Officers Eat Last

A New York Times interview with Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D - Mass) by Bret Stephens caught my attention. I am somewhat familiar with Mr. Stephens from his various pieces in NYT; he is definitely a conservative, but in the old, pre-MAGA sense where it meant you worried about spending but you didn’t hate people who weren’t like you. Rep. Auchincloss, on the other hand, was unfamiliar to me, but the headline of the interview – The Democrat Who Makes Me Listen – proved apt.

Serving others first? What a novel concept. Credit: Microsoft Designer

For me, the final line the interview summed everything up. Rep. Auchincloss is a Marine veteran, having served in Afghanistan. Mr. Stephens asked: “Final question. If there is one thing you learned in the Marine Corps which every American should know, what is it?” Rep. Auchincloss’s reply was succinct, to the point, and highly instructive: “Officers eat last.”

“Officers eat last” – wow. That’s a philosophy I can buy into. That’s a credo I hope I can live up to. That’s a slogan for a political movement I could get behind.

Of course, I’m not just talking about literally only Marine officers, and I’m not just talking about eating. I’m sure Rep. Auchincloss intended that it was a life lesson that should be applied broadly. I.e., people in authority should make sure the people they are responsible for get taken care of before they take care of themselves. I don’t think that attitude is solely responsible for the esteemed Marine esprit de corps, but it’s got to be part of it.

The trouble is, we don’t see much of that attitude in the rest of America. When Congress failed to pass a budget and millions of federal workers went without paychecks, they (and their staffs) kept getting paid. When the White House went slashing various budgets, it didn’t eliminate White House jobs.

If you want to keep your blood pressure under control, don’t even ask how generous the Congressional retirement package is. Suffice it to say that, if you are one of the few workers who still qualify for a defined benefit pension, it is almost certainly less than theirs. Don’t get me started on how members of Congress seem to get richer – a lot richer – while in office, possibly due to insider trading loopholes.

According to Gallup, only 10% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, with 86% disapproving, but they don’t care. They get paid anyway, and most House seats aren’t competitive, so most incumbents are in little danger of getting voted out.

This is no “officers eat last.”

It’s not just politicians. All those billionaires – over 1,000 of them in the U.S. alone! – didn’t get (or keep) all that money by putting anyone else first. CEOs used to “only” make 15x the average worker, but now make closer to 300x, with their pay going up 20x the average worker’s pay increase in 2025 alone. If there was ever an era of benevolent CEOs looking out for their workers, that era has long gone. If CEOs can underpay or, better yet, layoff their workers, the better for their compensation. The rich guys eat first, with the finest dining their employees’ labor can finance.

Or private equity investors. They’ve wrecked their havoc on manufacturing and other industries, and more recently have turned to areas like housing and health care. They’re not just coming for your job, they’re coming for where you live and where/how you get care. They don’t make any pretense that what they’re doing is for your good; they are openly in it for the R.O.I. They’re face first in the dinner trough and don’t really care if you even get any of the scraps.

It’s obscene. It’s the opposite of officers eating last.

Rep. Auchincloss calls for “economic patriotism,” saying:

If the core idea of America is that the circumstances of your birth shouldn’t determine the condition of your life, you cannot have a durable “demos,” a durable sense of a shared American future, if you have an ossified American aristocracy. And that is what has happened. The top 10 percent of the American economy are people just increasingly divorcing themselves from the rest.

He wants, in particular, for more wealth to be taxed at death, so the richest Americans can’t keep passing along their wealth without ever paying taxes on the gains. He recognizes that government overregulation can be an issue, but correctly points out that the unbridled corporate monopolization we’ve seen in recent years is also harmful. Gordon Gecko famously said “Greed is good, “ but Rep. Auchincloss counters with “Officers eat last.”

I know which side I’m on.

If the Democrats had any sense, which they don’t, they’d seize upon this slogan and help define how it applies to our everyday lives. They’d build out what “economic patriotism” means. Dems are still getting blamed for NAFTA and letting China join the World Trade Organization, with the subsequent loss of many U.S. jobs, but those jobs didn’t just magically disappear. Rich people decided they could get richer by offshoring them, and if that meant losses of lots of jobs and devastation of many communities, so be it. The Dems should never have taken the blame, and, instead, should have aggressively pointed the finger at the true culprits.

To be honest, I don’t think the Democrats are the right party to advocate this idea. They have their own cadres of rich people, both in office and among their donors, and it shows in their policies. The Democratic brand is so toxic that they may be beyond reinvention. That’s why, say, Rob Sand in Iowa’s Governor’s race or Graham Platner in Maine’s U.S. Senate race are carefully trying to not talk about their ties to the party, and Dan Osborn in the Nebraska U.S. Senate race is running as an independent (with the tacit support of the state’s Democratic Party).

Those are the kinds of politicians who could make the “officers eat last” pitch and make it work.  Chuck Schumer? Kamala Harris? Gavin Newsom?  I don't think so. 

Neither party has a real vision for how – or agreement on even whether – to address the growing inequality in America, much less a vision for how to address AI and other revolutionary technological changes that are upon us. We should have long ago grappled with climate change and microplastics, but there was too much money in the status quo.

It’s not the answer, but “officers eat last” could be part of an answer. Show me the candidates who believe in, live by, and will fight for it, and they’d have my vote.