McCain really lost what little respect I had for him when he started knocking Mitt Romney for not having lived a life of “public service.” Romney, you see, spent his life in the shameful pursuit of building an honest business, and he succeeded in spades, creating a billion dollar consulting empire.
To me, Republicans used to have one natural constituency: people that were rich or trying to become rich, or, at the very least, people that took some pride in pulling their own weight. If they didn’t have their neighbor’s money, they didn’t want the government to steal it for them becuase they knew they had not earned it. Republicans may recognize the need for a social safety net, but would rather not partake of one for themselves. This streak is the old fashioned American “rugged individualism,” and McCain is quite notably the first anti-business Republican since sometime Bull Moose, Teddy Roosevelt, to whom McCain is often compared.
While I am skeptical of off-shoring and impenetrably complex financial arrangments with 27 classes of stock designed to conceal a company’s financial picture, I still have a sentimental respect for people trying to make a buck along the lines of Calvin Coolidge’s insight that the “business of America is business.”
McCain’s class warfare rhetoric is crowned with a call for national service and sacrifice at the national level that is quite un-American in its particulars. Gene Healy captures its essential creepiness rather nicely:
John McCain provided an answer in a little-noticed article in the Washington Monthly, written shortly after 9/11. In it, McCain called for a quasi-militarized domestic national service corps as a way to address a “spiritual crisis in our national culture.” What Senator McCain envisioned was, well, rather creepy–a sort of jackbooted Politics of Meaning.
McCain praised City Year, an AmeriCorps initiative operating in 13 cities: “City Year members wear uniforms, work in teams, learn public speaking skills, and gather together for daily calisthenics, often in highly public places such as in front of city hall.” He also endorsed the National Civilian Community Corps, “a service program consciously structured along military lines,” in which enrollees “not only wear uniforms and work in teams… but actually live together in barracks on former military bases.” McCain calls for expanding these two initiatives and “spread[ing] their group-cohesion techniques to other AmeriCorps programs.”
“Group cohesion” and calisthenics in front of city hall reflect a version of patriotism, to be sure, albeit one that seems more North Korean than American. But all in all, the article provides further evidence of Welch’s claim that McCain has an essentially “militaristic conception of citizenship.”
18 Apr 2008 at 11:21 pm
Great post. It’s appalling how popular this idea of required “national service” is among self-styled conservatives these days. You know I really don’t have much in the way of libertarian instincts, yet the idea that we owe to the state what McCain says, really is fascist. I don’t say that lightly, either.
Sadly, I think there is a lot of enthusiasm for “national service” among our generation, regardless of political persuasion. Actually, it seems especially widespread among women, who don’t want to be included in a military draft, but fear that men will insist that their obligation to military service carries a corresponding right to leadership and privilege. Feminizing “national service” (and certainly women are more enthusiastic than men about things like City Year) winds up being another feminist power grab.
19 Apr 2008 at 3:31 pm
I was just thinking, too: Isn’t it contemptible for big fans of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism — with its deep hostility to the “politics of meaning” — to overlook the same tendency in McCain?
20 Apr 2008 at 4:16 am
John, I don’t know of anyone who overlooks that tendency in McCain, just those who swallow hard and gulp a couple of Peptos while they think of what the Dems are offering as alternatives.
21 Apr 2008 at 6:55 pm
I think some of it is driven by the unprecedented number of 18-25 year olds we have in college studying things like “University Studies”. People like myself experience a deep disgust comparing the lives of these kids now (i.e., no responsibility, very little study, lots of beer and sex, and a big sense of entitlement) with what we used to expect out of kids that age (i.e. military service, hard labor, or hard studies).
While national service isn’t the right solution, I think it is perfectly in tune with conservatism to feel that the current situation is unnatural and innapropriate to building strong character or civic-mindedness.
21 Apr 2008 at 7:01 pm
Reality has a way of knocking on the door for the kids that screw around until they’re 25 or so. And it’s naturally to find this pretty lame. But the government is not going to fix our culture. It seems the cream rises by the time people are in their late 20s, after having had reality knock on the door in the form of moving out, buying homes, having kids, having had to get a job, etc.
The idle rich will always be pretty loathsome, of course.
21 Apr 2008 at 7:26 pm
Apart from the moral and cultural aspect, have you considered what economic impact it must have on the country to have so much of our population wasting what should be productive years in this manner, and sucking up tens of thousands of dollars a year to do it? And think about the economic impact of graduating sloppy, lazy thinkers instead of intellectually hardened workers. You’re right that the real world shapes them up in their late 20’s, but why in the world should we wait until then? Think about how much more productive workers they would be in their 20’s.
And not only that, consider that the waste is only compounded when students leave the workforce again to go to grad school, where much of what they learn could have been learned in the undergrad years. And of course there is the economic cost to employers for whom a college degree becomes an increasingly less valuable screening tool.
Of course this doesn’t apply to most students in the engineering and hard sciences. But as an MBA, I can tell you that if we added a few core courses to undergrad studies (accounting, finance, a couple tough econ courses, etc), we could easily cut most MBA programs done to one year, and increase the basic economic literacy of our country.
21 Apr 2008 at 7:31 pm
I think the problem is that there’s never been a golden age of education. Fewer went to college in the past. Those that go to pseudo-colleges like the diploma mills with such august names like Georgia Tech, Cal State, etc., and get lousy grades are as dumb and disadvataged as ever. I don’t think it’s a question of rigor so much as numbers: Only 10% or less of a society should even have a college degree, and only 10% have a real college degree with the prestige that entails. Everyone else thinks they have a degree, but soon learn in the real world they either (a) have the savvy to succeed in business or (b) were shortchanged in their youth.
As for wasted money and resources, I agree, but if their parents foot the bill, that’s there problem. I also think wage pressure from mass immigration makes certain formerly attractive jobs profoundly unattractive. So ther’es a lot of issues.
21 Apr 2008 at 7:55 pm
Romney’s achievements were at Bain Capital, the PE fund, not so much Bain & Co., the consultancy. He made his money in the PE sphere, not the consulting sphere.
21 Apr 2008 at 8:41 pm
The problem is that in making college accessible to those with average or slightly below average intelligence, rather than to those with above average intelligence, we’ve made college increasingly less worthwhile and more wasteful (from an economic perspective, even if the parents are paying for it, the fact that the kids are idle still creates a major inefficiency).
You might say that good colleges still prove their worth by turning out students that go on to great productivity, but they are where the greatest damage has been done. The reality is that these colleges are now for many students just performing a screening function, and they can get away with this because the overall value of a college education has been degraded by the phenomenon we are discussing.
And that is perhaps the most wasteful aspect of this situation. Instead of developing the country’s best minds, many of these elite colleges are just performing the role of a very expensive IQ test that churns out products like your abortion-artist from an earlier post.
In fact, some of these grads leave college knowing less than they did when they arrived!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/27/MNGC4LDHS91.DTL
22 Apr 2008 at 12:30 am
Jeez Louise Chris. The other two are out and out protectionists for goodness sakes, and want government to grow like there’s no tomorrow. McCain, for all his manifest faults, is an actual gvernment cutter and an unabashed free trader who wants to increase market mechanisms in health-care, not increase them.
At this point, the choice is obvious, unless one wants to throw the ovte to the bad guys. We can criticise him all we ant, and belive me, I want to, especially on his environmental activism, but he at least gts free markets in goods, servies and human capital even if he doesn’t understand how they work.
Better miliarism than labor union pandering.
most of government isn’t daddy government anyhow, so at least the mommy bits have reason to fear his presidenccy. Good. We need those less.
30 May 2008 at 4:17 am
[...] romantic views of big government are well known, and were manifested in his obnoxious criticisms of Mitt Romney’s lack of military service. I was glad to see the similarly naive and self-absorbed Obama [...]