--- Ronn!Blankenship <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A question for all the members or former members of > the military on the > list: do you consider yourself more "right" or > "left" wing? My own > experience in the military suggests that for the > most part professional > military members tend to be more "conservative" than > "liberal," though it > frequently seems that those labels are so abused > that they are almost > meaningless. Thus my feeling is that in the current > volunteer military > service we have in the US, most of the people who > sign up, and particularly > those who stay in, probably represent the "right" > wing more than the "left" > wing. (If anyone can show me that I may be wrong in > this feeling, I would > appreciate being corrected.)
Don't have the citation close to hand, but TISS (The Triangle Institute of Security Studies) did a big survey on this a few years ago. Michael Desch - now of Dartmouth, then of Duke - actually wrote a paper on the "Conservatization of the military". Basically, the "liberal Democrat" military officer no longer exists. Something like 90% of officers in the armed forces either characterize _themselves_ as "conservative Republicans" or, if they don't, have views that accord very closely with those of conservative Republicans - very often those of the religious right. (The role of evangelical Christianity in the post-Vietnam recreation of the US Armed Forces is one of the great untold stories of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s). This is a radical contrast to the 1950s, when the military was essentially non-partisan. I believe (and argued with Desch about this) that this is because the Democratic Party went - in his delightful phrase - "looney tunes" during and after the Vietnam War, rejecting the military and, even more importantly, its values, and the military responded in kind. Desch didn't agree, but didn't have an alternative reason either that I recall. I may be doing him a disservice - he hadn't finalized his paper when I saw it. Sam Huntington, in _The Solider and the State_ (still the best book about military-civil relations ever written, although Janowitz's _The American Soldier_ is close and, amusingly enough, comes to almost exactly opposite conclusions) argued that professional militaries are, by their very nature, conservative, and as such uncomfortable with the ideals and ideologies of modern liberal democracy. Liberalism, he said (I paraphrase, and it's 2:00am, so I'm probably doing it wrong), stunningly successful in domestic politics, fails catastrophically in international politics, because the assumptions that underlie it do not operate in the international arena. The military, forced to operate in the Hobbesian world outside liberal society, is thus forced to be conservative if it wishes to be effective. A much better summary of these ideas is in The Atlantic's profile of Huntington, which you can find pretty easily on-line. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
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