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Entry: McCain is even worse than you thought Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/mccain_is_even_worse_than_you_thought#31902 Post contents: I'm not the least surprised McCain is lukewarm on this issue. Like many military men, McCain has served well and comfortably with qualified minorities. He's probably only dimly aware that every minority in the military has been IQ screened (and, let's face it, McCain himself was a bit of an old-fashioned legacy affirmative action baby himself, people in glass houses and all that). His military experiences not only affect his view of foreign policy but also of domestic possibiltiies. Militaries are often successful multicultural and multiethnic institutions; they are held together effectively by the natural strictness of military discipline. National armies, such as Frederick the Great’s, in fact have served to grind down regional differences and create a new national identiy. Some of the best militaries have united men from many lands, such as the multi-ethnic hordes of Genghis Kahn and the polyglot Red Army of World War II. Even among the Nazis, the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS drafted Cossacks, Turkistanis, Ukrainians, and other ethnic minorities into the ranks of “Aryan Supermen.” Among ourselves, we see more and more citizenship ceremonies taking place among American soldiers. McCain see a touching melting pot coupled with the beauty of order and unity. Far from being touched, I’m disturbed. It’s a short step from these ceremonies to a military made up largely of mercenary immigrants that have nothing in common with the great mass of the American people. McCain's romantic warrior views, nostalgia, and his lack of ease with the give-and-take of civilian political life color his views on all matters domestic. The American military of today is only partially a conservative institution. While the military has physical courage, organization, discipline and effectiveness in spades, it's also a land of affirmative action lectures, group-think, censorship, semi-socialism, lack of ties to geographic space, socially engineered and successful ethnic mixing (born largely of front-end ASVAB testing), and extraordinary comfort at every level with big government and big spending. McCain has both sides of the ledger; it's, at best, Bismarkian authoritarianism coupled with late 20th Century white guilt. Not exactly a formula for holding the line against the problems of our age. Sent at: 2008 12 05