What Conservatives Think About the Draft
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Tony Blankley wants to bring back conscription — he imagines that the U.S. would have suffered virtually no casualties if we had sent 300,000 troops to Iraq. (H/t to Eric Garris.) Blankley may be held up as a conservative spokesman by Fox News, but I’ve lately been looking at back issues of the New Guard, the old publication of Young Americans for Freedom, including the famous May 1967 special issue on the draft in which Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman all called for its abolition. Here’s what Goldwater had to say about the liberal and conservative views of compulsory military (or civil) service:
There should no longer be any confusion about the liberal, radical and conservative positions on the draft.
Liberals favor it, but either want to make it random in its selection or extend it to social as well as military service.
Radicals want to end it or turn it to social service. They are not against compulsion. They are just against the fact, it seems to me, that the compulsion in this case is being used as part of an effort against their current heroes, the Viet Cong.
Conservatives want to end the draft–period. They do not want to extend it to any other form of service. …
Between the liberal and conservative positions lies the world of difference that marks the two philosophies.
The liberal position is based solidly upon the notion that every form of compulsion and every sacrifice of the individual may be justified in the name of ’society.’
The conservative position is based solidly upon the notion that man’s most fundamental right and responsibility is to live his own life.
The May ‘67 New Guard cites anti-draft opinions from a number of other sources, including Robert A. Taft, who included these remarks in the August 14, 1940 Congressional Record:
It is said that a compulsory draft is a democratic system. I deny that is has anything to do with democracy. It is neither democratic nor undemocratic. It is far more typical of totalitarian of totalitarian nations than of democratic nations. The theory behind it leads directly to totalitarianism. It is absolutely opposed to the principles of individual liberty which have always been considered a part of American democracy. … The principle of a compulsory draft is basically wrong.
Here, by contrast, is Blankley:
Filed under: Conservatism, War, media
Blankley is a charming man who, unfortunately, has succumbed to the mysterious charm of the neocons (among the most charmless people on the planet) to become one of their water carriers for foreign policy. Re-imposing the draft is one of the fondest dreams of what might be described as the lunatic fringe of the neocons (which I admit is sort of like saying, “really bad child molester”), characters like Michael Ledeen and Max Boot (when he isn’t pushing for transforming the military into an imperial foreign legion recruited in Third World nations, the soldiers of which become citizens after completing their enlistment).
But to make otherwise reluctant mothers and fathers accept the drafting of their children for service in endless foreign wars will require an external cause, a big one, like a successful terrorist strike on America as big or bigger than 9-11.
And not being a conspiracy theorist, I think the chances for that are low, and believe this idea will wither away soon.
As always with neocons, I’ll be happy to enlist when they do. Perhaps we can both join together and get Newt to sign up as well. I seem to recall he skipped Vietnam.
Government compulsion runs against our grain, but let’s remember that service in the militia was compulsory in much of early America, as Jury duty still is. It’s difficult to separate cultural questions here from questions of social utility. Machiavelli wrote about the danger of hired armies. Rome fell when the Roman elite amputated their thumbs rather than serve in the legions. We can’t have a Republic without republican virtue, which includes a willingness to serve militarily when necessary.
Our current system sends citizens who are willing to serve, off to die in wars instigated by cowardly, disloyal citizens who risk nothing. This is a policy of dis-eugenics, ensuring the survival of the weakest and worst. It is also morally iniquitous.
On the other hand, who wants their children put in the hands of our lovely mass democracy? It’s hard to imagine any system of universal service that would not morph into leftist mischief. There is evidence to suggest that Obama plans to use just such a ploy to funnel American youth into the employ of left wing nonprofits. We may be approaching the point where our corrupt government and pornographic culture is no longer worth defending. But I’m holding on to my thumb for the time being.
Daniel, the first sentence is missing a word between “virtually” and “casulties.”
I will tell my sons not to sign up. And I will resist any effort to draft them. Mr. Meehan says properly, republican citizens serve “when necessary.” Cincinattus left his field to lead the Legions in the face of invasion. And returned when the threat was defeated; repudiating power and its enticements.
There has not been a “necessary” war in 60 years, of that I am certain. Korea was a closer call than any since. Our elites, quite simply, cannot be trusted with our sons. The notion the “mass democracy” has any say in warmaking is painfully naive. She is only manipulated into war.
No: no draft, no enlistment. I will not have my sons wasted on lies by the likes of Bush, Cheney and the villains beneath them. When a real threat comes, we’ll all know it; and we’ll be there, one and all, rifles ready. But, in the meantime, it is all lies and waste, and I won’t loses my sons for that. And I frankly don’t care what category that puts me in.
Thanks for spotting that, Angela! I’ve inserted the missing “no.”
To say that the rise to prominence of commissars and consiglieri of the Blankley Generation spells the death of American conservatism is to pay that latter spook in the head (after Max Stirner, natch) the unearned compliment of assuming it ever existed in the first place (after Edmund Wilson on the temporary loss of The New York Times Book Review during the 1963 New York newspaper strike.
I’m often tempted to write a book arguing the essential moral and rhetorical equivalence between American movement conservatism and its great-uncles of the Old Left, but sometimes, Mencken help me, someone like Blankley comes along, takes a nothing day and suddenly makes it all seem worthwhile, or at least far too easy:
“”The new conservative movement will be facing a political opponent that will soon reveal itself to be both multiculturalists and Euro-socialist…We will be engaged in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country…I will certainly do what I can to make it a big-tent conservative movement. But just as in every great cause, one question has to be answered correctly: Whose side are you on, comrade?”
Dwight Macdonald, Honey, are you listening from the life eternal?:
“Parody is disarmed before such candor.”
If I come before long to post my comments here from the cell of a Federal prison, as the result of taking one Selectively vulnerable young man after another into my bed of thorns as conductor on a new Overground Railroad,*
*Anyone with spikes and ties to spare, and those skilled in Chinese cookery and the laundry arts, Inquire Within
I’ll at least have the satisfaction of knowing that, thanks to the tender ministrations of inverted Trotskyists like Blankley, the final collapse of the Amerikan empire will have been set to bullet-train. Much as Ludwig von Mises pointed out to naive Marxists, in Theory and History</em?, that, far from fastening onto the roaring, sparking capitalist machine the speed-governor brakes of welfare-state measures, those who live for the socialist millennium burst from the shell of capitalism ought to allow the latter at every chance to seek its natural level and attain its fullest flower undisturbed in its last-stop-Utopia express run.
Lucky Dan didn’t say anything about Blankley’s new book, from Regnery, natch – whoops, there it is…
WRW, I use the term Mass Democracy in the way Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn did in the The Menace of the Herd. As we just saw in the case of Iraq. Democracies can and do commit enormities. Democracy and virtue rarely walk hand in hand in my view.
In order for Cincinattus to be, and then not be, a General of the Legions, there had to be legions in the first place. So a military machine of some sort must exist if a state is to survive. Cincinattus drilled and campaigned with his fellow citizens in order to be who he was. The early legions were composed of citizen soldiers who were legally obliged to turn out and train together.
As I recall, the so-called conservative supporters of the war in Iraq (like Blankley) had balked against any suggestion of bringing back the draft because they knew, as the Democratic advocates of conscription did at the time, the war would have about a 20-second lifespan if we had asked every man — and possibly woman — to stop shopping and head down to the draft board.
I am with others in thinking the political elites would have a much harder time engaging this country in their unnecessary and morally corrupt excursions if we all had a stake in fighting them. It certainly wouldn’t stop war, but it would definitely change the dynamic. Especially after Vietnam.
I have mixed feelings about the draft. I understand the libertarian perspective, i.e. that the state is denying the individual the right to make his own decisions, etc. While it is nice to say “I’ll serve if the country is threatened” in reality it doesn’t work that way as a war cannot be won without a trained pool of manpower. As a student of ancient history I have a great deal of respect for the Roman model, whereby citizens with property were the only ones allowed to bear arms as it was felt that they had the most to lose if Rome were conquered. The Marian reforms allowed citizens without property to serve, leading to an army that looked to its generals rather than to the state, resulting in two civil wars and the end of the Republic. Machiavelli, from the perspective of condottieri-wracked Renaissance Italy, also looked to the Roman model and noted the dangers in relying on a professional army as opposed to a citizen’s militia.
I was drafted in 1968 for Vietnam. Being white and middle class and coming out of an elite university, having to mix with the hoi polloi was a frequently painful experience. Though I hated the regimentation and conformity, I think my military service made me a better person, more able to understand my own country and its people. Nevertheless, when the draft ended I considered it a good thing.
On a practical level, a citizen army might discourage politicians from initiating wars unnecessarily, though it has not often done so in fact. I would note the large level of dissent within the ranks during Vietnam, which surely was a factor in the eventual shift in public sentiment against the fighting. I recently attended my college’s fortieth reunion and served on a panel discussing Vietnam and the protest movement. The hard core anti war activists on the panel all agreed that they had only opposed the war because they and their friends were at risk. None of them were doing anything at all to oppose Iraq, where the professional army drawn predominantly from the working class is seen as somewhat divorced from their own concerns. Admittedly, having a large, constript army also gives the politicians more cannon fodder to play with. I note the calls of leading democrats and republicans alike for a larger army, presumably so they can interfere in new and exciting places like Darfur.
Ah yes, apparently not satisfied that the public has just overwhelmingly and even viscerally vomited his party as far out of power as possible, Blankley now exhorts it to stand up and fight to keel-haul its sons and daughters over to Iraq and Afghanistan. (And in his mind no doubt to Iran as well.)
What next? Propose that Homeland Security take out everyone’s children once a year and slam their fingers in a car door to toughen them up? Set up gibbets on every street corner and start hanging their puppies and kittens and bunnies to begin steeling their little minds?
Buffoonish idea-grabbing masquerading as deep thinking; yeah, that’s the stigmata the Republicans still want to be wearing.
It’s hard to say what effect conscription has on a republican government’s ability to wage unnecessary wars — the theory seems to point in one direction but, as Phil points out, experience often suggests something else. Conscription did not prevent the U.S. from getting into Korea or Vietnam, and I tend to doubt that it would have stopped us from getting into the first Gulf War or the Iraq War — especially considering how popular both of those wars were when they began.
It’s also open to question just how much the backlash against conscription contributed to ending the Vietnam War. What we got out of the Vietnam experience may have been the worst of both worlds: a prolonged and unsuccessful military campaign coupled with massive social upheavals at home, as anti-draft sentiment (much of it purely self-interested) fed into all of the other discontents of the era. I suspect that if the Iraq War had been fought with a draft, we would not be getting out of Mesopotamia any sooner, but we would have had a much greater hard Left movement developing over the past four years. Ironically, a ’60s-style hard Left might have prevented someone like Barack Obama from defeating McCain. The public dislikes prolonged wars, but the public dislikes left-wing unrest at home even more.
[...] caught this item at The American Conservative’s blog and needed to comment on [...]
Many have supported the draft on the theory that if it was fairly and uniformly applied, including all those from the ruling class like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, that it would make war far less likely. I still on principle oppose the draft, but consider this an intersting and possibly valid argument. I would be interested in comments.
Conscription is morally wrong and totally unnecessary. It will never, ever be fairly and uniformly applied, and it would still be immoral even if it were. The idea that conscription makes war less likely is a totally unsubstantiated hypothesis. Conscription is a convenient tool for warmongering tyrants and the threat of conscription is a convenient tool for cowardly leftists.
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If the U.S. is truly at war, i.e that the Congress declares it officially and the president puts the economy and the whole country on a war footing ala World War II and even World War I, then I have no problem with conscription as a way making sure all of its citizens take part in defending the Republic if its in danger. Obviously you don’t want that burden falling on just one segment in society.
However, the U.S. has not conducted a war like World War II despite the country in armed conflict many times since 1945. This is because we are an empire, and empires need professional armies that serve around the globe and can be organized to fight quickly and not disrupt the civilian population lest they start to question why we are fighting. The U.S. shifted from a conscripted to a volunteer military for this very reason and Vietnam was what forced the change. Our military may be overstretched but better an overstretched military serving around the globe, according to the policy makers, then one filled with tons of civilians that don’t want to be doing what the policy makers want and making trouble. Iraq is no different than the Boer War and the army is no different than the French Foreign Legion.
A profession military is a nice thing to have but make it too big and spend too much money on it and it feels like it has to be used for no other reason than to prevent boredom and lack of retention. This is not to say soldiers actively want war, most don’t. But at the same time one cannot believe they just want to be an army that just trains. This is true for the policy makers as well. “What’s the use of having this magnificent miltary if we can’t use it?” As Madeline Albright said. The neocons would concurr.
” and the Army is no different than the French Foreign.” This would come as quite a surprise to the many young American soldiers I’ve met. I think this debate about the nature of the draft has been a good one with valid points made on all sides. But let’s not consign our serving troops to the status of mercenaries.
I think behind this debate is another question. What do we think of our Republic and at what point do we wish to have the option of withdrawing our participation. I suspect that some who object to the draft would not object if the draft served to defend what we would call a virtuous republic. As our Government comes to embody and enforce the norms of a society most of us find increasingly alien and disreputable it’s natural that our willingness to serve falls away. My opinion is that as our common culture dissolves our allegiance to societies institutions dissolves with it.
As usual, the poison spread by neocons haunts the argument. What was most disgusting about Max Boot’s call for an American Foreign Legion was not his call for the use of mercenaries, but his assumption that those we pay to kill for us should automatically join our ranks as citizens. This tells us more about what being an Americian means to neocons than it does about how to man our military.
Sean: “A profession military is a nice thing to have but make it too big and spend too much money on it and it feels like it has to be used for no other reason than to prevent boredom and lack of retention.”
Sean’s mention of boredom may strike a chord in those of you with a copy of Robert Nisbet’s Prejudices handy; Nisbet devotes one of his stimulating alphabetical essays to boredom, and since I gave my most recent copy away some years ago, I rely for the moment on the summary provided by George Will in 2007:
“Boredom, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is among the universal and insistent forces driving human behavior. Mankind’s nervous system evolved during millions of dangerous years (saber-toothed tigers, etc.). Now, however, mankind has suddenly, in a few millennia, encountered the monotony of orderly life, which bothers human brains formed by and for hazardous circumstances.
“Among the cures of boredom that Nisbet listed are war, murder, revolution, suicide, alcohol, narcotics and pornography. He might have added presidential politics. Memo to the Clinton campaign: Inevitability is boring.”
What I meant was the army being used as a French Foreign Legion, i.e. a force designed to fight for the nation-state so that nation state’s own citizens can avoid fighting themselves.
Of course as you point out, the more immigrants that used as cannon fodder with the carrot stick of citizenship drawing them in, the more the U.S. military does represent the Foreign Legion, or the Roman military near the end of the empire.
‘This is because we are an empire, and empires need professional armies that serve around the globe and can be organized to fight quickly and not disrupt the civilian population lest they start to question why we are fighting.’
What’s wrong with the citizens questioning the war? Don’t we run this country? I think you just hit upon why the framers didn’t want a standing army. So we wouldn’t go off having wars of convenience.
‘As I recall, the so-called conservative supporters of the war in Iraq (like Blankley) had balked against any suggestion of bringing back the draft because they knew, as the Democratic advocates of conscription did at the time, the war would have about a 20-second lifespan if we had asked every man — and possibly woman — to stop shopping and head down to the draft board.’
Do you mean because we (the people) wouldn’t have been so in favor of the war if we actually had to fight instead of the volunteers, or that we would have won so fast there wouldn’t have been as much profit made for the defense contractors?
Anyone who thinks a draft will be applied fairly and across the board is fooling themselves. It’s not going to happen, at least not in this world. Strings will be pulled and congressmen called. A way will be found around the system, no matter how many safeguards are written into the law. Any privileged kid who does actually get called up, will sit out any war doing some sort of safe work in the rear.
‘Any privileged kid who does actually get called up, will sit out any war doing some sort of safe work in the rear.’
Or flying in the Air National Guard locally instead of for the Air Force in theatre.
The trouble with this “conscription for peace” argument is that there has been no experience or evidence to support it.
The United States was unprepared for her enemies in WWII in regards to both material and personnel, and she quickly rose to the challenge through efficient manufacturing and volunteers.
Conscription as a national policy did not prevent either the Korean or Vietnam wars, as Dan pointed out.
Living in the South, I can tell you that if there was a serious threat to American security, folks would volunteer. 9-11 proved that theory.
I am willing to contend there is zero evidence of a state without an explicitly neutral foreign policy that has ever been halted in its warmongering by the need for conscription.