--- 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
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