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Entry: Militarism and Conservatism: Can this Marriage be Saved? Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/militarism_and_conservatism_can_this_marriage_be_saved#18077 Post contents: 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. Sent at: 2008 09 08