Not like Ike

The nut baggers are right. Socialism has come to America. It is here, now. The government owns the "commanding heights" of this economy, as is the case in classic socialist doctrine. Citizens of this American socialism get free medical care, housing, food, clothing, even travel. They have abundant educational opportunities, including college. It promises and actually delivers both diversity and social mobility. It also has elements of fascism, just as the nut baggers have warned in their rallies attended by hundreds: The socialism has a heavy corporate component, with giant companies moving in lockstep with the regime's demands yet also holding strong political sway within the regime. In exchange for its benefits, members of the society give up certain freedoms -- yet they keep joining enthusiastically.

I'm writing about the military, of course, and not just to show the absurdity of the nut baggers' claims. In a nation where six people are chasing every job, where college is increasingly out of reach, the only advanced nation in the world where people go without health insurance -- in today's America, the military is often the only option open. It made news last month when a man who couldn't get insurance joined the Army so his cancer-stricken wife could get help. (When I Googled "joined Army to get health care," the second and third hits out of 53 million were Army recruiting sites). Military recruiters have more than met their targets -- ones raised for the Army -- since the economic meltdown. Even with the danger of war, many Americans just don't see another way.

Elements of this have long happened. There's the classic case of the directionless kid from high school who joins the military -- sometimes under a parent or even judge's threat -- and becomes an adult. I went to high school with young men who joined up, served honorably and succeeded as civilians -- I doubt most of them ever would have chosen the military as a first option. And we honor their service. But the Great Disruption's first act -- the crash and its resulting unemployment, combined with two wars seemingly without end -- is creating something new. New and unsettling.

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down. I'm convinced it ultimately happened because our free society showed its advantages over, and outlasted, the totalitarian regimes of Moscow and its satellites. But all this was backed by unprecedented-in-peacetime American military power, including nuclear weapons (Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, about the general who led the development of the peace-keeping intercontinental ballistic missile is a fine read). Yet, combined with America's emergence with an internationalist commitment after World War II and Britain's retreat, a price was paid. It was the emergence of the national security state, elevated to extreme levels under George W. Bush but begun under Harry Truman. And it created the Military Industrial Complex, which Dwight Eisenhower, the liberator of Europe and no peacenik, considered dangerous. The founding fathers would be aghast.

The U.S. allocates around $660 billion a year for defense, 43 percent of the world's total defense spending in 2007. We pay out 4.6 times more than China, the world's second biggest spender. Ryan Avent imagines what just one year of this money would do if it were spent for 21st century infrastructure here at home:

With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense?

Alas, there's little lobbying money available to advocates of high-speed rail or transit, while the representatives of Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics et al have a powerful hold on Capitol Hill. And the status quo appears safer than any leaps into what appears to parochial Americans as the unknown. Military hardware, wanted or not by the Pentagon, makes up an increasing part of a deindustrialized nation's productive base and exports. It means jobs in congressional districts. Ironically, the district in upstate New York where the Conservative candidate drove out the moderate Republican (and losing) is most dependent on federal dollars to Fort Drum, whatever the sudden right-wing fear of the deficit. Indeed, conservatives never worried about the red ink when it was going to defense spending. It's only when health care comes up that the "scoring" by the Congressional Budget Office and "paying for itself" becomes paramount.

What can't be asked without having one's patriotism impugned is how long we can sustain this costly and highly distorting commitment? Eisenhower feared the Military Industrial Complex would lead to entanglements such as Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan. The former five-star general fought the Cold War on the cheap. He knew the way endless war could sap and coarsen a society, how it could undermine a democracy. What would he think now about the strained-to-the-breaking point situation of his beloved Army, much less that it is the only economic ladder up for a growing portion of the population?

China is spending where it will really hurt us: building universities, advanced infrastructure — including high-speed rail — and on research. Its playing currency and protectionist games to build and maintain its productive economy, including striving to become the world leader in energy sustainability. China has its own problems, too, such as a huge poor cohort and a pile of American IOUs. But it seems more focused on a future of competition for economic and educational supremacy, as well as scarce resources, especially energy. China is happy to see America bleed itself weak with foreign military entanglements, while Beijing extends a friendly trading hand around the globe — gaining access to oil and raw materials in the process. We act like the French general staff of old, always preparing for the last war.

Britain suddenly collapsed in the late 1940s, after fighting two world wars, carrying the always-losing cost of empire and seeing the rise of economic competitors that exploited London's advocacy of free trade. The British people, having given so much (nearly 900,000 killed in World War I alone, out of a population of 45 million), demanded such things at home such as national health care. Britain's retreat was sudden and earth changing. Fortunately, America was willing and able to fill the void. Yet Pax Americana was not just made possible by military power, but also by economic dominance in every industry, a strong and secure middle class, a sense of community unbroken by sprawl, a robust government and unions countering the power of the moneyed elites, and great public education. (One especially bittersweet part of the Sheehan book is to read about the scientists who trained at superb free universities in California and New York). America was also an oil power, something not to be underestimated. Now all these advantages have slipped away.

When we have exhausted ourselves from misadventures, bad choices and delusions, no benign ally will step up. The aftermath will be messy, not the least at home.

Comments

[soleri]

Military spending is stimulus spending. The sheer excess of military bases and weapon contracts was part of a bargain that kept us near full employment without ruffling the feathers of deficit hawks.

Health care, HSR, education and other infrastructure can be portrayed as "socialist", however, since this spending doesn't wave a bloody flag. America's hyperpatriots gladly accept government spending on condition that it intertwines their paranoia and tribalism.

Our American Way of Life is so couched in irrationalism and fantasy that a sane debate about our priorities is impossible. We'll scour the planet for fresh enemies to fear and combat in order to justify the spending. If they disappoint us in their flaccid malevolence, there are always the enemies at home: the cosmopolites, minorities, and socialists who undermine "real Americans".

Patriotism that commands the hatred of half our citizens is a strange thing but even that cannot be questioned. To do so is itself a sign of moral weakness and liberalism. Patriotism is muscular and ever-vigilant. To doubt it is to betray it.

[ChrisInDenver]

"Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong."
-- James Bryce

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!"
-- Albert Einstein

[Emil Pulsifer]

Along a parallel track, another organization that is attracting record numbers of applicants, at least here in Arizona, are the police forces of various localities. They are organized by strong unions that give their members good pay and benefits. (More "socialism".) And similarly, the profession is an unpleasant, stressful, and sometimes dangerous one.

One difference is that the excess of recruits allows the police to (theoretically) take the pick of the crop, whereas the military is more like a government work program which virtually guarantees anyone without a serious criminal history (and even sometimes with one, given recent manpower shortages) an income with benefits.

It just happens to be a government work program that sends you to third world nations that don't threaten our national security, to get your legs blown off, instead of sending you out to clean up communities (trash, graffiti), build affordable housing, cut fire breaks in forest areas which haven't been properly managed because of the lack of funding and manpower, and countless other quiet but necessary works that would concretely improve quality of life and society at large.

[Emil Pulsifer]

President Obama had been scheduled to leave for his overseas trip tomorrow November 11th) but apparently it has been postponed a day. Not that I am expecting any, but from the standpoint of conspiring parties (within the government itself, I hasten to add) that would be a fine time for mischief.