I turned this
morning to the New Jersey section of the New York Times to find the
following letter to the editor from one Mary Durkee of Princeton Junction,
New Jersey. Durkee is responding here to a previous letter writer, Rebecca
Kurson, who had described herself as a “Security Mom” interested in voting
for President Bush. Durkee writes:
“Security Mom” Rebecca Kurson feels safer from a terrorist attack
because George W. Bush is president….But how will these Security Moms feel
if the draft returns and they have to put their own children’s lives on
the line? Or is the war on terrorism a war they feel should be fought by
someone else’s children? This naïve confidence in Mr. Bush seems sadly
misplaced. (New York Times, Oct. 10, 2004; Section 14, p. 21).
Actually, what I think is sad is that Ms. Durkee’s letter accurately
represents the current mental state of the rank and file of the Democratic
Party, and generally, what passes today for American liberalism. The
trademarks of this mentality appear to be brazen self-contradiction,
unfailing factual inaccuracy, rigid dogmatism, and a nearly inexhaustible
supply of sanctimoniousness. Despite the brevity of her letter, Ms. Durkee
manages to cram each one of these elements into the space at her disposal.
First consider the self-contradiction involved in the two rhetorical
questions she asks. The first question implies that the draft (which is
evidently imminent, and coming to us care of President Bush) is bad
because it makes us all liable for service, thus increasing the risks of
death or injury for everyone of draft age. The second question implies
just the opposite: that the absence of the draft is bad because it allows
us to free-ride on the efforts of others, rather than making us all
equally liable for military service.
In other words, Ms. Durkee is simultaneously telling us that a draft would
be bad because it would undermine our sense of security, and that the
absence of a draft is bad because it doesn’t sufficiently undermine
everyone’s sense of security. So which policy is better by her own chosen
standard of safety—a draft or no draft? Needless to say, no inference is
possible from the incompatible assumptions expressed in her letter. As
we’ll see, this confused ambivalence—"Keep your laws off our children's
bodies" and "Take our liberty and give us death!"—is at the heart of the
distinctively liberal attitude on the draft, whether expressed by ordinary
people, politicians or philosophers.
Having dispensed with the logical issue, you can at once see the factual
inaccuracy, dogmatism, and sanctimoniousness of Ms. Durkee’s letter by
asking the following simple question: What is the empirical evidence that
Bush will institute a draft at any time during his presidency? It is
pathetic enough that the answer is: zero. It is more pathetic, however,
that the only party currently in favor of the draft is the Democratic
Party. This dismal story, buried in obscure and forgotten newspaper
articles, deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten.
On October 6, the Times ran an article on p. A16 by Carl Hulse with the
rather cryptic title, “Bill to Restore the Draft Is Defeated in the House:
GOP forces a vote to quell rumors.” No summary can convey the sheer
ludicrousness of this story as can a verbatim excerpt of its first few
paragraphs:
Washington, Oct. 5—Trying to quiet fears of a return of the draft, the
House Republican leadership engaged in a hasty call-up of its own on
Tuesday. The Republicans brought to the floor a Democratic-sponsored
proposal to reinstate mandatory military service and presided over its
overwhelming defeat on a vote of 402 to 2.
“We’re going to put a nail in that coffin,” said the House majority
leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. He accused Democrats of
generating opposition to President Bush—especially on college campuses—by
raising the idea that the draft might be re-established after the November
election to provide troops for service in Iraq.
Democrats were outraged at the tactic, charging Republicans with a cynical
political ploy on a matter that merited more thoughtful hearings and
debate. The Democrats originally introduced the measure early last year as
a way to protest the war, even before it began, and to spotlight how
low-and middle-income Americans shoulder much of the burden of serving in
the military.
“It is a prostitution of the legislative process to take a serious issue
and use it for political purposes on the eve of the election just to say
they are against the draft,” said Representative Charles B. Rangel,
Democrat of New York, the author of the bill, who ended up voting against
it.
The article goes on to quote two high-ranking Democratic politicians—Rep.
John Murtha of Pennsylvania and minority leader Tom Daschle—as offering
timid support for the draft. It mentions that Sen. Ernest Hollings, a
prominent Democratic Senator, has introduced a bill in favor of the draft
in the Senate. It goes on to identify Rock the Vote, a left-leaning
organization, as the source of rumors about a Republican-sponsored draft.
It points out that there is no evidence whatsoever for Rock the Vote’s
rumor-mongering. And it quotes three high-ranking Republicans—President
Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, and Duncan Hunter, chairman of the Armed
Services Committee—as being unequivocally opposed to the draft. All in
all, it is hard to see how anyone minimally guided by considerations of
facticity could infer that the Republicans are the ones in favor of the
draft and the Democrats a bulwark against it. But considerations of
facticity are evidently not the ones guiding the Mary Durkees or Rock the
Voters of the world.
Now pause a minute on Rep. Rangel’s remarks, excerpted above, and try to
get your mind around his would-be message. In protest of the war, he
sponsors legislation for a draft. So his protest against the war consists
in forcing unwilling conscripts to die in it, while he sits on the
sidelines, condemning the very idea of sending them. Of course, he is the
one sending them—but no matter. In this little universe, gestures trump
reality.
So Rangel’s bill
sits around for more than a year, and eventually, the Republicans call his
bluff and do the unthinkable: they call for a real-live vote on it.
Naturally, Rangel calls foul. I mean come on: calling a vote on a bill--to
what new low will those Republicans stoop? Having introduced the bill,
Rangel then votes against it, as does most of the rest of the House. From
all this we’re to infer that it’s “prostitution” to call a vote on a bill
you oppose, but virginal moral purity to table a vote you’ve authored and
then end up voting against.
Having voted against his own ridiculous bill, Rangel then (ignoring the
couple of hundred Democrats who voted against it) accuses the Republicans
of playing politics. Politics, as we all know, is an activity strictly
forbidden in the halls of Congress, one engaged in only by Republicans,
but never by Democrats.
It seems like a
joke, but from this idiotic farce we’re somehow to infer that the
Republicans want a draft, but the Democrats don’t, and that the Democrats
hold the moral high ground while the Republicans are scum.
Only an authentic imbecile, one thinks, could actually draw such an
inference. But what is one to make of the fact that the Mary Durkees and
Rock the Voters have so vehemently drawn it?
People have accused the Bush Administration of getting its political
message from Machiavelli, but can you think of a better exemplification of
Machiavelli’s “prince” than Charles Rangel? In chapter 18 of The Prince,
Machiavelli tells us that “the prince” avails himself of two distinct
methods of governing: “the first method is that of men, the second of
beasts; but as the first is often insufficient, one must have recourse to
the second. It is therefore necessary for a prince to know well how to use
both the beast and the man.” And what better way of employing the method
of beasts but to appeal to abject animal fear, and then to employ the
brute force of the draft as a method of policy? (Anyway, where does the
word "draft" come from but animal agriculture? It's a method of dealing
with work animals.) Machiavelli continues: : “…it is necessary to be able
to disguise [one’s] character well, and to be a great feigner and
dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey present
necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow
themselves to be deceived.” Comment, I think, would be superfluous.
It only makes things worse to learn that historically, the Republicans
have always had a better record than the Democrats as regards the draft.
True, the draft originated during the Civil War with Abraham Lincoln, a
Republican. (Strictly speaking it originated under the Confederacy, but
since the Confederate governments weren’t really American, Lincoln gets
the unworthy honor.) But it was sustained thereafter under Democratic
Administrations: the Selective Service Act of 1917 under Woodrow Wilson;
the Selective Service Act of 1940 under Franklin Roosevelt; the U.S.
Military Training and Service Act of 1951 under Harry Truman; and the
Military Selective Service Act of 1967 under Lyndon Johnson. The latter
act expired in 1973 under the Administration of Richard Nixon, a
Republican—who dispensed with it at the urging of Alan Greenspan, an
Objectivist.
And who stood behind and influenced Greenspan? The answer, of course, is
Ayn Rand, whose 1967 essay on the subject, “The Wreckage of the
Consensus,” bears re-reading today. What strikes the reader is her
identification of the essential issue, and her rejection of the essential
premise behind conscription:
Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the
military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates
man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental
principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the
state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that
principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
If the state
may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a way
declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of
nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into
unspeakable martyrdom—then in principle, all rights are negated in that
state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is
there left to protect? (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, first paperback
edition, pp. 226-7).
Rand is scathingly (and properly) critical of conservative defenders of
property rights who defend the draft, but that sort of politician seems
mostly to be a relic of the past. What we face today are not conservatives
but liberals who claim that we all have a positive right to
need-satisfaction (e.g., health care) but no negative right to life. Their
position is worth scrutinizing.
Sadly, the first such defender was Abraham Lincoln, who wrote a long
justification for the draft in September 1863 after having instituted it a
few months earlier. His justification, however, goes only as far as
constitutional and legal issues, not moral fundamentals:
The principle of the draft which simply is involuntary, or enforced
service, is not new. It has been practiced in all ages of the world. It
was well known to the framers of our constitution as one of the modes of
raising armies, at the time they placed in that instrument the provision
that “the congress shall have the power to raise and support armies.” It
has been used, just before, in establishing our independence; and it was
used under the constitution of 1812. Wherein is the peculiar hardship now?
This argument is an obvious failure. For the most part it’s merely an
appeal to tradition, custom or authority, which tells us nothing about the
truth of the proposition under consideration. Its one appeal to the
Constitution is fallacious: Lincoln is arguing here that because the
Constitution gives the government the authority to raise an army, it
follows that it can do so by any means whatsoever, regardless of any other
goal. But the other goal it has is the protection of the right to life,
which no legitimate means can violate—a fact that Lincoln was able to
recognize virtually everywhere but here.
It is worth noting that Lincoln’s reading of the “raise and support”
clause of the Constitution is identical to the contemporary liberal
reading of the “general welfare” clause. Just as Lincoln thinks that the
government has unlimited power to raise an army, so contemporary liberals
think that the government has unlimited power to promote the general
welfare. Why would one think that? For the deeper premises, one has to
look not to politicians, but philosophers.
Consider in this
connection John Rawls’s discussion of conscription in the revised edition
of his A Theory of Justice, universally regarded as the premier
twentieth-century statement of contemporary liberalism in the English
language (perhaps in any language). Rawls has this to say on the subject:
Now I shall assume that since conscription is a drastic interference
with the basic liberties of equal citizenship, it cannot be justified by
any needs less compelling than those of national security. In a
well-ordered society (or in one nearly just) these needs are determined by
the end of preserving just institutions. Conscription is permissible only
if it is demanded for the defense of liberty itself, including here not
only the liberties of the citizens of the society in question, but also
those of persons in other societies as well. Therefore if a conscript army
is less likely to be an instrument of unjustified foreign adventures, it
may be justified on this basis alone despite the fact that conscription
infringes upon the equal liberties of citizens. But in any case, the
priority of liberty…requires that conscription be used only as the
security of liberty necessitates. Viewed from the standpoint of the
legislature…the mechanism of the draft can be defended only on this
ground. Citizens agree to this arrangement as a fair way of sharing the
burdens of national defense. (A Theory of Justice, pp. 333-334,
revised edition).
It looks like a long series of restrictions on conscription—conscription
is bad, except in emergencies. But no: contrary to the lengthy
qualifications and circumlocutions, what Rawls is giving us is a plain old
defense of conscription on the grounds that the state owns its citizens.
Conscription, he tells us, infringes on liberty. For that reason, one can
only resort to it in the case of dire military necessity. What case is
that? The case in which liberty itself is threatened by external
attack—and not just the liberty of one’s fellow-citizens, but that of
citizens of another country. Thus 9/11 is as good a justification for war
as genocide in Darfur. But isn’t the defense of liberty the only sensible
ground for war in the first place, so that there are no other good reasons
for war? According to Rawls—according to virtually everyone—the answer is
“yes.” So ultimately, what Rawls is saying is that conscription is
justified in any case where war itself is justified—which is another way
of saying that for all the infringement of liberty it involves,
conscription is just fine.
Notice, however, that unlike Lincoln, Rawls insists on engaging in
double-talk about the involuntary nature of conscription. Lincoln admits
that conscription is involuntary, but insists that it’s necessary. Rawls
says the same thing after a fashion but then abruptly tells us that the
involuntary is actually voluntary since we’ve “agreed” to it. Granted, the
“we” here refers to “representative persons” making decisions behind a
“veil of ignorance.” Granted also that it’s a puzzle why he would say that
“our” liberty is infringed by conscription in the first place if he also
thinks “we” agree to it. But the cash value of this two-pronged approach
is that he ends up covering all the bases, and making conscription
inescapable: if you complain that it’s involuntary, he tells you you’ve
agreed to it; if you insist that you haven’t agreed, he tells you that
your agreement doesn’t matter.
On the same page, Rawls justifies the “conscientious” refusal to serve in
the military, but reminds us that this right is only a right, in very
narrow circumstances, to refuse military service; it is not a right to
avoid one’s (enforceable) “natural duty” to others. A follower of Rawlsian
liberalism draws out its logical consequence with stunning results. On a
Rawlsian view, he tells us, the state owns us as fully as the lord owns
his serf under feudalism (Richard Arneson, “Property in Persons,” Social
Philosophy and Policy, 9:1, [1992], pp. 204-207). Recoil from it a bit,
but be grateful at least for the candor.
In this light, we can begin to make sense of why the Democrats have begun
to fall in love with the draft while the Republicans are so averse to it.
For once, and perhaps only for once, the two parties are acting in
accordance with the actual premises that underlie their ideologies. The
underlying premise of the Democratic ideology is that no one owns himself,
but that persons own other persons, and that the State owns a part of each
of us on behalf of all of us. The underlying premise of the Republican
ideology is that each of us owns ourselves, and that it’s the function of
a proper government to secure the conditions under which we can act on
that premise. Conscription is the litmus test that tests one’s loyalty to
that principle. Under duress, we’ve come to see that both Democrats and
Republicans have instinctively run back to their core principles.
There are, to be sure, exceptions to the rule: there are Republican idiots
who back “national service,” and honorable Democrats (and leftists) who
genuinely oppose conscription. But then again, there are also leftists
who, while opposing conscription, back the war on the grounds that in
doing so, we pay a “debt” back to the Iraqis for our past moral failures
to them—a debt to be paid in the currency of contemporary American lives,
on the tacit assumption that those lives belong to the state and
constitute legal tender for the sins of the past. And then there are the
leftists who scream about the evils of trying to liberate Iraq—while
demanding that we “do something” about Darfur (like liberate it). The
complications for my generalizations therefore cut both ways; they don’t
affect the root issue.
The root issue is this: Whatever else may be wrong with them, the
Republican Party is the only party with any allegiance to a conception of
self-ownership, and the same is true of a core of its constituents. They
may not fully understand it; they may even violate and contradict it from
time to time. But when push comes to shove, even the dullest among them
(like the President) knows where to stand on the acid test issue. The
Democrats by contrast have zero allegiance to that principle (or anything
like it): they hate it, fear it, feel guilty about it when they benefit
from it, and long to destroy it (except on this or that issue, like
abortion or gay rights). When push comes to shove, even their most
intelligent exponents evince ambivalence about where to stand.
Another word for “ambivalence” is “cognitive dissonance,” and that is what
we are seeing from our smug, holier-than-thou Democrats. Nothing else so
perfectly explains their undying habit of conjoining self-contradiction,
fabrication, and projection with a tacit assumption of the moral high
ground. The Republicans are not exactly an inspiring bunch, but it is high
time to kick the Democrats off of their self-conferred moral pedestal. The
draft is the perfect issue by which to do it. They should be taught a
lesson they won’t soon forget.
Dr. Irfan Khawaja is adjunct professor of philosophy at the College of
New Jersey, a columnist for Pakistan Today, and a contributor to The
Rational Argumentator.
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