Retro styling is en vogue these days. You can see it pronounced in the automotive world: Dodge with its fat fenders, Ford with its more muscle-car-like Mustang, Chrysler and its ’40s-esque PT Cruiser. Such stylings could probably improve many things on the market today – but not all, certainly. If public policy got such treatment, the draft would drive out as an Edsel.
That doesn’t stop a bevy of bigmouths hovering around the media like a Greek chorus singing the praises of the rotten idea, however.
It’s been a dull hum over the last few trips around the sun. Washington Post pundit Richard Cohen recommended it some years ago, ditto for military commentator David Hackworth. But the volume has been turned up recently, as Reps. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and John Conyers, D-Mich., have publicly called for the draft’s reinstatement.
Admittedly, I have some pity for the horse they rode in on. “It has unfortunately become the duty of someone else’s child to go to war and die as the privileged evade the tragic consequences of war,” Conyers explained the situation. As the nation gears up for some heavy military action, his words may be hackneyed, but they’re also noteworthy.
I’ve got teeth marks on my ears from all the pundits and politicians champing about liberating this-and-that national dung heap. I remember it keenly in the Clinton administration, and now Bush is bucking for recognition as the Great Liberator. Standing next to Bill in this regard, Bush comes off like a presidential Annie Oakley, chirping, “Anything you can do, I can do better.” First it was all about liberating Afghanistan. Now we’re turning to the liberation of Iraq – North Korea and Lord knows who else are in the wings. There may be good reasons for it, but any way you slice it, our boys are spending more time overseas in cammie pants.
Rangel and Conyers are protesting – however lamely and, as I’ll show momentarily, wrongly – the sending of American boys to fight while pampered, pale rich kids ride the war horse as desk-jockeys or get important stateside work where the biggest physical threats are bad traffic and the neighbor’s surly dog. To the extent it happens, that’s a thing worthy of protest. It’s wrong that the privileged should be sheltered.
But, of course, for all my sympathy with them, Rangel and Conyers are still wrong. The current U.S. military is voluntary, and given the increasingly globetrotting nature of the U.S. military since the 1980s, it’s a safe bet that a majority of the men serving now went in knowing full-well they might have to go off to some geographical armpit and shoot the heathen. All those pampered, pale rich kids that Rangel and Conyers whine about not going aren’t relying on the influence of pappy or anyone to get them out of duty – they simply choose not to sign up. But it won’t be that simple if these two congressmen get their way.
The problem comes when we don’t give those pampered, pale rich kids the choice. That’s when pappy starts pulling strings. That’s when some folks without rich dads get screwed, because presumably they’d want to get out of whatever engagement is coming up, as well, but can’t because they have no influence to peddle. In short, the draft is what creates the inequality that Rangel and Conyers so loathe.
But these guys are even further wrong than that. Despite the Democrats’ love for the scheme, a wrong is not righted by wronging everyone else.
Patch together Bush’s plans with those of the two representatives to see the problem. We’re now talking about doing all of this world-liberating with men not at liberty to choose if they want to participate in the liberation. Transporting ourselves back 150 years, the new-wave draft discussion is like abolitionists proposing the use of slaves to hand out abolitionist literature. If you doubt the connection to slavery, note that even Martin Luther King Jr. lashed the two up tight, calling military conscription “involuntary servitude.”
What else do you call it?
Daniel Webster was pretty straightforward. As he blasted a conscription bill in Congress, you can almost hear the shackles clatter in his words. “The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism,” he protested before the U.S. House of Representatives on Dec. 9, 1814. “They have not purchased at a vast expense of their own treasure and their own blood a Magna Carta to be slaves.”
He did a lot more than put a bug in the ears of his fellows. He set loose a rhetorical rhinoceros:
- Sir, in granting Congress the power to raise armies, the people have granted all the means which are ordinary and usual, and which are consistent with the liberties and security of the people themselves; and they have granted no others. To talk about the unlimited power of the government over the means to execute its authority, is to hold a language which is true only in regard to despotism. The tyranny of arbitrary government consists as much in its means as in its end; and it would be a ridiculous and absurd constitution which should be less cautious to guard against abuses in the one case than in the other. … A free government with arbitrary means to administer it is a contradiction; a free government without adequate provision for personal security is an absurdity; a free government, with an uncontrolled power of military conscription, is a solecism, at once the most ridiculous and abominable that ever entered into the head of man. …
Rangel and Conyers, albeit unintentionally, are bucking for the position of slave masters. How um, er, ironic.
What of the inherent contradiction between Webster’s words and the presence of slavery in those early years? Despite the acceptance of black slavery, in its dawn days the republic was edging toward scrapping the heinous institution. Today we edge toward re-embracing it, enslaving those of any color capable of wielding a gun.
But how perfectly telling it is of our love and commitment to freedom that while black slaves were not permitted firearms for fear of uprising, today the proposed slaves of military conscription will be shackled with their arms – and the federal government has no fear of becoming a target.
Rangel and Conyers may have some room to complain about the privileged (though, I’m not going to give it to them). Still, their solution stinks. As a political maneuver, it is stupid and ill-conceived; as actual policy, it is immoral. Every American who values individual liberty must commit to sneak into the federal parking lot under the cover of darkness and jimmy the air valves on this new Edsel’s tires.
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