Coercion and Social Cohesion
I don’t hear anyone suggesting a draft period of two years, as it was before 1973, so we’d be talking about a one year – twelve months – service period at most (Austria is down to six months coerced service, as a reference point, which has limited functional utility for the active forces.). Which would mean the U.S. military would have to invest in a vast training system resulting in lots of units filled with half-trained troops plus many others counting the days until they get out. It’s not difficult to see why you hardly ever meet career military types, of any rank, with any enthusiasm for restoring peacetime conscription.
Schindler acribes this to the utopian dreams of pundits that never had to endure military discipline themselves but want someone else’s sons and daughters to do it. However, even this is actually too charitable. I wrote and scrapped a column for War on the Rocks that analyzed this at length (it was getting too dense for a typical op-ed format) and I came to the conclusion that there is actually an strong element of authoritarianism in this.
The idea is that, in essence, with a regimented body of Americans we have cohesion again — cohesion, however, defined by the pundit’s own views about what politics America ought to have. What Dana Milibank’s column (which Schindler’s column rebuts) amounts to is the idea that a regimented America is one that will be more likely to agree with his own subjective political beliefs. Key is his sentence at the end that the ultimate goal of this would be to do undo the damage of “self-interested leaders” and the fact that the shutdown was the impetus for his column:
It’s no coincidence that this same period has seen the gradual collapse of our ability to govern ourselves: a loss of control over the nation’s debt, legislative stalemate and a disabling partisanship. It’s no coincidence, either, that Americans’ approval of Congress has dropped to just 9?percent, the lowest since Gallup began asking the question 39 years ago.
If partisanship is what regimentation seeks to cure, than the unspoken assumption is that a drafted public is one more likely to share Dana Milbank’s view of American governance. Let us be direct: his view of governance is one that conflates ideological disagreement (combined with the particularities of the US system) with pettiness and flaws of character. And the implication is that regimentation, authority, and discipline will reduce disorder and make American politics legible to him and other observers — like the China-fetishizing New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
Don’t get me wrong, I found the shutdown disturbing too. I dislike partisanship as well. I think that the shutdown was also a failure of American governance. But it had complex structural causes, not some sudden and simplistic deprecation in the character of Americans raised on butter instead of guns. Structure, particularly when combined with ideology, matters. And we should start being very careful when an intellectual avoids existing structural analysis, warns of societal decadence , and declares that we must regiment ourselves and quash disagreement to save the polity. We should particularly be concerned when said intellectual creates a mono-causal explanation for a complex set of social problems and declares we must regiment ourselves and quash disagreement.
In any event I’d rather have vigorous partisanship and democracy (even if it results in gridlock and partisanship) than the kind of America Milbank seemingly wants to build. And knowledge of history should make us very cautious about the constant of the intellectual proposing coercion for the sake of order, cohesion, and discipline in society. Diversity builds robustness and strength, and centralization and regimentation can have substantial costs.
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Ghost of Christmas Future:
December 26th, 2013 at 4:42 am
Mr. Elkus,
It’s now an open secret that John R. Schindler is going to become a news story in the New Year, once his employer stops dragging its feet and responds to FOIAs regarding their talking points received from the NSA. The cause of academic freedom is certainly not helped by its cynical abuse to promote three letter agency sock puppetry paired with snark, fanatical denial of (at the very least) bad apples in the NSA ranks who may very well have harassed Larry Klayman and his clients the gold star Strange family, and adverse lawfare decisions pending putting Agency morale into the toilet. It’s never a fun thing to be employed by an Agency and have friends and neighbors ducking you or asking you with nervous laughter whether you’ve spied on them or any other American during your career.
AdamElkus:
December 26th, 2013 at 4:59 am
GoCF,
.
That is mildly interesting, but distinctly unrelated to the post’s topic.
larrydunbar:
December 26th, 2013 at 6:58 pm
Are you suggesting there is diversity in a meritocracy, even when they are all going through the same regimentation?
Ghosts of Christmas Future:
December 26th, 2013 at 10:08 pm
“GoCF,
“That is mildly interesting, but distinctly unrelated to the post’s topic.”
I mentioned the author of the post you referenced. And it is highly relevant with Prof. Schindler’s colleague Tom Nichols sneering that ‘the average American thinks NSA has time to read millions of their emails per day and doesn’t even know who their Congressman is’ happens both be untrue (the first clause) and irrelevant (the second clause) to the discussion of whether the NSA is violating the 4th Amendment. In short, don’t sneer at the public for asking stupid questions if one’s preferred method of argumentation is to toss out snark, straw men, and duck debate with PhD level peers who have a different opinion (like Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla) or individuals like Thomas Drake who also can boast of NSA experience. The best Schindler could do against Drake was insult him for working at an Apple store after his federal career was destroyed by retaliation for whistleblowing via the legitimate channels Schindler insists Snowden could’ve used. Schindler and Nichols both resent the taxpaying public that pays their salaries and are terrified of actual face to face direct questions from said public. Twitter is so much easier because unlike taking questions from a packed auditorium or an opponent like Codevilla who can humiliate Schindler in front of a packed house, it has a block button. Why do you think Schindler prefers to go on MSNBC or CNN where he’s guaranteed softballs as opposed to appearing on Fox Business opposite Larry Klayman? Klayman would rip him a new one and ask him how he can be certain individuals inside NSA aren’t electronically harassing his gold star family clients the Stranges by sending them texts from their dead son.
Of course all great American debates have been defined by passionately motivated individuals on both sides going back to the American Revolution itself. The (first? American) Civil War was not brought about by the mushy middle that disliked slavery but didn’t want to forcibly outlaw it, it was triggered by the passionate pro-slavery and abolitionist camps. Per your point that structure matters — the South didn’t want to give up the economic value of their human chattel. The Surveillance State’s passionate advocates don’t wish to give up the gravy train, and you notice the outrage against Booz Allen Hamilton by those upset by Snowden’s actions rapidly faded into the background rather than remaining on the front burner, even with the spectacular claim that Snowden ‘took everything’ to the tune of 2 million documents. How an Agency that cannot be trusted to prevent a high school dropout from making off with the crown jewels can still be trusted to prevent rogue cells of Snowden-level IQ types from selling NSA obtained secrets to the highest bidder or using them for political blackmail is beyond me.
Ghosts of Christmas Future:
December 26th, 2013 at 10:19 pm
The relevancy of the topic is elitism, elitist thinking and mass conscription, plus whether the elites can be any more trusted with a conscript force than an all-volunteer force. For once I agree with Schindler but that doesn’t change the fact that he hides from serious informed arguments from PhD level or NSA veteran peers, while pretending they don’t exist because the general public on Twitter often struggles to articulate. In order to discredit NSA whistleblowers Schindler resorts to un-testable ad hominems (how does Schindler know that Russ Tice is lying about seeing Obama or Alito’s files in NSA cerca 2004? Did Schindler even have access to that ‘compartment’?), irrelevancies (so what if Jim Bamford is wrong about the USS Liberty being a deliberate Israeli attack? Bamford merely quoted ranking military NSA commanders who said it was) or just what Codevilla would call Ruling Class insults, putting Thomas Drake down for the fact that he no longer draws a .gov or .mil paycheck but has to work in the private sector selling IPads.
And as for Schindler’s comment on the Huertgen as an argument against mass conscription, he left out the part that the toughest German troops where either fighting in the Bulge or on the Eastern Front, and conscripts did much better in defense than on the attack (no surprise). The Huertgen was also the worst possible terrain from which to invade Nazi Germany from the West and the most easily defended, even more than Rhine crossings. The Soviets in contrast with the exception of the river crossings and the Seelow Heights had a clearer path to Berlin.
seydlitz89:
January 3rd, 2014 at 12:34 pm
Adam-
.
This post got me thinking about “modern” moral cohesion and conscription, which from a Clausewitzian perspective are intimately linked . . . I also think that Clausewitz can assist us in better understanding the arguments on both sides of the US debate . . . so . . . part I
.
http://milpubblog.blogspot.pt/2014/01/a-clausewitzian-view-of-current.html