If you have any conservative friends or family members who are on social media, you probably saw a number of “Participation Trophy” memes after the 2016 election. I’m not going to post any here, but the general gist was “Hillary voters are entitled snowflakes who want a participation trophy for winning the popular vote.” This then morphed into the “Liquid Participation Trophy” meme which usually showed a Police Officer Macing / Pepper Spraying a protestor labeled as “Here’s Your Liquid Participation Trophy.”
Of course, we all know that the real participation trophies are reserved for aggrieved white manhood. Thus the right’s love of confederate monuments — statues erected to the leaders of an unsuccessful rebellion against the U.S. government.
Unsurprisingly, DJT wants in on some of that sweet, sweet, participation trophy action. Traditionally, the United States has only staged large-scale military reviews in the nation’s capitol on the occasion of a military victory:
The image above shows the “Grand Review of the Armies” at the conclusion of the Civil War. Similar reviews were held at the conclusion of World Wars I & II. More recently, Bush I held a victory parade in Washington D.C. after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm.
Notice the absence of Korea and Viet Nam from the list above. While Dan Lamothe claims in today’s Washington Post that, “The military parade that Trump envisions was more common in another era,” the absence of these parades is not the product of changing times or changes in public perception of the military. We haven’t had this sort of military parade in recent years because 1) Fortunately we haven’t had a global world war or insurrection in recent years, and 2) Aside from our 43 day adventure in Operation Desert Storm we haven’t had a decisive military victory to celebrate. When you engaged in an endless “War on Terror,” a war that has now raged longer than the Civil War, WWI, and WWII combined, there is no ultimate victory.
You don’t have a military review — a victory parade — while you still have troops in harm’s way. You get all our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, with minimum additional damage to the political order and populace of the Middle East, and THEN we can talk about a parade.
Until that happens, until our troops are home, until we aren’t spending untold millions on the “War on Terror,” a military parade in Washington D.C. will be seen for what it is — a participation trophy.