Today as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys–and is bent on perpetuating–has become central to our national identity. More than America’s matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation’s arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for. –Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism
This is not the ranting of some left wing flake, but the words of a West Point grad, Vietnam vet, professor of history and writer for conservative mags Weekly Standard, National Review and First Things. He describes himself as situated "culturally on the right." And goes on to say, "I continue to view the remedies proffered by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values."
Of course they don’t. But I am going on at length here to establish Bacevich’s conservative credentials because I don’t think my posts over the last week are any different in their fundamental orientation or concern than his. But I’m sure many have dismissed what I’ve written as verging on the "blame-America-first" crackpot left. Like Bacevich I am concerned about the buccaneering irresponsibility of this administration, and like him I don’t think that if we get rid of George Bush and the GOP hardliners the problem will be solved. As Bacevich says, "Charging George Bush with the militaristic tendencies of present-day U.S. foreign policy makes as much sense as holding Herbert Hoover culpable for the Great Depression: whatever its psychic satisfactions, it is an exercise in scapegoating that lets too many others off the hook and allows society at large to abdicate responsibility for what has come to pass." Amen. The Dems are just as complicit in the New Militarism as the GOP is. It’s a trend that been over sixty years in developing mainly with the approval of the broad American electorate.
The enemy that most threatens America is not Islamic terrorism. Terrorism is small apples in comparison to the internal threat of those who are nudging us toward becoming a militarist authoritarian state. This kind of thing doesn’t happen over night. It’s not something that in a society as complex as ours could happen with a sudden military coup. It’s something we are drifting into. It’s something for which the foundation is being laid quietly and unobtrusively justified by a rationale that is partially true–the struggles against communism or terror. It’s something allowed by a nation’s citizens because they are angry or frightened, and they turn to hardliner authoritarian types who present themselves as the protecting father, the strong man who will keep them safe.
Of course any nation must be prudent and must have an competent military and police to protect its citizens from predators within and without. But the fact that the Democrats have to present themselves as "strong on defense" to earn a right to sit at the table tells you who is really in charge in this country. Anyone who resists the militarist power complex in this country is regarded as fringe or unserious. The American compulsion to be the dominant world military power is beyond question.
What does this say about us? Have we even begun to grasp the price we are paying for this obsequious compliance to this power that demands that we keep feeding it. Have we any concept yet about how this compliance is rotting our collective soul and undermining our highest ideals? This should be the most important debate in the land, and the powers that be have inoculated themselves from any challenge by simply uttering the phrase "weak on defense." Bismarckism doesn’t necessarily lead to Hitlerism, but it prepares the ground for it. Americans are no more or less inclined to this barbarity than the Germans were, but the more we give into this militarist cast of mind, the more receptive we will be should conditions ripen for it as they did in Germany.
The problem with the Bush administration is not its incompetence in the prosecution of the war in Iraq, but rather in the blatancy with which it has come to represent this trend toward militarism, authoritarianism, and the weakening of Constitutional safeguards and the rule of law in the name of national security. We don’t feel the impact of these developments now, but we will in the future. This is not a trend that began with the Bush administration, but in the last six years anyone who is half awake has become alarmed at just how far the trend has progressed. We are at a crossroads here, and voting for a Dem congress in November will not even begin to solve the problem. At best it will just slow down a process that accelerates whenever we have the GOP in power. Next time you hear a Republican accuse a Democrat of being weak on defense (Has anyone ever accused a Republican of being that?), think of the Democrat as the true patriot, not because he wants a weak America but because he wants a sane one. "Weak on defense" is the hardliner code for someone who has courage enough to stand up to the power factions in this country that would turn it into a militarist security state.
Again Bacevich:
Princes, armies, and perpetual war defined Europe. The absence of these things was to provide a point of departure for defining America. Determined to preserve their freedom and the experiment in popular self-government, Americans knew instinctively that militarism was perhaps the foremost threat to their prospect of doing so. Military power was poison–one not without its occasional utility, but a poison all the same and never to ber regarded otherwise.
In our time, oblivious to the potential consequences, we have lost sight of that truth. We have chosen to marry the means of the Old Wordl to the ends of the New, relying on force and the threat of force to spread the American Way of Life. . . .
While in earlier times Americans had viewed history as a "peaceful continuum interrupted by war," today planning, preparing , and waging war has become "the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States." And "the only accept ‘plan’ for peace is the loaded pistol." (NAM, pp. 32-33.)
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