I feel a draft

The American leadership have manoeuvred themselves into a tight corner by promoting egoism through war, and now risk wrecking the myth with conscription to rescue their beleaguered volunteer army in Iraq

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

With their armed forces spread thinly over an ever-expanding territory, some Americans are speculating about the draft. Despite the many back-door draft measures that have already been brought into play, such as the enforced extension of tours of duty, the Bush administration has been extremely reluctant to re-instate general conscription, and for good reason. The draft would devastate their agenda, and they know it.

The power base upon which these reactionary statists stand is a system of social relationships, embedded in both domestic and international institutions, that funnel resources from domestic and international masses to American elites. While the international institutions are important, the domestic ones are strategically far more significant. As long as these run smoothly, American elites can gather enough resources to impose their will upon the international community. Unfortunately—from the elites' perspective—it's impossible to force the domestic populace, against its will, to collectively redistribute resources from the bottom to the top of the social pyramid. They have to persuade the populace to accept relationships that benefit elites at everyone else's expense, and to provide the military muscle needed to obtain foreign resources.

To persuade people to serve your interests, you need to convince them that by doing so they're serving their own. This isn't a problem in co-operative ventures, where the efforts of each equally serve the interests of all, but it's hard to pull off in exploitative relationships. The only way to manage this is to first convince the exploited to turn their attention away from their easily-tabulated economic needs towards their more subtle psychological needs for self-esteem and status, and to then supply easily-produced patriotic myths that temporarily inflate their self-concepts. While these myths can't provide any long-term psychological benefit, each time they're used they relieve a little bit of fear, a little bit of self-loathing. By linking these myths to social relationships that benefit elites, and the more people identify with the myths, the more they'll serve elite interests.

As exploitation worsens, the more anxious the victims become, and the more desperately they cling to the myths, thus encouraging worse exploitation. Like drugs, these myths provide short-term euphoria at the cost of long-term psychological disability. Elites use such myths to maintain power over the populace the same way that pushers use drugs to maintain power over addicts.

Understanding how various patriotic mythologies work is like understanding the effects of specific drugs and the varieties of addiction they create. While there is a general level in which all addictions are the same, on a practical level you can't treat alcoholism the same way you'd treat methamphetamine addiction, and you can't treat one patriotic mythology the same way you'd treat another.

The patriotic mythology currently in vogue in the US isn't the same one that elites relied upon during the Vietnam War. That old mythology was rooted in a puritanical ethic that stressed self-denial and obedience: it held that “real Americans” unquestioningly did what their nation demanded of them, and always put their country's needs ahead of their own. One of the reasons why this mythology was replaced was because its side-effects became so debilitating that they encouraged people to “break the habit”—to start questioning the mythology and thereby disrupt the social relationships it supported.

This is where the draft comes in. By subjecting vast numbers of young people to the harshest and most blatant use of the state's coercive power, and by driving them against their will into the most bloody and traumatizing situations imaginable, the draft came to be seen as an insult to human dignity. As the draft was questioned, so were all the other features of the patriotic mythology that denied people their rights to self-determination and self-gratification. Faced with a concerted, multi-pronged assault, the mythology began crumbling by the early 1970s. It seemed, for a time, that the social relationships so dear to the elites might crumble shortly thereafter.

The elites defused this threat by replacing that mythology with one that incorporated the individualism of the times. They replaced the emphasis on abstinence with an emphasis on self-absorbed and amoral consumerism. Whereas the former mythology appealed to collectivist impulses, the new mythology would appeal to unbridled egoism. At the same time, vulnerability was vilified in ways unknown since the Nuremberg rallies. In an age when people would be more vulnerable than ever, rather than eliciting compassion, vulnerability would prompt contempt and ridicule—just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stone Cold Steve Austin .

Thus, the symbolism of the Vietnam era's rebellion was co-opted: the more people expressed the anti-governmental individualism appropriate for fighting the old mythology, the more they'd support the new.

In line with this celebration of egoism, direct coercion through the draft was replaced by indirect coercion through unending recession and the decimation of the social safety net. As the economy slowed, and as social supports vanished, the military became the “employer of last resort” for increasing numbers of people. Rather than being ordered to sign up, people found themselves “choosing” to enlist out of economic necessity.

Making sacrifices of this magnitude is humiliating and frightening, and all the economic perks that come with a military career can't make their emotional cost disappear. The military has to supply myths of its own to make the sacrifice palatable. Potential recruits are told that by entering the military they'll enhance their chances for self-determination and self-gratification, thereby bolstering their egos. They're told that they'll become bad-ass heroes, and that they'll have a damn good time: after all, soldiers have a reputation for debauchery. They're also promised social redemption: by enlisting, they'll be awarded the love and respect of their communities, obliterating whatever shame they might once have suffered.

Recruits come disproportionately from marginalized groups. They tend to be people who keenly feel their vulnerability, and who've known more than their share of self-contempt. They're desperate for what the military promises. What they don't want is any suggestion that they're unwillingly submitting to anyone else—that they're compromising the individualism so central to the mythology. So long as this caveat isn't violated, most recruits are quite willing to convince themselves that signing up was a good idea. Their families and friends will be encouraged to agree with them. Each recruit becomes a pebble thrown into a pond where each ripple spreads the mythology.

For these reasons, re-instating the draft can only be the administration's last resort. By disrupting the patriotic mythology they depend upon, the draft would split the ground beneath their feet.

As the Iraqi resistance intensifies, the administration may well be forced to either withdraw or supplement its military forces with conscripted soldiers. Since the first route remains unacceptable to the elite interests dominating both the Republican and Democratic parties, the second route may well be taken. If it is, then the United States will be hit by a cultural earthquake that will knock its people to their knees, and by political and economic aftershocks that may keep them there for longer than they could ever imagine.

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