Militarism and Conservatism: Can this Marriage be Saved?
Today it is almost axiomatic that conservatives are nationalistic, interventionist, and overly fond of answering political problems with police or military solutions. The power of John McCain’s candidacy probably boils down, in the end, to the craving Republicans felt for a genuine war-time hero--after 8 years of being governed by a nattering chickenhawk and his team of empire-building draft dodgers and opportunists. Those of us who rightly pointed out that Ron Paul was a far more consistent representative of conservative principles were continually frustrated by the sheer thick-headedness of pro-war Republicans, who seemed literally incapable of intellectually processing the idea that any mission which American troops were currently “accomplishing” might be in fact be a bad idea. In his typically canny way, that political piranha David Frum knew what he did when he penned that farrago of lies ”Unpatriotic Conservatives.”
Having appeared on numerous conservative radio shows to promote other projects unrelated to foreign policy, I have had to tread lightly and watch my words, lest the subject of our current foreign adventure might arise. I quickly learned U.S. policy in Iraq is for most conservatives literally beyond discussion. It is not that these people will not debate the war; they literally cannot. Even questioning American actions abroad while our troops are in the field strikes them as a form not so much of treason as of blasphemy. It’s as if our troops were several hundred thousand Christs, and to criticize their mission amounted to jeering at Jesus on the cross. “You saved others, why don’t you save yourself?” Of course, we are doing no such thing; in fact, we’re jeering at Pilate. Not that it matters--except to the soldiers themselves, who gave more money to Ron Paul than to all the other candidates in the race combined.
The experience of trying to debate the war with otherwise sensible and thoughtful conservatives has forced me to consider the deeper connections between right wing political movements and instinctive militarism. On the one hand, conservatives claim a preference for small, localized government, low taxes, an unforced and unplanned variety of social mores and customs that vary from place to place, continuity with the past, and the primacy of prudence as the virtue that governs all the others. We favor gradual change over sudden, patchworks of hallowed customs over rationalized ideologies, and oral tradition over written books of rules.
Admittedly, many of us made a deal with the devil in the Cold War, following William F. Buckley’s prescription that to defeat the totalitarian enemy abroad, we must accept for a time a similar regimentation at home--"for the duration” of that struggle. What we learned in the 1990s, with the ascendancy of the neocons, is that the struggle would never end, that having despatched Communism our political masters would look about for new enemies to confront, even invent them if they had to. It was only the events of 9/11 that distracted the neocons from ginning up a confrontation with China, as they are now trying to do with Russia--even as they urge us to fight “World War IV” against the entire Arab world. Militarism, from being the means, became the goal itself. A militaristic discipline and wartime spirit were now the necessary counter-force to modern, consumerist decadence, and must be kept stoked, in effect, forever. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Is this just naked opportunism, a mask for advancing the goals of the Israel Lobby, enriching the likes of Halliburton, seizing foreign oil supplies, or winning elections? I don’t think we can responsibly reduce the resurgence of militarism to any one of these. Conspiracy theorists, like millenarians, are hopeless optimists, who imagine that somewhere there are 13 evil men who meet periodically over martinis in Amsterdam to plan out the evils we suffer--and if only we could shoot down their Gulfstreams en route to the Bilderberger Convention, the world would revert to sanity. If only.
There’s a long history of conservatives making common cause with the most adventurous, militaristic elements in a given country, the better to fend off destructive internal developments. I don’t know enough ancient history to speak of Greece and Rome (Dr. Gottfried, I’d welcome your interventions here!). But it’s undeniably true that the Crusades were launched in part to redirect the anarchic military energies of Christian knights across the Continent away from internal feuds and civil wars--and toward a suitably wicked foreign enemy. It helped that the Crusades were (apart from exceptions such as the Fourth) a long just war waged in self-defense by a Christendom which had been under Islamic siege for centuries, a misguided and poorly executed series of campaigns to liberate majority Christian populations from grinding oppression. But an unjust war might have served just as well. Likewise, in the wake of the French Revolution, the Right in several European countries abandoned its traditional (aristocratic) internationalism, and sought to whip up patriotic sentiment as an alternative locus to class resentment. There is also the question of finding work. In France, the only avenues for advancement open to dispossessed conservatives after the catastrophe of 1830 were in the Army. Government positions were only granted to anti-clericals; being seen attending Mass was career suicide, especially after 1870, as Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Leaving aside the brute political necessity of redirecting popular sentiment and gaining power, one can’t help observing a natural affinity between conservatives and the military. There is surely something in the typical make-up of a person willing to disapprove of sexual and social innovations and scoff at elitist critiques of traditional ways which attracts him to the order, discipline, ritual, and asceticism of military life. Even if he does not take part in it personally, he naturally admires the soldier as the heir to the chevalier--the icon of an ancient ethos that transcends the calculation of the merchant, the stodgy caution of the peasant, the sneering skepticism of the professional intellectual. Indeed, to visceral conservatives, a soldier is second only in dignity to a priest. Perhaps this is why, for most of the history of the Church, the ranks of the saints have been filled first by priests and nuns--and secondly by soldiers.
With all this in mind, I wonder if the Old Right of which Justin Raimondo writes so eloquently was not necessarily the natural state of conservatism in America, but rather a happy exception--a brief but worthy reaction to the evil futility of World War I, and the extreme forms which bureaucratic militarism was taking in Russia, Germany, even (of all places!) Italy in the 1920s and 30s. Are we in fact doomed as a movement to yoke our carts to the chariots of war? If so, is there something profoundly wrong with conservatism--a fundamental tension between its ends (stability and liberty) and its means (regimentation and invasion)? Were this true, we’d be morally bound to follow the libertarians in shaking off the embrace of the military, purging ourselves of the instinct which leads us to admire the soldier and the policeman. The great conservative partisan of liberty Wilhelm Ropke was troubled by this tension.
Let me offer an alternative suggestion which requires a less radical shift of psychology--and will alienate fewer (mostly just the stupidest) instinctual conservatives. How about we rethink our attachment to the military, keeping in mind the following realities:
* War is a revolutionary force, frequently destroying the very institutions it was meant to save. This is obviously true in the losing countries. Which fire-eating Confederate in 1865 would not have wished that he could go back and accept the compromises offered by President Lincoln in 1860? (Of course, not every institution is worth saving--but that’s beside the point here.) Ditto the French right-wingers who supported the war with Prussia in 1870--which led directly to the Commune and the loathsome Third Republic--and the conservatives who goaded the German and Austrian kaisers and the Russian Tsar into a war which destroyed all three monarchies. But the experience of war can also undermine key institutions among the victors. As Allan Carlson and Bill Kauffman document, the effort of waging World War II helped massively and permanently increase the power of the U.S. federal government, drive women into the workplace, encourage Americans to move off farms and into the cities, and in dozens of different ways to break up the old America which the soldiers had fought to defend.
* Not every army is conservative. Think East Germany, Cuba, Venezuela. Go back further, and remember the fanatically nationalistic, anti-Christian armies of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. Indeed, there is no social force which can so quickly smash the arrangements for living which have prevailed for centuries than an army in the hands of radicals. It was not for nothing that “progressives” in America in the early 20th century favored the militarization of large parts of American life.
* Not all soldiers are militarists. While we can certainly point to many instances of jingoist generals provoking conflicts so that they could win their spurs, or justify their bloated budgets, we have ample counter-examples in the soldiers who’d seen enough of combat to favor cautious, prudent policies. The sad case of Colin Powell comes to mind, but greater names include Dwight Eisenhower, Smedley Butler and Andrew Bacevich.
* Not all militarists are soldiers. Many, during wartime, had other priorities.
* Most soldiers fight for the defense of their homelands and ways of life. Any proposed military conflict which is not strictly fought for these reasons is betrayal of the troops by their commanders--and should be denounced as such.
I think that these observations, repeated relentlessly to pro-war conservatives, might begin to make a dent. It’s too late in this election year, where the truth about American war-making has been buried in a pile of elephant crap. But truth has a nasty habit of clawing its way back up into the light.
Comments
I saw a sign in a yard down the street that read, <bold>"Support Our Troops -Hold Our Leaders Accountable"</bold>
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Robert Nisbet, a passionately anti-militarist conservative, had a lot to say about the effects of militarism in the modern era. He notes that militarism (not just war) is by nature destructive of intermediate institutions—family, church, guild, etc.—that buffer the action of state power on the individual. What a strong military by its very nature desires, according to Nisbet, is a sovereign state ruling over a population of individuals unburdened by any of those messy pre-state loyalties and obligations. Oh, wait a minute—that’s what many self-described “conservatives” want too. Never mind.
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This is an excellent outline of the militarism/conservatism conundrum. In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson compares the militarism of the Roman Empire and the US. He also notes that 86% of American industrial production today is devoted to the military so that militarism has a firm base in economic reality for many Americans. War is just business or part of the job.
This material base of militarism seems to dovetail neatly with ideology in the form of national therapeutic rationalizations of militarism such as Leo Strauss’s remedy for decadence:
“Militarism, from being the means, became the goal itself. A militaristic discipline and wartime spirit were now the necessary counter-force to modern, consumerist decadence, and must be kept stoked, in effect, forever. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”
The Orwell estate has sued George Bush for plagiarism, btw.
The military ethos is very admirable in many respects for its asceticism, devotion and traditional “men with chests” thymos or spirit (as well as for romantic nostos) However I don’t think the national therapeutic ideology of militarism has succeeded in that respect. Americans are very much “men without chests” in Nietzsche and Fukuyama’s sense and the military is an economic option in an increasingly class-bound democratic society, with an overlay of the ethos of spectator sports and technological invincibility. Even McCain in his 100 year-war gun-decking was careful to make an exception in the event of casualties and the basic ethos of the military seems to be self-interest and a hedonism that extends to pornography and sadism as in the case of Lindy England.
The pun on “military theatre” Emmanuel Todd makes in After the Empire can be extended both to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the torture fan dance. These are not rotten apple bins but essential policy displays, moments of that “boot stamping on a human face forever and ever.”
Americans are poor soldiers by and large as Richard Early establishes in War, Money and American Memory: Myth of Virtue, Valor and Patriotism and the upper classes have always distinguished themselves in their pursuit of “other priorities” in wartime. Fun Fact: both Theodore and Franklin Ro (o) sevelts’ fathers bought their way out of the draft in the Civil War for $2,000.
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The problem with militarism is the mind-set it brings.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,
and to people fixated on the military, all foreign
problems look like excuses for military action.
There are problems out there in the world, that concern
us, and that we would do well to become involved in -
such as new epidemics of transmittable diseases, or
criminal activity across borders - but not if our first
response is to think of invading or bombing.
The military should be the last resource of diplomacy,
not the first - but of course the current occupant
stinks at diplomacy.
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I don’t think that the promoters of such mania as supply side economics and Reagan deification qualify as “otherwise sensible.”
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‘Militarism’ could be directed towards ‘civil defense’ and militias via the very strong hold on the imagination the 2nd Amendment maintains. Culturally speaking, it means a sharp criticism of, for example, the folks on those airplanes who ‘hoped’ it was just a ‘hijacking’, and a celebration of the warrior ethos of Todd Beamer et al.
We are all part of the national militia when under attack.
It is standing armies the American can and should criticize, at the same time, celebrate the education of an independent officer class through what otherwise should be, conservative institutions like VMI, the Citadel or Norwich.
Another example, aesthetically speaking, might be conservative romanticism for the doomed Rhodesian Freedom Fighters or in the present.
Decentralism is the proper American military tradition, and that includes a sharp criticism of Washington’s Revolution Era ‘standing armies’ that not only were ineffective, but incurred such debt as to insure a strong central government in the aftermath of our founding war.
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This may superfluous, but isn’t the economic component of militarism a critical one when considering conservative attraction to militarism? Secretary of State James Baker’s blunt/cynical response that Gulf War I was “about jobs” revealed a lot about the heart and soul of American conservatives circa 1991, I think. At that time, the diminishment of the Cold War was already affecting the domestic economy. It had, after all, afforded a vast boon to the war industries – to the point where soldier and conservative Dwight Eisenhower warned in his valedictory against its alarming pervasiveness. Postwar war materiel production affected all industries - and the stock porfolios of their investors.
Many voices are cajoling us to go forth and seek foreign dragons to slay, but the attraction of (short-term) wealth is a seductive and deceitful siren for far too many on the “right.”
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The statement “War is the Health of the State” is well known and as a result of the Cold War Shift to Big Government Conservatism “vs.” Big Government Liberalism, the State has become an uber Bureaucrat-warrior. Both Conservatism and Liberalism , in this milieu, are dead letters and the basic dialectic of the lapsed Republic has been long silenced. It is why Conventional Wisdom so easily depicts the conservative principles of Ron Paul as quackery. It is why modern popular culture is a mile wide and an 1/8” thick.
As a result, we have lost the separation of powers and the Office of the Executive has grown a State Bureaucracy that makes Kafka look but a piker. Elections are an elaborate show, a Potemkin trade show and every 4-8 years we hear about change only to see the Bureaucracy continue to entrench, spend borrowed money and clamp on the weakly pumping jugular of the lapsed Republic like a vampire.
Parsing of the words “conservative” and “liberal” in politics today is about as worthwhile as discussing “democracy” in the same breath as one discusses the actions of the American War-State. Increasingly, it will make as little sense to discuss prosperity and quality of life in the 50 states of the lapsed Republic. We are a Neo-Weimar, Banana Republic in training.
The Bureaucracy is like a Fat Man that can no loner see his toes nor his genitals and so it has confined itself to bed and simply accretes and consumes with no sense of pleasure beyond steady consumption. At some point, the Slob will expire and they’ll have to punch a hole in the wall to cart the smelly carcass out. When the sordid nest finally airs out, perhaps a discussion of ‘conservatism” and “liberalism” will be edifying. Until then , one is obviously best served by hanging on the camp train following the war mongers on their deathly rounds.
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I’m not quite sure what Mr. Zmirak means by the supposed “compromises” offered by Lincoln (of all people) in 1860; I always thought the Constitutional Union Party was the party of honorable compromise between North and South in 1860. Could someone fill me in, please?
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The ORIGINAL (never ratified) 13th Amendment, proposed by Lincoln, would have guaranteed the survival of slavery in any state which already had it. It was meant to deter secession. It wasn’t worth the massive bloodletting of the War, but I’m very glad this never ended up part of our governing document.
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@Dirk Sabin,
Thanks for the stirring visuals. I have to use that one about the fat man in the room.
The federal Republicans and Democrats will adopt ron Paul’s ideas when peaceful non-intervention expand the power of the federal government and line the pockets of special interest groups at the expense of the taxpayers.
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that should read Democratic and Republican parties, and of course Ron is capitalized.
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To read my book, War, Money and American Memory: Myth of Virtue, Valor and Patriotism, quoted was pleasant and surprising. Dan has omitted more damning facts. Ezra Pound was deeply offended that American leadership was assumed by the likes of J.P. Morgan, who profited by the sale of defective rifles to the Union army. Judge Mellon, founder of what was once the largest American fortune, advised his sons that it was the duty of others to fight and die. His sons were put on earth to make money. The rich were allowed to buy their way out of danger.
Professor James McPherson, savant of public television and Princeton University, asserted appropriations by city councils and draft insurance societies allowed men who did not want to go to war to pay commutation fees. Professor McPherson baldly claimed this allowed poor men to buy their way out of the draft almost as readily as rich men. These avowals are needed by McPherson and his ilk to maintain moral supremacy and legitimacy for their caste.
Professor McPherson claimed that 26 percent of the white soldiers in the Union army were born overseas while the foreign born constituted 31 percent of the draft age population. One possible explanation to the underrepresentation of immigrants in military service given by McPherson was the exemption from conscription given to aliens who had not filed for citizenship. Then McPherson said that two of the principal ethnic groups - German and British Protestants - enlisted in proportion to their representation in the general population, but that German and Irish Catholics did not. McPherson asserted he had data for these pronouncements, but did not bother to cite it. (When a black professor was assigned by the magazine Black Scholar to critique The Bell Curve, which maintained subnormal performance by blacks on intelligence tests, Professor McPherson advised the black professor against reading the book. Reportedly Professor McPherson of Princeton told the black that reading the book was exactly what “those white boys” wanted him to do. If he did so, the black would have to contend with their ideas which would distract the black from contradicting a lot of nonsense. How McPherson could know the book was nonsense without reading it has defied logic. But the most pertinent point was the classic illustration of the closed mind of the establishment academician, McPherson, when confronted with challenges to his deeply held beliefs.) McPherson has not answered two letters asking for sources on the evasion by the Roman Catholics,
One of the curious things about the McPhersons of this country has been what they omit and fail to cite either from plain ignorance or deliberate oversight. The puritan strain in America is represented in McPherson, who with a sinecure at Princeton and once a leadership position in the Presbyterian church, carefully made judgments which affirmed the social and cultural superiority of his class. That Roman Catholics were fair game has long been accepted, and that Jews were not has been a covenant of more recent age. However, the Encyclopedia Judaica, published in Jerusalem, gave a Jewish population of the United States in 1860 of about 150,000. A little further in their exposition on the glory of the accomplishments of Jews in the United States gave a total of 500 Jews who fell during the Civil War. These numbers were proudly recounted by The Jewish Veteran, the official newsletter of the Jewish War Veterans. A little computation arrived at the ratio of one Jew in every 300 dying during that war. This worked out to little more than three deaths per thousand Jews. This contribution to the Civil War death toll was of the order of one sixth or one seventh of the rest of the population after making allowances that restrictions were placed on service by blacks. One could feel supremely confident that Jews came nowhere close to matching the contribution of the immigrant Irish on a proportional basis.
The question must be why this fact has not been widely known and discussed. The supposition that the esteemed Presbyterian elder James McPherson was unaware of it is simply ludicrous, but far more interesting has been why he would not comment on it. Until the 1930’s in the United States the progressive element was almost exclusively in the hands of radical non-conformists and high-minded Christians who attested to the probity of all those who wished to be admitted to their circle. These people asserted their cultural and moral superiority by professing pacifism as the answer to everything and at all times.
Almost comical has been the McPherson as cheerleader for the North. Professor McPherson of Princeton professed that Glory was the most powerful movie ever made of the Civil War and provided a cold dose of realism over romantic views of the Confederacy. Harvard hero, Robert Gould Shaw, led his black troops in attacking Fort Wagner. Shaw´s bungling caused more than 1500 deaths while the South had about 150. How McPherson could be gladdened by such incompetence that led to unnecessary deaths of brave men illustrates the woeful inadequacy of those who teach history at supposedly reputable colleges.
World Wars I and II
One sensed George Marshall had qualms about the performance by his country during those demanding wars and felt we could have done more. Later Marshall told his Forrest Pogue that the Germans are “natural fighters” and “natural warriors”, and Americans must accept that. He found the ordinary military quality not to be dominant in Americans during both world wars. Long buried in his papers has been George Patton’s disparagement of American infantry in both wars fighting Germany. He thought American infantry needed all the help it could get. These two unflattering assessments of American fighting ability by two competent generals have flustered professional American patriots. Thus they have been forgotten. More satisfying myths have taken their place.
Jews in American Wars
The present war in the Middle East marks the 6th war that the Jews of America have shirked. They have lied and cowered once again. Those who challenge their calumny are called anti-Semites, a word that causes many professed stalwarts to turn to stone. Unless the Israeli lobby is broken, the sons, daughters, 53 year old grandmothers and single mothers of the American goyim will continue to be sacrificed.
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About this word semite. It comes from thr name of one of Noahs sons. Shem. Arabs and Jewish people are semites!.
To say one is anti-semitic is not PC whereas being anti-muslim is??
Its a crock of crap, according to scripture we all come from Noahs family right?
Do people REALLY think that some of GODS children are superior to others?
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It’s good that you recognize that there’s a cult of the sacred, holy soldier martyr that most American conservatives are in deep communion with. Your solution is unfortunately totally ridiculous, and I think that you must be very late to this debate to make it. To these same people, America is also an exception beyond critique. Comparing us in any way to a bunch of nazis, commies, and Frenchmen is an insult in and of itself. But the Germans in WW1 weren’t technically nazis, you say? Who cares! An American conservative would just say that they were only (to a degree) suppressing latent tendencies in the German character which would find their full expression under Hitler (though they might not express it in so many words, I honestly believe that this is their underlying assumption.) The same with pre-communist Russians, and don’t you even get them started on the Frenchies! Who do you think is going to want to listen to your history lesson on a bunch of dead, euro-fag aristocrats, anyway?
The idea that this above mentality and conservatism are somehow inextricably bound is a really depressing thought. I very much hope that it isn’t true.
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Mr. Earley’s comments reminded me of a story in William Manchester’s “Goodbye Darkness.” When Manchester’s war-crippled father introduced his Southern belle bride to his father, she commented to papa Manchester that his ancestors must have fought hers in the civil war. Mistaking her observation for an insult, papa M replied that the Manchesters had hired substitutes (i.r., they weren’t the lumpen who did the fighting).
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P.S. - regarding the performance of American infantry in the World Wars - the infantry is not an elite formation in the US Army as it was in the German Army. The large commitment of men to the navy and air corps and siphoning offf of ment to the marines and airborne forces further degraded the pool of personnel available to the infantry.
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Thank you, Mr. Zmirak. I believe it’s a bit clearer now.
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Mr. Theodore M. Van Oosbree
Historian and biographer William Manchester had fought as a Marine on Okinawa and been wounded. Hospitalized in Hawaii with other gravely injured Marines, Manchester had been carried by Navy Corpsmen to the theater to see films for morale boosting recreation. One night the staff had planned a surprise for the patients. Before the film started, the curtains parted and out stepped John Wayne. The man from Hollywood was wearing a cowboy hat, bandanna, checkered shirt, chaps, boots, spurs and two pistols. He grinned at the severely wounded men and greeted them, “Hiya, guys.”. Not one patient responded. Then the booing started, and the tinsel hero had to leave. Over 40 years later recalling the episode still gave Manchester enormous pleasure.
The appeal of John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima to immature minds should appall anyone with anything near an adult mindset. Republican rabble-rouser Newt Gingrich has admitted to seeing the film four times in one day in 1953 when he was aged ten years. Manfully Mr. Newt confessed, “It was probably the most informative single film of my life”. When the father of Mr. Gingrich was dying of cancer in 1972, his son visited and lectured him on not feeling sorry for himself. John Wayne would have understood. When ex-Marine William Manchester and a fellow veteran saw Sergeant Stryker on Iwo Jima, they laughed so hard they were asked to leave the theater. He cautioned those who liked the Sands of Iwo Jima that they should not tell it to the Marines. Mr. Manchester was awarded the Navy Cross, or so I believe.
The performance of both the Marines and airborne has been heightened to appease American audiences.
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Nothing typifies the ossification of Paleoconservatism better than the general befuddlement and simple ignorance in this discussion on war. And so this discussion becomes a paradigm of what in general is wrong with Paleoconservatism.
Paleos have become utterly purblind with respect to what Real Conservatives in the past have been masters: the first two O’s of the OODA Loop. I mean a blindness toward the factual reality of 4th Generation War (4GW) – unmentioned in this discussion – , a blindness caused by Paleos’ ideological rigidity and also their stagnation in 2GW conceptons. (And I’m afraid that the otherwise wise Mr. Z himself still thinks in 2GW categories, as did the French in 1940 – in terms of what Van Crevelds call the triangle of the Clausewitzian world: The State, the Military, and the People as three distinctly separate units. In 4GW this triangle collapses: the People are the Military are the Polticians.) I remarked in the discussion on Kosovo – a discussion of the blind, trapped in 2GW and 3GW, long on ideology and emoting and short on facts – that Paleos are now Neos in the ignorance of 4GW and its accompanying concept: the fall of The State in general and the Centralized Nation-State in particular. In short, it’s time to junk Paleoconservatism and return to Burke’s, De Maistre’s, and Disraeli’s mastery of the OODA Loop’s first two components.
Compare those of us who are Tories with others. Classic Liberalism can’t master the first two O’s because it can’t move beyond them. It is so caught up in Observation and Orientation (endless discussion) that it cannot make a Decision – and in this Carl Schmidt is quite correct. Other ideologues have different problems in the OODA loop. Whig Neo’s, Socialists, Cultural Marxists, Fascists and fascists, Paleoconservatives, and Ecologists all are prisoners of their various ideologies and collective hates. And so they makes Decisions without Observation and Orientation. Libertarians, wise in economics and foolish in everything else, are such free spirits that they can’t coordinate, or even plan, and thus cannot take Action. The Ron Paul campaign is a case study of failure to know the enemy: For an anti-Whig candidate to campaign in the Whig party is folly defined. Part of the Paul failure was due to another imprisoning idea: that there would be only a line with two poles, the Left and the Right, and that Whigs are “closer” on that line to libertarians. They aren’t.
Those of us who are Tory Conservatives, rather than men of the “Right”, – because we can master the first two O’s, and because our locus is the small unit functioning in the world market and the geopolis – can master 4GW. We are the first to notice change, to judge change, and to react to change. We know the world is Heraclitan, and nothing is more Heraclitan than 4GW. Our historical situation means that we have a “background” upon which to place current events, and thus we understand those events correctly. And we see the both the trees and the forest.
Take heart from the current political situation. We have been defeated in battle. There is no better teacher than Defeat – provided that we do the first to O’s. So lets use the free time to read Van Creveld, William Lind, and John Boyd’s interpreters.
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I want to commend Mr. Zmirak’s essay and wish it was
published in Chronicles as it explains the thinking
of one of the more important, but little analyzed,
conservative sub-cultures- the military conservative.
The military conservative essentially swung the vital
South Carolina and Florida primaries to John McCain, Navy
pilot.
Military conservatives tend to be casual conservatives
and more interested in a vigorous military and foreign
policy than in conservative goals in other spheres.
As Mr. Zmirak points out, they are almost woodenheaded
in their support of the military engagement in Iraq, a
fiasco that has damaged conservatism and not strengthened
it. Neo-conservatives have used the simple-minded
military conservatives for their own policy endeavors
which, in turn, have discredited conservatism before
a supermajority of the American people.
Military conservatives tend to be the sort of people
who think John Wayne was some sort of great American
when, in fact, the Duke did his best to stay out of uniform
in World War Two, and wasn’t above forcing future
wife number three into having an illegal abortion so
that he could get a better divorce settlement from
the second Mrs. John Wayne. Some hero.
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Mr.Earley,
According to my WW II infantryman uncle, Frank Sinatra was their bete noire. No only was he 4F, he was also getting the girls!
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Sid Cundiff wrote: “So lets use the free time to read Van Creveld, William Lind, and John Boyd’s interpreters.” Extreme caution should be used.
John Boyd never was in combat. He flew one mission and one mission only where he might have seen an enemy. A great explicator of Colonel Boyd dismissed Erich Hartmann as a “back-shooter”, obviously not one whose behavior should be emulated. By himself Hartmann shot down 350 planes. To put this in perspective the top 10 American aces shot down a total of 300 planes.
If you want to win, you need more Hartmanns. Boyd and his theories need to be put in some perspective. Americans have much to learn about war, most especially those beguiled by abstract theories.
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I read the Frum piece that you referred to (”Unpatriotic Conservatives”) with a mixture of glee, anger, and frustration. Glee that we were so right, anger at what he and his cronies have done to NR, and frustration that the truth matters so little to those conservatives who seem to love this war so much. Bear in mind this was written almost 5 years ago…
“Espousing defeatism: Here is Robert Novak again, this time on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: “The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.” And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: “We remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman’s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don’t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt."”
Frum pointed these items out (among others) as ‘proof’ of a bunch of conservatives that had left the reservation. Quite to the contrary, Novak and Buchanan spoke bravely, forcefully, and with prescience. I’m sure Frum would now posit that we would be doing much better if didn’t have all these ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ undermining the War on Terror (TM).
Of course, Frum is just using the William Kristol Playbook: be opinionated AND consistently wrong and you will maintain a fruitful living as a writer.
Peace be with you.
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