Thought of the Day

There are two ways to conceive of a military establishment's proper relationship to civilian society. On one account, the military exists in order to make civilian society possible. Like police officers, fire fighters, bus drivers, etc. the soldier is providing a public service that allows civilian social and economic life to function at a high level. On another account, civilian society exists in order to make the military establishment possible. Farmers, shopkeepers, industrialists, etc. are here to create the resources that provide the supplies that a warrior needs in order to practice his most honorable of crafts. The former conception is what's generally deemed to express the values of a democracy or a republic. The latter conception is what you have in a feudal system.

One way of understanding John McCain's oft-expressed hostility to politicians, his condescending attitude toward businessmen, and his frequent attacks on selfishness and individualism is as expressing that more aristocratic conception. That would be in keeping with McCain's family background and things like this odd genealogical note he's interested in broadcasting.

T

Comments

Of course, it makes sense. McCain is Scotch-Irish. Assholes they are.

Posted by freddiemac | March 12, 2008 4:15 PM

I know that Jim Webb's Born Fighting suggests that the Scotch-Irish have gotten a raw deal from historians, but McCain's invocation of the "Scotch-Irish" sounds like a dog-whistle appeal to the racist redneck vote. Although to McCain's credit, it's a lot more subtle use of dog-whistle politics than, say, Geraldine Ferraro. Hillary Clinton is so wrong if she thinks she can beat Republicans by playing their game.

Posted by jonp72 | March 12, 2008 4:29 PM

At first impression, your analysis is inaccurate. The relation expressed in your feudal conception is not as simple as you make it. Civil society, insofar as it can even be called that, does exist to furnish the military class. Yet, that relationship is really a subset in the hierarchical structure of feudal society. That is, the civilian-military relationship is superseded by an overarching social structure that defies the simplistic syllogism you try to establish in your so-called "thought of the day."

Hopefully, this isn't the only thing you were thinking of today.

Posted by nvs | March 12, 2008 4:30 PM

Conservative Feudalism: A Very Serious, Thoughtful Argument that has Never Been Made in Such Detail or with Such Care

By Matthew Yglesias

Posted by Sam L | March 12, 2008 4:37 PM

This analysis is goofy. For one obvious counterexample Bill Bradley, no great warmonger, makes the same boast about his ancestry at some length in _Time Present, Time Past_.

Posted by Sanjay | March 12, 2008 4:38 PM

Unrelated news: the Chilean pension system as (sort of analogous to a 'social security' program) modified by Pinochet's team has been revised by Socialist president Bachelet so that many (especially the poorest) now may draw public pensions.

Chile's private pension system adds public payouts for poor
By Eduardo Gallardo, AP, March 10, 2008

SANTIAGO: Chile is undertaking its biggest overhaul ever of its pioneering private pension system, adding sweeping public payouts for the low-income elderly.

The new $2 billion-a-year program will expand public pensions to groups left out by private pensions - the poor and self-employed, homewives, street vendors and farmers who saved little for retirement - granting about a quarter of the nation's work force public pensions by 2012.

The program, to be signed into law Tuesday, is the most ambitious pension plan for the poor in the region, according to David Titelman, a social security expert at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The so-called Solidarity Pensions of President Michelle Bachelet will supplement, not scrap, the current private pensions, while salaried employees continue paying in to private funds in a combination of state subsidy and free market.

"This illustrates an evolution - it shows you need a hybrid system and can't put all your eggs in one basket," said Estelle James, a former World Bank economist. Public pensions alone won't do, because governments are not able to finance them, while private accounts can leave people out, she said...

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/10/business/pension.php

Posted by El Cid | March 12, 2008 4:40 PM

Err, I think you're being polite in calling this
"feudalism". Wouldn't "fascism" be closer to the
mark ? Though I guess Stalinism took the same
tack, he had no compunction about adopting the
policy of forced collectivization of agriculture
which resulted in about 10M civilian excess deaths from starvation and disease, in order to implement
rapid industrialization for military production.

Either way, it's damned un-American.

Posted by Richard Cownie | March 12, 2008 4:44 PM

It's not that the military is an end in itself--in the feudal system the military exists to make the king or the lord possible. In that system the military is priviledged over the civilan society because the military is the king's most direct tool of power. Military service is especially "honorable" due to its proximity to the king.

The key difference between democratic and feudal societies is that in democratic societies the head of state serves the people and in feudal societies the people serve the head of state. The military is a tool of whichever group is being served. This is why the president is the commander in chief _and_ a civilian, but of course the president as head of state still has more direct control over the military than the people do. The point of the posse comitatus law is to ensure that the head of state wields the military only in his capacity as a servant of the people rather than as a tool for subjugating the people and making himself into a king.

Posted by Galen | March 12, 2008 5:02 PM

Yeah, maybe. Either that or McCain is just a dick.

Posted by How Insane Is John McCain? | March 12, 2008 5:10 PM

I don't find the genealogical note all that odd. Just about everyone can trace their ancestry to some king or another (I'm descended from King David of Scotland! Yay me!), and most people who have researched their genealogy point out the famous ancestors. Because if you say "I'm a descendant of some unknown shepherd" nobody really cares.

I think it's a stretch to use it to try to understand McCain's approach to the relationship between civil and military society. It's a lot simpler to say he was in the military, his family has a military history, and so he just identifies with the military, rather than trying to claim he's a closet feudalist.

Posted by Royko | March 12, 2008 5:12 PM

Finally!

I'm glad someone else besides me and a few other hippies who probably smell like patchouli is making this point.

One way of understanding John McCain's oft-expressed hostility to politicians, his condescending attitude toward businessmen, and his frequent attacks on selfishness and individualism is as expressing that more aristocratic conception.

I would say the same applies to the media's condescending attitudes toward what could roughly be desribed as popular/populist politics as well. Media pearl-clutching about "oh noes, the Dems. are doing something political" isn't just a matter of IOKIYAR double standards because the media is afraid of being perceived as liberal, etc. -- there really seems to be a sincere dislike of the political process amongst media types, even those who get paid to report on said process and revel in the dirty details as if they were reading a lurid novel and "shocked, shocked, I tell you" about what's being described even as they can't put the book down.

There really is a neo-feudalist movement afoot in this country (concentrated in the plantation south and ranchero west, where feudalism didn't really end until the New Deal/Great Society, which is why the neo-feudalists so hate Dem. gummint programs). Alas, the "politics is dirty" attitude of the neo-feudalists resonates with pre-millenialist and Lenninist (neo-con) thinking about progressive change being the work of Satan/the Bourgeois-status quo, and thus we have the modern GOP coalition.

It may pretend to be capitalist and American, but it's fundamentally anti-capitalist and against the very foundation of a democratic-republic in which political ambition is to be made to check ambition and provide for liberty. If you start calling the base of our system "dirty" and dismiss it, then you undermine the whole foundation that keeps bosses, whether in gummint, business or in the feudal sense, from stealing our liberty.

But to the neo-feudalists, the assault on politics is then obviously a good thing, right?

Posted by DAS | March 12, 2008 5:26 PM

Couple of thoughts from an old fart that remembers the draft, grew up in the 40s and 50s when military service was regarded very differently and had the honor of serving:

First, the dichotomy between 'citizen' and 'soldier' is a false one. It is reasonable to expect that everyone who counts themselves as anAmerican should in some way 'serve' as a normal part of their life. Even during my childhood (active duty Marines were my Scoutmasters, my teachers were called to active duty during the Berlin Blockade, my father graduated from the Citadel) I was taught to respect the service of Conscientious Objectors, for example, but not to respect Draft evaders. It was left to LBJ and Nixon to teach me that moral lesson.

This 'Scotch-Irish' business is overdone. There are other cultural-national 'tribes' that have tended toward militarism (the Zulu) and other that have many non-militaristic characteristics but when militarized are famously fierce (the Nepalese Buddhist become the Ghurkas). But it is true that: The Irish as a race are mad,
For all their songs of war are happy,
And all their songs of love are sad.

Posted by JohnMcC | March 12, 2008 5:26 PM

I'm surprised no one is going to call me out for making a prejudiced remark...

On a related tangent, I think Matt may not realize that what makes a feudal system is its promises of military support to a lord from a vassal.

To dovetail into Scotch-Irish history, the Scotch-Irish were landless Scots who moved to Ireland to become landowners. This of course didn't go over well with the Irish, so they moved to America. In a way you could say that they were on the outside of the feudal system looking in, trying to climb that metaphorical fence.

Posted by freddiemac | March 12, 2008 5:27 PM

Couple of thoughts from an old fart that remembers the draft, grew up in the 40s and 50s when military service was regarded very differently and had the honor of serving:

First, the dichotomy between 'citizen' and 'soldier' is a false one. It is reasonable to expect that everyone who counts themselves as anAmerican should in some way 'serve' as a normal part of their life. Even during my childhood (active duty Marines were my Scoutmasters, my teachers were called to active duty during the Berlin Blockade, my father graduated from the Citadel) I was taught to respect the service of Conscientious Objectors, for example, but not to respect Draft evaders. It was left to LBJ and Nixon to teach me that moral lesson.

This 'Scotch-Irish' business is overdone. There are other cultural-national 'tribes' that have tended toward militarism (the Zulu) and other that have many non-militaristic characteristics but when militarized are famously fierce (the Nepalese Buddhist become the Ghurkas). But it is true that: The Irish as a race are mad,
For all their songs of war are happy,
And all their songs of love are sad.

Posted by JohnMcC | March 12, 2008 5:28 PM

Couple of thoughts from an old fart that remembers the draft, grew up in the 40s and 50s when military service was regarded very differently and had the honor of serving:

First, the dichotomy between 'citizen' and 'soldier' is a false one. It is reasonable to expect that everyone who counts themselves as Americans should in some way 'serve' that nation as a normal part of their life. Even during my childhood (active duty Marines were my Scoutmasters, my teachers were called to active duty during the Berlin Blockade, my father graduated from the Citadel) I was taught to respect the service of Conscientious Objectors, for example, but not to respect Draft evaders. It was left to LBJ and Nixon to teach me that moral lesson.

This 'Scotch-Irish' business is overdone. There are other cultural-national 'tribes' that have tended toward militarism (the Zulu) and other that have many non-militaristic characteristics but when militarized are famously fierce (the Nepalese Buddhist become the Ghurkas). But it is true that: The Irish as a race are mad,
For all their songs of war are happy,
And all their songs of love are sad.

Posted by JohnMcC | March 12, 2008 5:29 PM

So then how do you explain Michelle Obama telling people not to work for corporations, and instead go to the public sector? Can I assume that she's some kind of socialist then? Or, like your napkin level analysis of McCain, would that be stretching things?

Posted by James Robertson | March 12, 2008 5:31 PM

OhMyGod!!! I got lost in the 'preview' and couldn't get out. Forgive the triple posting. That's what happens to 'old farts' sometimes.

Posted by JohnMcC | March 12, 2008 5:33 PM

Nice post by Galen.

I would add that any social biological organism, not just humans, maintains soldiers and internal enforcers that protect the society and its laws, norms from internal and external danger.
Or which seek to expand that social organism and cause it to flourish and reproduce and survive at the expense of its rivals.

People who talk of the lack of need for a military or domestic enforcement of rules only have to observe an animal society in operation or witness how ineffectual International law, doplomacy and ernest human rights lawyers are without force to back them up - to show how flawed such thinking is.

And if military is that important, and it is, the last thing we should do is ally with those ideologues seeking to cripple or destroy the military part of our society by making them outcasts or attempting to block them from recruiting the best warriors possible.

Posted by chris ford | March 12, 2008 5:38 PM

And if military is that important, and it is, the last thing we should do is ally with those ideologues seeking to cripple or destroy the military part of our society by making them outcasts or attempting to block them from recruiting the best warriors possible. - chris ford

Sounds like a good reason to vote Dem. then. The McCain/neo-con wing of the GOP is full of ideologues whose policies, from excessive wars to failure to the swift-voting of war heros, cripple the military and make soldiers outcasts. Also, we need to drop "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and allow gays fully into the military, so that we can recruit the best warriors possible.

Unfortunately, people hearing this will just "think" "respect the military"="vote for the manly man GOP".

Which goes to show what exactly is happening with our democracy, don't it?

Posted by DAS | March 12, 2008 5:53 PM

Explain to me again which side of the political spectrum has attacked recruiters?

Posted by James Robertson | March 12, 2008 6:09 PM

Ah, so you're saying it's Captain Adama vs. Admiral Cain.

Okay, when art imitates life we all know what it is, but what happens when life imitates sci-fi? Because the similarties between those names...that's creepy.

Posted by anonymous | March 12, 2008 7:26 PM

1. FreddieMac, I guessed (rightly?) when reading your first comment that you yourself are Scots-Irish, and so would respond to anyone who took your bait with the "I can say it cuz I'm one of them" defense. Nonetheless, you're right, one who similarly defamed a different, more traditionally "minority"-defined, ethnicity would probably have been heavily slagged by this point.

2. JonP: with regard to McCain's genealogical claim: from my reading of Webb's book, which is more interesting as a glimpse into the good Sen.'s psyche than anything else (and, sadly, not at all well written), I'd say the Bruce is not the sort of Scots-Irish he was talking about - rather, it's the salt of the earth sorts, warrior culture, who have moved from place to place (as Freddie notes later), stayed poor, and always been ready to defend their country , etc. The Scots royalty who led these plebes against the Norman English didn't later on have to pick up and go to Ulster to be the ground troops in an occupation. Though, on the other hand, McCain's own family has certainly shown the tradition of military service that Webb celebrates.

3. Responding to Matt's actual point: to grant the dichotomy arguendo, I think there's plenty of room for McCain to operate in the rhetorical direction he seems inclined toward, without him becoming a feudalist. Our constitutional requirements of civilian control of the military (Lindsey Graham should resign his commission or his Congressional seat!) sets our groundrules pretty far to the democratic/republican side.

Posted by DGJ | March 12, 2008 8:19 PM

If you're going to use that genealogical background to see something about his personality and beliefs, it fits so much better with "maverick" than anything your trying to prove. You're forgetting his support of immigration in the picture you're trying to draw, though the other points fit.

Ruminating about stuff like this is fun, and I like that you aren't afraid to post on it. Our family and tribe culture does affect us all.

Put him into the 18th century with his forbears, he's really into the concept of America as a nation, not a British aristocrat. An anti-hereditary aristocrat aristocrat, an independent farmer not a mercantilist businessman. The Robert the Bruce stuff fits, the Scots-Irish fits, the Confederacy fits maverick, independent, live free or die. Need one mention he has a lot of kinfolk in Appalachia who lost out in the whole deal that happened in a couple of centuries?

As for the military thing, for his family, if you're doing it for a nation like the U.S.A., it's taking the aristocratic noblesse oblige thing of military service out of that milieu and leaving just the "honor of a gentleman" part.

Posted by artappraiser | March 12, 2008 8:51 PM

Explain to me again which side of the political spectrum has attacked recruiters?

Eh . . . he's having a flashback and still fighting with them damn dirty pacifist hippies back in the sixties. There are still pacifists out there today, but everyone has gotten used to ignoring them.

The people who try to interfere with military recruiting today are doing so because the military has been hijacked to fight and die for the greater glory of Bush's ego and Cheney's sick old man vision of nationalist hegemony. Not because being a soldier is evil, but because joining the military now makes you a victim of Neocon callousness and a mercenary servant to their ambitions of slapping the entire world into obedience.

The professional soldier of today is just cannon fodder for the Bushies. They join to serve their country and instead keep getting sent back into hopeless combat again and again because Bush and Cheney cannot admit they ever make mistakes. Back into combat, year after year, until they are all dead or maimed and rotting in an underfunded hospital.

Posted by Berken | March 12, 2008 9:38 PM

Thought of the Day

"The professional soldier of today is" a hero unlike the individuals on this blog. Everyone seems to be so high and mighty. How many of you have faced combat or been a POW for eight years?

Everytime the Obama bloggers insult McCain, you essentially hand the election to Hillary or McCain.

Posted by EWard | March 13, 2008 12:28 AM

SPARTA!

We're way fuckin' overmilitarized, it's depressing.

All this 'CandC' talk too, also depressing. It's just not necessary.

Posted by mike | March 13, 2008 1:04 AM

A "professional soldier" (as opposed to a professional warrior) is an idiot.

Anybody who risks his life on the orders of someone he doesn't know on the basis of intelligence he can't evaluate for purposes he doesn't understand deserves to get his ass shot off.

And I say that having done just that back in the Vietnam war. Fortunately I didn't get my ass shot off, and I learned. I learned that the US military is the second dumbest thing on earth (the first is the prison system, as I learned later.)

McCain's military service and foreign policy opinions merely demonstrate the point vividly. He'd be wise not to bring it up too much lest someone get tired of hearing it and start pointing out how much of a military loser McCain actually was and is.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 13, 2008 2:24 AM

"Explain to me again which side of the political spectrum has attacked recruiters?

Posted by James Robertson | March 12, 2008 6:09 PM"

My understanding is that a lot of people in the military see recruiters these days as kind of the scummiest guys in the military. They're the guys who lie to high school kids about the benefits and such without telling them that if you get hurt within the first month, you have to pay back your sign-up pay. Also, the last I checked (about a year ago), about 100 cases are pending of recruiters being charged with either sexually assaulting or raping young women who were interested in signing up for the armed forces.

""The professional soldier of today is" a hero unlike the individuals on this blog. Everyone seems to be so high and mighty. How many of you have faced combat or been a POW for eight years?

Everytime the Obama bloggers insult McCain, you essentially hand the election to Hillary or McCain.

Posted by EWard | March 13, 2008 12:28 AM"

Nobody is questioning his heroism in combat. He's an elected official and is thus open to such scrutiny. If he didn't want to be scrutinized, he could have entered a different line of work once he returned home. After all, we do live in a free society here.

I'm not sure feudal is the best word to describe his outlook beyond a vague militarism. What worries me about McCain is that he isn't a business conservative. I disagree with bc's a lot, but having them mucking around with marginal tax rates is a lot less dangerous than militarists playing brinksmanship with Iran to show how manly they are. I wouldn't be so worried about McCain if he was a conservative who was such because of well-developed ideas on economics. In fact, he seems to disdain the private sector and goes along with it in the Senate for political purposes. Remember when he dissed Romney for working for profit? That was just plain creepy.

Posted by Reality Man | March 13, 2008 4:45 AM

The people who try to interfere with military recruiting today are doing so because the military has been hijacked - Berken

Ostensibly (at least on college campuses) they are doing so because the military, in discriminating against homosexuals, violates various anti-discrimination policies.

I the military would actually allow the best and brightest to serve even if they happen to be gay, there'd be fewer objections to recruiters on campus.

Posted by DAS | March 13, 2008 9:57 AM

This is painful to watch. John McCain and his worldview are fascist, not feudal.

Feudalism was a complex web of obligations that prevented the emergence of nationalism. There were no nations in feudalism and no military.

In one sense, this is too incredibly complex for a philosophy major from Harvard to even begin to understand. In another sense, the past two centuries have been all about the final painful death of feudalism, real and imagined, and in spite of these immense agonies of the world's peoples, China has quite arguably emerged with the broadest outlines of pre-Rennaissance China intact.

The warp and woof of feudalism was a broad network of feudal obligations, so impossibly intertwined that owning anything other than a bed or jewel in fee-simple was almost impossible, but this mainly applied to the lesser people, who naturally took every opportunity to burn the papers and deeds the wealthy had collected.

At the top, feudalism was a collection of murderers and robbers who made it up as they went along, and had less "nobility" among the lot of them than a single bus driver displays today. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would renounce the whole thing, and the 'Scots-Irish', from whom I'm descended, did exactly that. That's why they were deported.

You have two parents, four grandparents, &tc. Work it back and you're descended from everyone alive in Europe in the year 1000. Big deal.

McCain is working for a "perfected" form of fascism, and when you reflect that the Germans had to be totally defeated to admit their mistakes, it's not a very reassuring sign of what lies ahead for us.

Posted by serial catowner | March 13, 2008 12:28 PM

By the way, I'm probably descended from Genghis Khan, so fuck all y'all!

Posted by Reality Man | March 13, 2008 1:25 PM

My father was a soldier for about nine years ('37-'46), about four of those as a P.W.. He assured me that every soldier he knew thought that "civilian" was the lowest form of life, primarily because they (notionally) had it easy. He firmly believed that this was part of the personality that is rebuilt into recruits after their original one is demolished in Basic.

(Actually, given his background, if he hadn't been a soldier he would have been murdered along with his family. Actually, the civilians in Leipzig whose firebombed buildings he cleaned-up had it, eventually, worse than he did, and as badly as the citizens of London, Tokyo, Leningrad,...these days it's often safer to be a soldier.)

He said that, given his experiences, it would have been easy for him to decide that everyone should have to go through what he did or something like it. It's to his credit that he decided that no-one should have to unless really, really, necessary; it's to McCain's discredit that he seems to have opted for the former, late-60s-VFW-redolent, option.

One of the things that disturbs me about the militarist/fascist way of looking things is that they have incentive to back policies that create situations in which the military looks necessary and exaltation-worthy.

Posted by Archimandrite Luseferous | March 13, 2008 2:33 PM

If you examine this biography through essentially left wing eyes, Sen. McCain may seem "fascist" (whatever that means)or "feudal", etc, but the majority of voters will notice that his children, unlike those of Mitt, Bush, and Hillary are in the military and willing to sacrifice their lives if needed. That fact alone will trump any other nuanced thought about his biography.

I am not going to vote for McCain no matter who runs against him mostly because he is not suited to be president for many reasons not related to his (or his family's) military service. In general his family story is a great plus and attacking it only adds to the impression that those on the left are spineless wusses.

On the other hand, Sen. Webb, who has the same biography, can counter this perception. Who would have more credence, Sen. Webb saying that Sen. McCain is not suited to be president or the guy that blocked the Berekely USMC recruiting station?

Posted by mikeyes | March 13, 2008 5:06 PM

I always like to refer to Shakespeare's play Coriolanus when discussing the characteristics of military men as political leaders, and the uneasy relationship between the values of military and civil society. While obviously not a strict parallel to or example of any particular American case, it does wonderfully underline the issues involved.

Quick synopsis: idealistic, exceptional, but arrogant military hero, spurned by fickle mob in his quest for political power, raises a foreign army to destroy his own city as punishment for its failure to live up to his idealistic vision of civic virtue.

Posted by J. Myers | March 14, 2008 11:04 AM