An American Orthodoxy

Last week on Facebook, Andrew Hartman posted the following fbleg from a friend:

Dear academic friends: Please help! A friend of mine is seeking texts for a student (see his query below):  

Can you think of a good text in the modern American context that would help my student (and me) learn about the tension between orthodoxy and dissidence that is not so removed from her own experience and reading? I think TV and other tools of cultural, political, and intellectual homogenization create the impression that "we are one", that the counter-culture on the left and right are simply insane, whacko. What would represent orthodoxy or the mainstream? Barack Obama's autobiography? Something by Thomas Friedman? The counter narrative? Cornell West? Glen Beck? Maybe you can think of relevant films?

 I thought that this was an interesting, but poorly framed, query. As I wrote in response:

I don't think most people in this country feel they belong to a consensual center, beset by whackos, left and right. I think that view--which is, roughly, the Tom Friedman view--belongs to a neoliberal, self-understood "center" that represents a tiny minority of the public (though a big chunk of the policy elite). More people, I think, see themselves as representing some version of "real America" with whackos besetting them from only one side (left or right, depending on which real America we're talking about). I find it difficult to discover any kind of actual consensual "center" in American culture today...except for things that are to us as water is to fish (necessary but invisible), e.g. the English language and capitalism itself, i.e. stuff we take for granted, not things that appear in particular books or movies.

But, in fact, there is at least one thing that does form something like a consensual center to American culture today: an abiding faith in the military.  Americans disagree about what our military role should be in Afghanistan.  We are deeply divided about the proper level of military spending and even about our state of military readiness.   But the military remains far and away the most trusted institution in American life.

Since 1973, Gallup has conducted an annual survey of public confidence in fifteen key institutions. Since the mid-1980s, the most trusted institution has been the military.  In the most recent survey, taken about eleven months ago, 78% of those surveyed had "a great deal of" or "quite a lot of" confidence in the military. Sixteeen per cent had "some" confidence in the military. Only 3% had little or none. While confidence in most institutions is well below historical averages, confidence in the military is 11% higher than average.*

As we celebrate Memorial Day, I think this particular cultural orthodoxy bears some further consideration.




Trust in the military as an institution is not at all support for any particular U.S. military action. Indeed, most Americans want to see us out of Afghanistan.  Nor is it the same thing, necessarily, as "supporting the troops," though in fact, Americans today overwhelmingly do this (or at least pay lip service to doing this).

Historically Americans have often expressed solidarity with those in the military while questioning the institution of the military itself.  During World War II, Bill Mauldin's iconic cartoons of frontline soldiers  lampooned and criticized army brass as consistently as they celebrated the men-in-arms.   And although often falsely remembered as expressing simple hatred toward soldiers, Vietnam-era anti-war activists frequently reached out to men in uniform and encouraged them to revolt against the military.

The most famous example of this kind of activism may be Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland's F.T.A. Show, a kind of counter-USO show that toured (just outside) U.S. military bases in the Pacific in 1971. F.T.A.  (the title stood for a variety of things, including "Free Theater Associates," "Free the Army" and "Fuck the Army") was made into a documentary film that was released in '72 and apparently swiftly suppressed; tellingly, it was recently rereleased and largely ignored:

But of course today's military is rather unlike the Vietnam-era military.  As the former Dartmouth President and Marine Corps veteran James Wright notes in his new book "Those Who Have Borne the Battle" (reviewed by Andrew Bacevich in this week's New York Times Book Review), having for most of our history fought major wars with militaries composed of male citizens conscripted during wartime, the U.S. departed from this pattern during the last century, first by adopting peacetime conscription as a readiness measure in 1940, and then by going to an All-Volunteer Force in the 1970s.  The volunteer military finally put an end to the citizen-soldier tradition already badly strained by the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Though the Vietnam-era draft was far from socially equitable, the post-Vietnam, volunteer military is more socially discrete and disconnected from large parts of U.S. society than any wartime military in America's past.

As Bacevich notes (quoting Wright):

In ­places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still fights ambiguous no‑win wars in pursuit of elusive objectives. Yet in contrast to the reaction to Vietnam, the public finds these conflicts tolerable. Not required to serve or to sacrifice (or even to cover the costs incurred), Americans have effectively off-loaded responsibility for national security onto a small warrior elite, whose members, according to Wright, “are embraced as heroes, even as we do not really know them.”

Although he readily admits that he does not know how to change this situation, Bacevich has long argued that endless war fought by a small, warrior class is a very dangerous thing, both for the world at large and for the United States.

On this Memorial Day, rather than joining in the celebration of this warrior elite -- as Charlie Pierce recently noted in an excellent post criticizing this emergent military aristocracy, "every day these days, apparently, is Memorial Day"-- let me suggest a heterodox approach to this holiday: use the various pious invocations of our military that you encounter as occasions to question how we got here and to think about ways in which we might think differently about both the military as an institution and the people who it employs.  Like Bacevich and Wright I don't think there are any easy answers to how we get out of the situation we're in. But the first step is to realize that we have a problem.

And to return to Andrew Hartman's friend's fbleg, let me close by suggesting a film that embodies a countercultural view of these matters: Paul Verhoeven's brilliant satire of militarism, Starship Troopers (1997), currently available on Netflix instant view.  Having missed it when it came out, I finally saw it a couple weeks ago and it far exceeded my expectations.  Verhoeven is, to say the least, an uneven filmmaker.  At the time of its release, audiences and critics apparently did not entirely understand that the film was satirical, a failure that's especially surprising given the great success of Verhoeven's equally satirical Robocop a decade earlier. But while Robocop clearly laughs at its characters, Starship Troopers is much more deadpan. The film's own (apparent) attitude to its material, which is in many ways pretty typical of militarized space operas, is itself an object of satire.**  In a way, audiences' failure to get Starship Troopers' satire was a measure of its timeliness.

Have a happy Memorial Day, everyone!

__________________________________________________
*   Small business finished second with 64% in the "great deal" / "quite a lot" category; the police were third at 56%. All other institutions scored under 50%, with organized labor (21%), big business (19%), HMOs (19%), and Congress (12%) at the bottom of the list.

** Sometimes the film is described as a satire of fascism, but I think this, too, misunderstands Starship Troopers.  Certainly Verhoeven is playing with the rhetoric of fascism, but the world government and its military depicted in Starship Troopers, and the film itself, mix-and-match the look and feel of classical fascism with very American tropes.

Clinton's Army

I made a remark recently on the blog that in reading William Kristol and Robert Kagan's essay "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" I had forgotten that their main point seemed to be that Americans needed war to realize who they were as a nation. Okay, Teddy Roosevelt said that too--I don't think Reagan made that argument, but that was beside the point to the two K's.

I have also been looking at the 2000 presidential and vice-presidential debates and was stuck that basically the only point that Bush-Cheney went after Gore on was Clinton's relationship to the military. Cheney took on took this position with relish, reminding his audience in the only debate he had with Joseph Lieberman that as a former Secretary of Defense, Cheney was especially sensitive to the way America should treats its troops.

“There is no more important responsibility for a President of the United States than his role as Commander in Chief,” Cheney counseled, “[particularly] when he decides when to send our young men and women to war.” Even though the upper levels of the military had few problems with Clinton’s people, the neocons had circulated the idea that Bill Clinton and his administration did not appreciate the military as the symbol of American patriotism but rather used it as a force to dole out government aid. “When we send them without the right kind of training, when we send them poorly equipped or with equipment that's old and broken down, we put their lives at risk,” Cheney said. “We will suffer more casualties in the next conflict if we don't look to those basic problems now. This administration has a bad track record in this regard, and it's available for anybody who wants to look at the record and wants to talk to our men and women in uniform, and wants to spend time with the members of the Joint Chiefs.”[2]

Using the military as a wedge issue, it seems to me, contained an irony. At least, I would like to know if my observation seems reasonable to others. The Clinton administration had lost fewer troops during its eight years in office than any previous eight year period since the end of World War II. Thus, Cheney’s charge made little sense in light of the reality that the military’s image had actually improved in large part because Clinton’s foreign policy had avoided ground wars and, instead, killed from the skies. And while Bush-Cheney went after the Clinton-Gore foreign policy of fighting “humanitarian wars,” such efforts had created an image of American troops doing relative good across the world. Ironically, then, Clinton’s policies allowed Bush, Cheney, and the neocons to use the military as a unique expression of American virtue--as the embodiment of American civil religion.

Rather than use the troops to promote an American civil religion, Clinton had pushed the military into the culture wars with his bungled policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The perception that Clinton (and Gore) had disrespected the military had grown among the rank-and-file in part because of this controversy. Of course, both the left and the right hit Clinton hard for his "moral" failure to do right by anyone in that situation. And the fiasco in Somalia only served to taint further Clinton's record as Commander in Chief.

But am I correct in assessing Clinton's larger legacy? By the end of Clinton's second term, as popular support for the military far out-paced all other institutions, it had actually been Clinton's use or non-use of troops that made it possible for the neocons and, more particularly, the Bush-Cheney team to employ the military as a political tool. And if this is the case, did Clinton's relative success create a hubris that Bush-Cheney elevated to a global policy, as Peter Beinart has recently argued in The Icarus Syndrome?

In short, is there an irony at the heart of the relationship between Clinton's wars and Bush-Cheney leaps of faith?

Clinton's Army

I made a remark recently on the blog that in reading William Kristol and Robert Kagan's essay "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" I had forgotten that their main point seemed to be that Americans needed war to realize who they were as a nation. Okay, Teddy Roosevelt said that too--I don't think Reagan made that argument, but that was beside the point to the two K's.

I have also been looking at the 2000 presidential and vice-presidential debates and was stuck that basically the only point that Bush-Cheney went after Gore on was Clinton's relationship to the military. Cheney took on took this position with relish, reminding his audience in the only debate he had with Joseph Lieberman that as a former Secretary of Defense, Cheney was especially sensitive to the way America should treats its troops.

“There is no more important responsibility for a President of the United States than his role as Commander in Chief,” Cheney counseled, “[particularly] when he decides when to send our young men and women to war.” Even though the upper levels of the military had few problems with Clinton’s people, the neocons had circulated the idea that Bill Clinton and his administration did not appreciate the military as the symbol of American patriotism but rather used it as a force to dole out government aid. “When we send them without the right kind of training, when we send them poorly equipped or with equipment that's old and broken down, we put their lives at risk,” Cheney said. “We will suffer more casualties in the next conflict if we don't look to those basic problems now. This administration has a bad track record in this regard, and it's available for anybody who wants to look at the record and wants to talk to our men and women in uniform, and wants to spend time with the members of the Joint Chiefs.”[2]

Using the military as a wedge issue, it seems to me, contained an irony. At least, I would like to know if my observation seems reasonable to others. The Clinton administration had lost fewer troops during its eight years in office than any previous eight year period since the end of World War II. Thus, Cheney’s charge made little sense in light of the reality that the military’s image had actually improved in large part because Clinton’s foreign policy had avoided ground wars and, instead, killed from the skies. And while Bush-Cheney went after the Clinton-Gore foreign policy of fighting “humanitarian wars,” such efforts had created an image of American troops doing relative good across the world. Ironically, then, Clinton’s policies allowed Bush, Cheney, and the neocons to use the military as a unique expression of American virtue--as the embodiment of American civil religion.

Rather than use the troops to promote an American civil religion, Clinton had pushed the military into the culture wars with his bungled policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The perception that Clinton (and Gore) had disrespected the military had grown among the rank-and-file in part because of this controversy. Of course, both the left and the right hit Clinton hard for his "moral" failure to do right by anyone in that situation. And the fiasco in Somalia only served to taint further Clinton's record as Commander in Chief.

But am I correct in assessing Clinton's larger legacy? By the end of Clinton's second term, as popular support for the military far out-paced all other institutions, it had actually been Clinton's use or non-use of troops that made it possible for the neocons and, more particularly, the Bush-Cheney team to employ the military as a political tool. And if this is the case, did Clinton's relative success create a hubris that Bush-Cheney elevated to a global policy, as Peter Beinart has recently argued in The Icarus Syndrome?

In short, is there an irony at the heart of the relationship between Clinton's wars and Bush-Cheney leaps of faith?

The End of American Exceptionalism? No Kidding.

On Monday night, March 28, President Obama defended American intervention in the Libyan civil war. Many pundits had anticipated the president's remarks as a signal of what might come to be called, the "Obama Doctrine." The president, though, disappointed those hopes. His speech became noteworthy for what it did not address as much for what it did. For many observers, Obama's unwillingness to exert leadership over the multi-national force taking on Moammar Gaddafi made his position and that of the United States rather, well, unexceptional. The U.S. was just like any other member of a coalition.

Such action made Josef Joffe, the all-purpose pro-America European pundit, declare an end to American Exceptionalism. Joffe wrote in the New York Times that the Obama Doctrine, if there really is one, offers the world a vision of "America Lite." "There is nothing wrong with bringing ends in line with means and interest," Joffe allowed. "It’s the American way — and the way of all great powers. And yet. The Obama doctrine is to Truman et al. like chardonnay to moonshine: pleasing to the palate and easy on the blood, but without punch and power -- kind of un-American, isn't it?"

Is it? Or better, what is American about our understanding of American Exceptionalism?

We have discussed this issue before on this blog and will do so at the 2011 conference. But there was a convergence this past week that made me wonder how many times we will declare the end of American Exceptionalism.


The President delivered his "unexceptionalism" speech the same week as Rolling Stone released a special issue on "The Kill Team." For those unacquainted with this report, Rolling Stone exposed an official investigation into a particular American army platoon in Afghanistan and the vile campaign of murder some of its soldiers engaged in. These soldiers have been accused on hunting Afghanistan civilians for sport. The photographs and videos posted on Rolling Stone's website accompany the story of this crime.

While researching the American relationship to war since 1945--primarily how political and theological leaders led Americans in a debate over how war shapes their relationship to the nation--the role soldiers play in defining what America is has of course changed over time. Not surprisingly, other than the initial burst of euphoria for returning troops following World War II, there had been little effort to glorify the American soldier as a significant representative of American power and ideals.

It seems to me that perception changed most dramatically in mid-1990s. Certainly Reagan talked big about the military, and George H.W. Bush hoped the Gulf War would cleanse the nation and its military of the malaise created by Vietnam. But it was the rise of the third generation of neocons (as Justin Vaisse calls them in his book) that remade the American soldier into the symbol of American Exceptionalism--or in my terms, the medieval Jesuits of a modern American theology of exceptionalism.

In perhaps the most celebrated essay by this third generation of neocons, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," William Kristol and Robert Kagan declared:"There is no more profound responsibility than the defense of the nation and its principles." Of course, their argument was that Americans had been allowed to forget this understanding, which had led to a general fracturing American-ness, the eruption of the culture wars, and a fading sense of exceptionalism.

Their point was that throughout the 1990s, the American public had been distracted—had been allowed to grow distracted—by the lack of a coherent martial vision. Kagan and Kristol believed that the American military was not some unfortunate appendage of a peace-loving, civic polis, but an essential branch of the American system of ideals. “It is foolish to imagine" they wrote, "that the Untied States can lead the world effectively while the overwhelming majority of the population neither understands nor is involved, in any real way, with its international mission." They clearly believed that the military stood as the sole institution in American public life that should command universal admiration. Americans needed to be reminded, educated, and trained, Kagan and Kristol claimed, in “military virtues.”

Americans need moral clarity--an activist foreign policy would remoralize America itself. America need war.

I don't know if Obama reminded Americans that they are not immune to the moral catastrophes of war. Like all other presidents before him, he praised and thanked the military for, yet again, taking on the burdens of war and for doing their jobs with courage. Yet Joffe saw Obama's speech as cautious, an abdication of America's "claim to world power and responsibility." Truly, an activist foreign policy has made America an exceptional nation, but surely we should remember that such activism comes with consequences that can be considered exceptional in ways that are possibly heroic and possibly horrific. If we can claim heroism as American, must we not also claim the horror? This has indeed been a week to end American exceptionalism, again.

The End of American Exceptionalism? No Kidding.

On Monday night, March 28, President Obama defended American intervention in the Libyan civil war. Many pundits had anticipated the president's remarks as a signal of what might come to be called, the "Obama Doctrine." The president, though, disappointed those hopes. His speech became noteworthy for what it did not address as much for what it did. For many observers, Obama's unwillingness to exert leadership over the multi-national force taking on Moammar Gaddafi made his position and that of the United States rather, well, unexceptional. The U.S. was just like any other member of a coalition.

Such action made Josef Joffe, the all-purpose pro-America European pundit, declare an end to American Exceptionalism. Joffe wrote in the New York Times that the Obama Doctrine, if there really is one, offers the world a vision of "America Lite." "There is nothing wrong with bringing ends in line with means and interest," Joffe allowed. "It’s the American way — and the way of all great powers. And yet. The Obama doctrine is to Truman et al. like chardonnay to moonshine: pleasing to the palate and easy on the blood, but without punch and power -- kind of un-American, isn't it?"

Is it? Or better, what is American about our understanding of American Exceptionalism?

We have discussed this issue before on this blog and will do so at the 2011 conference. But there was a convergence this past week that made me wonder how many times we will declare the end of American Exceptionalism.


The President delivered his "unexceptionalism" speech the same week as Rolling Stone released a special issue on "The Kill Team." For those unacquainted with this report, Rolling Stone exposed an official investigation into a particular American army platoon in Afghanistan and the vile campaign of murder some of its soldiers engaged in. These soldiers have been accused on hunting Afghanistan civilians for sport. The photographs and videos posted on Rolling Stone's website accompany the story of this crime.

While researching the American relationship to war since 1945--primarily how political and theological leaders led Americans in a debate over how war shapes their relationship to the nation--the role soldiers play in defining what America is has of course changed over time. Not surprisingly, other than the initial burst of euphoria for returning troops following World War II, there had been little effort to glorify the American soldier as a significant representative of American power and ideals.

It seems to me that perception changed most dramatically in mid-1990s. Certainly Reagan talked big about the military, and George H.W. Bush hoped the Gulf War would cleanse the nation and its military of the malaise created by Vietnam. But it was the rise of the third generation of neocons (as Justin Vaisse calls them in his book) that remade the American soldier into the symbol of American Exceptionalism--or in my terms, the medieval Jesuits of a modern American theology of exceptionalism.

In perhaps the most celebrated essay by this third generation of neocons, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," William Kristol and Robert Kagan declared:"There is no more profound responsibility than the defense of the nation and its principles." Of course, their argument was that Americans had been allowed to forget this understanding, which had led to a general fracturing American-ness, the eruption of the culture wars, and a fading sense of exceptionalism.

Their point was that throughout the 1990s, the American public had been distracted—had been allowed to grow distracted—by the lack of a coherent martial vision. Kagan and Kristol believed that the American military was not some unfortunate appendage of a peace-loving, civic polis, but an essential branch of the American system of ideals. “It is foolish to imagine" they wrote, "that the Untied States can lead the world effectively while the overwhelming majority of the population neither understands nor is involved, in any real way, with its international mission." They clearly believed that the military stood as the sole institution in American public life that should command universal admiration. Americans needed to be reminded, educated, and trained, Kagan and Kristol claimed, in “military virtues.”

Americans need moral clarity--an activist foreign policy would remoralize America itself. America need war.

I don't know if Obama reminded Americans that they are not immune to the moral catastrophes of war. Like all other presidents before him, he praised and thanked the military for, yet again, taking on the burdens of war and for doing their jobs with courage. Yet Joffe saw Obama's speech as cautious, an abdication of America's "claim to world power and responsibility." Truly, an activist foreign policy has made America an exceptional nation, but surely we should remember that such activism comes with consequences that can be considered exceptional in ways that are possibly heroic and possibly horrific. If we can claim heroism as American, must we not also claim the horror? This has indeed been a week to end American exceptionalism, again.