy as a necessary examination of how veterans, shaped by war, service, trauma, solidarity, and neglect, can either help defend democracy or become tools of authoritarian politics. The article places veterans within the long arc of U.S. militarism, working-class sacrifice, VA privatization threats, and the fight for a politics that honors veterans with material support rather than empty flag-waving.
Leopold frames U.S. history after World War II as a near-continuous cycle of wars, interventions, proxy conflicts, and military campaigns that relied heavily on working-class Americans.
The review stresses that veterans are not politically monolithic: many have drifted right, but many others have become labor leaders, working-class candidates, antiwar voices, and defenders of democracy.
Early and Gordon argue that the Veterans Administration remains a model of single-payer care and solidarity, which makes Republican privatization schemes especially dangerous.
The article highlights the painful contradictions veterans face: society praises their service while too often abandoning them to PTSD, suicide, homelessness, incarceration, underfunded services, and political exploitation.
Leopold invokes Major General Smedley Butler’s transformation from imperial enforcer to critic of capitalism and war as a warning and an invitation for today’s veterans to question militarism, empire, and authoritarianism.
The progressive takeaway is direct: veterans deserve more than patriotic slogans. They deserve healthcare, housing, dignity, democracy, and a political home that does not use them for wars abroad or authoritarian projects at home. Their culture of solidarity can become a democratic force, but only if progressives organize with them, respect them, and fight for the material conditions they were promised.