Given that the United States is engaged in the occupation of two countries, has a thousand bases spread across the globe, and its military budget is seven times that of its nearest competitor, it is clear that the anti-war movement of the past decade has been a profound failure. Though the majority of Americans are now against the wars, the movement has been dismally unable to translate those attitudes into a change in policy. Much of this failure, I believe, can be attributed to its inability to craft and communicate a realistic and specific alternative vision to the present order in which the American people can have both peace and security. Instead, for the most part, it has been a weak and reactive opposition that, at best, acts as a damper on the worst excesses of the American empire. While better than nothing, the chances of such a movement to achieve the peace its advocates so urgently desire is effectively nil.
Further damage has been caused by the aggressive exploitation of this deficiency by the advocates of foreign policy interventionism. While acknowledging the preferableness of peace as an ideal, such people commonly counter the anti-war position by observing the reality that there are bad people in the world who want to kill us. “How,” they inquire, “do peace advocates propose we deal with that situation?”
An extremely common anti-war response to this critique is that the “desire to kill us” has its origins in our own interventionism; for instance, by bombing a village to kill a terrorist leader, we initiate a cycle of violence by radicalizing the residents of the village who lost friends or relatives. Though true, this argument suffers from the fact that it is an abstract assertion: we can speculate on the effects that an action today will have on tomorrow, but we can never be certain. By contrast, the interventionist argument is concrete: there exist, now, people who want to kill us, and it is more important to respond to what is than it is to respond to what could be.
As human beings, the inherent uncertainty of our lives drives us to seek as much certainty as we can lay our hands on so that we can effectively plan for our futures (the existence of insurance companies being one powerful tribute to this impulse). This dynamic sheds light on the nature of the failure of the contemporary anti-war movement; though most Americans desire peace, the reality is that many prefer the certainty provided by a predicable society at war to the abstract uncertainty of possible peace.
Given this, the most effective way forward for those of us who oppose war and empire could lie in challenging the interventionists on their own ground. This does not mean we should abandon the moral and systemic elements of our advocacy; without the guidance provided by those perspectives, our movement would be rootless and ineffective. Rather, we need to supplement those important tactics with concrete proposals for an alternative order that will provide for a more predictable and secure life than that which the empire can deliver.
To start with, it is necessary that the peace movement confront head-on and diffuse the interventionist challenge based upon the existence of people who want to kill us. Too often, the aforementioned “breaking the cycle of violence” argument is deployed with the unspoken assumption that, as soon as the last of our soldiers returns home, the incentive and desire to attack us would instantly disappear. As the wounds inflicted by our meddling in other countries run incredibly deep, this is an unrealistic assumption, and it is thus often used as a straw-man by interventionists in their attempts to discredit the entire cycle of violence thesis. In reality, the post-empire order would likely experience a long period of readjustment and trust-building for which the anti-war movement, to be credible in the eyes of the majority of people, must develop a concrete and realistic transitional plan.
Additionally, interventionists who accept that having an empire inherently generates resistance to it often point to the need to defend against the predatory impulses of other nations. If we don’t maintain an empire, they argue, other ambitious countries will simply fill the void and we’ll soon find ourselves with expansionist armies on our doorstep, ready to take our very homes from us. While allowing that ending the empire would greatly lessen the threat we face from international terrorism, they perceive such risks as a small price to pay for the greater benefits of a territorially secure homeland.
As history is full to bursting with examples of predatory national behavior, this is perhaps the most important question that anti-interventionists must answer in concrete terms. If we hide behind the false panacea that ending our empire will eliminate all of our society’s security threats, the movement doesn’t have a chance of gaining the level of support needed to achieve its goals. Though bringing our troops home will definitely make America more secure, we must also present a clear non-interventionist strategy for securing both peace and security in the short, medium, and long-term. There is a great deal of room for much needed debate on this topic, but I believe that one powerful possible strategy could take the form of a proposal for radically restructuring the American military.
Since the draft was ended in the 1970s, the American military has been a “volunteer” force of professional soldiers. While certainly preferable to the military slavery system of conscription, the professional army also presents a number of philosophical and political problems. By offering robust public airing of these issues and proposing a viable alternative to the professional military system, the anti-war movement has the potential to provide a concrete road-map to a secure peace.
The first problem with the present system is the fact that being a soldier is a “job.” As such, it competes with other opportunities in the labor market, and thus finds its recruits primarily from people for whom better opportunities are unavailable. As a result, people from low-income communities are over-represented in the ranks, while the wealthy are proportionally under-represented. This is politically problematic, because it means the distribution of military service is the inverse of the distribution of political influence, since wealth is positively correlated with voting, and the ability to provide financial support to political candidates ensures the access of the wealthy to those in power. Thus, those with the greatest likelihood of being affected by the decision to go to war have the least influence over the process, and vice versa. As a result of (on average) isolating policymakers from the personal effects of their decisions, the professional military has helped to make war an easier and more appealing foreign policy option.
Second, the professional military has helped to facilitate a worrisome helplessness on the part of the average American. When our country was founded, the militia was considered to be all of-age able-bodied males, which implicitly charged each member of our society with a degree of personal responsibility for its defense. In contrast to this ideal of the citizen who will take up arms to defend his home and community, the professional military and security establishment has contributed to the development of a dangerous dichotomy between the powerful protector and the helpless civilian. By creating the expectation that any problem will be dealt with by the professionals, the ideal response to aggression has become that of utter submission. One terrifying example of this mindset in action can be seen in the example of the passengers of the planes on 9/11. In three out of four cases, passengers who overwhelmingly outnumbered the box-cutter armed hijackers failed to take responsibility for their own safety and paid the ultimate price as a result. On a larger scale, the prevalence of this submissive mindset calls into question the ability of the American people to effectively resist an occupation in the event of the failure of the protective shell of the professional military.
Given these troubling issues inherent to the present system, I believe the anti-war movement can turn the table on interventionists by arguing that the replacement of the professional military with a universal militia system would bring about a world that is simultaneously more peaceful and more secure. In such a system, every citizen would receive basic military training and, in case of war, could be quickly mobilized into units which would be co-ordinated by a small professional officer corps. Such a capacity for the massive, co-ordinated mobilization of the entire well-armed populace would serve as an enormously powerful deterrent to any potential occupier. Furthermore, such a system would develop a population with the training, mindset, and equipment to effectively deal with acts of terrorism themselves, thus reducing our current vulnerability that is rooted in the protector/civilian dichotomy.
Additionally, such a system would change the way in which our society approaches going to war. If war were to be declared, the units deployed overseas should consist of a randomly-chosen sample of of-age militia. This would mean that, in the debate over going to war, the majority of citizens would know that they have an equal chance of actually fighting. By distributing the risk of violent death over as much of the population as possible, war as a tool of foreign policy would likely be used only as a grave last resort, when the safety of the society is truly threatened. Imagine the tone the debate over the Iraq War would have taken had the decision to invade meant the call-up of a random sample of 18-50 year olds.
While the interventionist foreign policy promises questionable security at the cost of eternal war, a universal militia system would provide powerful domestic security while ensuring that the consequences of the grave decision to go to war are shared by the whole of our society. By advocating for such a concrete vision, I believe the anti-war movement has the potential to put the failures of the last decade behind it and start building the coalitions that are needed to achieve lasting peace.
American Socialism for the Rich
The Anti-War Movement and the Militia: Providing for the Defense of a Free Society
Given that the United States is engaged in the occupation of two countries, has a thousand bases spread across the globe, and its military budget is seven times that of its nearest competitor, it is clear that the anti-war movement of the past decade has been a profound failure. Though the majority of Americans are now against the wars, the movement has been dismally unable to translate those attitudes into a change in policy. Much of this failure, I believe, can be attributed to its inability to craft and communicate a realistic and specific alternative vision to the present order in which the American people can have both peace and security. Instead, for the most part, it has been a weak and reactive opposition that, at best, acts as a damper on the worst excesses of the American empire. While better than nothing, the chances of such a movement to achieve the peace its advocates so urgently desire is effectively nil.
Further damage has been caused by the aggressive exploitation of this deficiency by the advocates of foreign policy interventionism. While acknowledging the preferableness of peace as an ideal, such people commonly counter the anti-war position by observing the reality that there are bad people in the world who want to kill us. “How,” they inquire, “do peace advocates propose we deal with that situation?”
An extremely common anti-war response to this critique is that the “desire to kill us” has its origins in our own interventionism; for instance, by bombing a village to kill a terrorist leader, we initiate a cycle of violence by radicalizing the residents of the village who lost friends or relatives. Though true, this argument suffers from the fact that it is an abstract assertion: we can speculate on the effects that an action today will have on tomorrow, but we can never be certain. By contrast, the interventionist argument is concrete: there exist, now, people who want to kill us, and it is more important to respond to what is than it is to respond to what could be.
As human beings, the inherent uncertainty of our lives drives us to seek as much certainty as we can lay our hands on so that we can effectively plan for our futures (the existence of insurance companies being one powerful tribute to this impulse). This dynamic sheds light on the nature of the failure of the contemporary anti-war movement; though most Americans desire peace, the reality is that many prefer the certainty provided by a predicable society at war to the abstract uncertainty of possible peace.
Given this, the most effective way forward for those of us who oppose war and empire could lie in challenging the interventionists on their own ground. This does not mean we should abandon the moral and systemic elements of our advocacy; without the guidance provided by those perspectives, our movement would be rootless and ineffective. Rather, we need to supplement those important tactics with concrete proposals for an alternative order that will provide for a more predictable and secure life than that which the empire can deliver.
To start with, it is necessary that the peace movement confront head-on and diffuse the interventionist challenge based upon the existence of people who want to kill us. Too often, the aforementioned “breaking the cycle of violence” argument is deployed with the unspoken assumption that, as soon as the last of our soldiers returns home, the incentive and desire to attack us would instantly disappear. As the wounds inflicted by our meddling in other countries run incredibly deep, this is an unrealistic assumption, and it is thus often used as a straw-man by interventionists in their attempts to discredit the entire cycle of violence thesis. In reality, the post-empire order would likely experience a long period of readjustment and trust-building for which the anti-war movement, to be credible in the eyes of the majority of people, must develop a concrete and realistic transitional plan.
Additionally, interventionists who accept that having an empire inherently generates resistance to it often point to the need to defend against the predatory impulses of other nations. If we don’t maintain an empire, they argue, other ambitious countries will simply fill the void and we’ll soon find ourselves with expansionist armies on our doorstep, ready to take our very homes from us. While allowing that ending the empire would greatly lessen the threat we face from international terrorism, they perceive such risks as a small price to pay for the greater benefits of a territorially secure homeland.
As history is full to bursting with examples of predatory national behavior, this is perhaps the most important question that anti-interventionists must answer in concrete terms. If we hide behind the false panacea that ending our empire will eliminate all of our society’s security threats, the movement doesn’t have a chance of gaining the level of support needed to achieve its goals. Though bringing our troops home will definitely make America more secure, we must also present a clear non-interventionist strategy for securing both peace and security in the short, medium, and long-term. There is a great deal of room for much needed debate on this topic, but I believe that one powerful possible strategy could take the form of a proposal for radically restructuring the American military.
Since the draft was ended in the 1970s, the American military has been a “volunteer” force of professional soldiers. While certainly preferable to the military slavery system of conscription, the professional army also presents a number of philosophical and political problems. By offering robust public airing of these issues and proposing a viable alternative to the professional military system, the anti-war movement has the potential to provide a concrete road-map to a secure peace.
The first problem with the present system is the fact that being a soldier is a “job.” As such, it competes with other opportunities in the labor market, and thus finds its recruits primarily from people for whom better opportunities are unavailable. As a result, people from low-income communities are over-represented in the ranks, while the wealthy are proportionally under-represented. This is politically problematic, because it means the distribution of military service is the inverse of the distribution of political influence, since wealth is positively correlated with voting, and the ability to provide financial support to political candidates ensures the access of the wealthy to those in power. Thus, those with the greatest likelihood of being affected by the decision to go to war have the least influence over the process, and vice versa. As a result of (on average) isolating policymakers from the personal effects of their decisions, the professional military has helped to make war an easier and more appealing foreign policy option.
Second, the professional military has helped to facilitate a worrisome helplessness on the part of the average American. When our country was founded, the militia was considered to be all of-age able-bodied males, which implicitly charged each member of our society with a degree of personal responsibility for its defense. In contrast to this ideal of the citizen who will take up arms to defend his home and community, the professional military and security establishment has contributed to the development of a dangerous dichotomy between the powerful protector and the helpless civilian. By creating the expectation that any problem will be dealt with by the professionals, the ideal response to aggression has become that of utter submission. One terrifying example of this mindset in action can be seen in the example of the passengers of the planes on 9/11. In three out of four cases, passengers who overwhelmingly outnumbered the box-cutter armed hijackers failed to take responsibility for their own safety and paid the ultimate price as a result. On a larger scale, the prevalence of this submissive mindset calls into question the ability of the American people to effectively resist an occupation in the event of the failure of the protective shell of the professional military.
Given these troubling issues inherent to the present system, I believe the anti-war movement can turn the table on interventionists by arguing that the replacement of the professional military with a universal militia system would bring about a world that is simultaneously more peaceful and more secure. In such a system, every citizen would receive basic military training and, in case of war, could be quickly mobilized into units which would be co-ordinated by a small professional officer corps. Such a capacity for the massive, co-ordinated mobilization of the entire well-armed populace would serve as an enormously powerful deterrent to any potential occupier. Furthermore, such a system would develop a population with the training, mindset, and equipment to effectively deal with acts of terrorism themselves, thus reducing our current vulnerability that is rooted in the protector/civilian dichotomy.
Additionally, such a system would change the way in which our society approaches going to war. If war were to be declared, the units deployed overseas should consist of a randomly-chosen sample of of-age militia. This would mean that, in the debate over going to war, the majority of citizens would know that they have an equal chance of actually fighting. By distributing the risk of violent death over as much of the population as possible, war as a tool of foreign policy would likely be used only as a grave last resort, when the safety of the society is truly threatened. Imagine the tone the debate over the Iraq War would have taken had the decision to invade meant the call-up of a random sample of 18-50 year olds.
While the interventionist foreign policy promises questionable security at the cost of eternal war, a universal militia system would provide powerful domestic security while ensuring that the consequences of the grave decision to go to war are shared by the whole of our society. By advocating for such a concrete vision, I believe the anti-war movement has the potential to put the failures of the last decade behind it and start building the coalitions that are needed to achieve lasting peace.
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