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What causes them to charge into enemy fire?
I’ve mentioned before that I’m cleaning up old emails that backed up way last summer when we were in Europe. Well, I’m still doing it, making my way through a few hundred each day. Which is progress, just not fast progress.
Anyway, today I ran across something I had set aside to consider writing about (which I may have done in passing; I don’t recall now). It was an Ezra Klein podcast (he’s always good) headlined, “What’s Wrong With Trump?”
I gave you a link to that if you want to go back and hear it, or read the transcript. But I’d rather you spend time reading what I’m thinking about today, which is on the much larger topic, which is Trumpism, and what is wrong with that. Which is, of course, an immense topic (since it’s about what is killing our country), but this is at least a digestible bite out of the subject.
It’s a David Brooks column from several days ago, and it’s headlined, “I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge.” (That, by the way, is one of those “share full article” links that the NYT offers, so please let me know whether it works for you).
It very much goes to the core of my own views, because it arises from Brooks’ marked tendencies toward communitarianism, which is one of the main reasons I enjoy reading him, and am often inspired by his words.
He starts this way:
Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”
This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth….
He then mentions that J.D. Vance made a similar point at his inauguration, and that “these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.”
Of course, Brooks isn’t saying soldiers don’t lay their lives on the line for their buddies. “Of course warriors fight for their comrades.” And they do. I’ve made that point many times on this blog. (Based of course upon study, not personal experience. But what I’m studying is the experiences and memories of combat veterans.) When battle is at its hairiest, that’s an essential factor that keeps soldiers from turning tail and running — the comrades beside them. To see what happens when that factor breaks down, read the first part of The Red Badge of Courage, when the protagonist flees the battlefield because others around him are doing the same.
But there are larger questions — the factors that cause a someone to become a soldier to begin with, and don the uniform and go through all that training, long before they’ve even met those comrades who will keep them from running.
That’s what Brooks is writing about. And it’s what Deneen and Vance are dumping on when they say soldiers are never motivated by “abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens.”
That is not only an insult of immense proportions to soldiers (and sailors and Marines and others who serve) but to all Americans, whether they’re capable of perceiving the insult or not. It’s an insult to the idea of America. It’s an insult to ideas, period — to democracy, to freedom, to humanity, to God. It reduces us to grunting animals who can’t see past their own feeding troughs, and don’t care.
So it’s worth getting “angry about,” as Brooks so mildly puts it:
Deneen’s and Vance’s comments about men in combat are part of a larger project at the core of Trumpism. It is to rebut the notion that America is not only a homeland, though it is that, but it is also an idea and a moral cause — that America stands for a set of universal principles: the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with inalienable rights, that democracy is the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and best honors beings who are made in the image of God.
There are two forms of nationalism. There is the aspirational nationalism of people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, who emphasize that America is not only a land but was founded to embody and spread the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Then there is the ancestors and homeland nationalism, traditionally more common in Europe, of Donald Trump and Vance, the belief that America is just another collection of people whose job is to take care of our own. In his Republican National Convention acceptance speech Vance did acknowledge that America is partly a set of ideas (though he talked about religious liberty and pointedly not the Declaration). But then when it came time to define America, he talked about a cemetery in Kentucky where his ancestors have been buried for generations. That invocation is the dictionary definition of ancestors and homeland nationalism.
Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it….
Well, I’ve probably gone what the lawyers at the NYT would consider “Fair Use,” so I won’t quote any more.
But I urge you to go read the piece, and reflect upon it. It’s worth your time…
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Note that Vance served in the United States Marine Corps. I honor him for it. I suspect that I would have respected and even admired him then. Not so much now, given what he has chosen later in life to embrace…
I wondered if you had seen the Brooks column. Soldiers fight for both noble and ignoble reasons. Of course, homeland nationalism is as much an abstraction to fight for as aspirational nationalism, and since Vance served during the Iraq War there is the self-defense rationale since at the time Saddam Hussein was being tied to al-Qaeda if indeed he was holding that belief at the time as opposed to adopting it later. What gets me is the whole “transactional” thing, and how it’s touted as not only a more rational policy but more aligned to a business mindset. Businesses are trying to get repeat customers all the time and encouraging “brand loyalty,” which is definitely not a “transactional”. I mean, sometimes that’s the strategy to go with but not all the time, or even most of the time. Trashing your allies and ignoring “soft power” is self-defeating.
Yep. Of course, I don’t consider sticking with your buddy to be “ignoble.” There are plenty of ignoble reasons to go to war, of course, and they pretty much motivated most wars in human history, from what I’ve seen.
The United States — back when it was still the United States — was in large part a departure from that. (Try to imagine any king or general in ages past going across the ocean to set Europe free from Hitler, then turning around and going home to leave the whole continent to those who live there. That’s certainly not why Julius Caesar came, saw and conquered Gaul. Long before there was a Roman empire, he was building it. (And of course, in the 20th century, wars in pursuit of some ideal — even a wrongheaded one, such as Nazism or Marxism — became fashionable.)
Remember how a subset of antiwar folks — those most given to rhetorical fancy — would claim we went to war in Iraq “for the oil?” Well, if Trump decided to go to war in Iraq, something like that would be the motivation. If he didn’t see a way for him, personally, to benefit from the oil (or whatever he was after), he wouldn’t send the troops…
For a moment there, I had trouble thinking of any wars before the Enlightenment that were waged for ideas, whether good or bad.
But I wasn’t trying hard enough. Insane as they were, the Crusades count in that category. So did religious conflicts such as the 30 Years War, or the more combative parts of the rapid spread of Islam. Oliver Cromwell obviously thought abolishing the monarchy was extremely high-minded.
But mostly, especially in Europem, they were generally about the cupidity or whim of a single person — a king, a duke, a count, or what have you. Not much for the common soldier to get excited about, except maybe opportunities for looting, rape, etc. (opportunites that modern war often offer as well, as normal order breaks down in a place). After the development of nation-states, some were likely motivated by the cruder forms of nationalism…
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that protecting your buddies was somehow ignoble. I was referring to some the reasons you refer to for common soldiers in the second paragraph of the post above. Not to mention that some people just want to fight or like killing things and war is a good excuse for that.
As for the U.S., we have had our share of “land-grab”/imperial wars: Mexican-American, Spanish-American, the wars against Native Americans, interventions in Latin American, etc. Even the War of 1812 had a “conquer Canada” component.
It should be noted that “ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights” are a motivating factor for more than just soldiers. There are folks in all walks of life, people who are working in an array of endeavors, who are driven by the same concerns. And that includes many academics, public intellectuals and, yes, politicians.
And to expand on the point about America being “founded to embody and spread ideals” declared in certain aspirational statements of national purpose, Masha Gessen, a close observer of our national situation, notes that “Democracy is not a state of being. Democracy is a vector of development.” In other words, it is a never-ending project, which, for it to work at all, must be sought not merely by spouting tidy dogmas and not just by projecting our ideals into the world, but by living them out at home. And that is NOT what is happening under the current US regime.
Just FYI, it was “noted.” I did so when I noted that “That is not only an insult of immense proportions to soldiers (and sailors and Marines and others who serve) but to all Americans, whether they’re capable of perceiving the insult or not. It’s an insult to the idea of America. It’s an insult to ideas, period — to democracy, to freedom, to humanity, to God. It reduces us to grunting animals who can’t see past their own feeding troughs, and don’t care.”
There is more mention of soldiers here because, ahem, that’s how we got onto this, during the week of Memorial Day…