Enjoy Your Time in the Wilderness

Patricia Cohen details how the conservative movement is trying to reform and reorganize itself in advance of a Fall debacle at the ballot box. At the end of the article--which ought to prove that I read the whole thing, right?--is a gem from Megan McArdle:

Indeed, to Ms. McArdle, the possibility of a Republican defeat holds a certain romantic appeal. “Younger people are kind of excited about being in the wilderness,” she said, evoking the pre-Reagan years when Republican thinkers plotted their revolution at nonprofit organizations and in bars instead of in the Executive Office Building and congressional majority offices. The longer you’re in power, the more you want to preserve it. “That’s where the Republicans are right now, and it’s demoralizing for think tankers.” Desperation has a way of focusing the mind. As Ms. McArdle said, “When they’re out of power, they have to think in a clearer way.”

When the Republicans were out of power in 1993, they turned, in desperation, to a bomb-throwing backbencher named Newt Gingrich, who favored destructive personal politics and overwrought lunacy diguised as public policy as his means of getting things done. How'd that turn out?

Young people are "excited" about being in the wilderness? Which young people? Because the only enthused, motivated and active young people who are actually accomplishing anything in this country support Barack Obama.

You mean to tell me that a group of people--young conservatives--who can't be bothered to join the military in order to help fight the war they enthusiastically support are, all of a sudden and out of the blue, going to enjoy "adversity?"

Adversity is the one thing that modern conservatives cannot stomach or stand. If they believed in it, they wouldn't have rolled over for George Bush and they certainly wouldn't have rolled over for John McCain. If adversity was something conservatives in this country as a whole could take, they would have nominated Senator Sam Brownback on principle and rejected the likes of McCain and Romney out of hand. Instead, they rolled over and took it.

There's a dirty little secret out there that the media refuses to reveal or discuss--at some, but not all of the McCain events, there are empty seats and people are packed in close to the candidate to ensure that all of his campaign event visuals show supporters, not empty seats.

[judge for yourself--is the crowd being prevented from seating themselves in the top 8 or 9 rows of the bleachers? this photo was taken prior to a John McCain event in Kansas City, MO on July 17, 2008 --hat tip to Show Me Progress.]

You can see the effects of being in the "wilderness" now. And that means empty seats and indifference, and that's not necessarily the best place to be in American politics.

--WS

Megan McArdle Tries to Get One Right

Well, at least she's not crazy, right? I know, that's scant praise for The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, but props to her for trying to refute some particularly odiferous bullcrap in italics, below:

Another mistake I think people make when they discuss police brutality, or war crimes, is to attribute them to some characteristic of the population that joins the military or becomes a police officer. One of my commenters says:

I think a lot of folks who join the military (not to mention police officers and prison guards) have authoritarian or sadistic tendencies which in turn increase the probability of war crimes being committed, especially given the stress of being under fire, in a strange land, among hostile locals.
What would you expect from people who sign up for a job where you maim and kill people you don't even know, just because someone else told you to do it?

(sorry if I offend anyone; I know a few of you just signed up for the tuition support or needed the money and got more than you bargained for)

Maybe this is so, but I'm skeptical. I've known a lot of quasi-pacifists with aggressive, domineering personalities and a startling lack of empathy. Give them slightly different political beliefs and an M-16, and I sure wouldn't turn my back on them.

It seems highly probable that there's some selection bias. But a desire to kick some ass is only one reason to become a police officer or a soldier. There's also a desire for justice, an interest in protecting your community, a sense of duty to something larger than yourself, a desire to do something really important with your life, like, say, put it between your beloved home and war's desolation. What do I expect from people like that? Quite a lot, actually.

But as the Milgram experiments show, most people given unlimited power over other human beings tend to abuse that power unless there are adequate institutional safeguards against us. We are natural bullies. And in mobs, we quite often make each other worse. Military culture fights this natural tendency with a pretty rigorous code of conduct--but in the end you've got a bunch of boys out on a corner with big guns. There's only so much that a code of conduct can do.

Those are good points, but they don't go far enough. War crimes don't start at the bottom and work their way up--they start at the top and spread their way down to troops who don't have a clear moral set of standards from which to operate. As in, explaining to the troops that we don't torture, we don't kill civilians, and we won't tolerate anything that violates basic Counterinsurgency Doctrine (COIN) and causes us to lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the people we're trying to help.

So, actually, the reality is this--when the example set by your leaders is to torture people in the name of the United States of America based on some phony-baloney legal justification cooked up by a third-rate team of legal minds, the "war crimes" don't appear as if by magic--they are symptoms of a lack of clear guidance and moral conscience from the people at the top.

We've seen this in the Phillipines at the turn of the century, in Vietnam, and now at Abu Ghraib: when Americans have an ambiguous, morally suspect leadership in a time of war, the men at the bottom of the ladder don't live up to particularly high standards. When they know what their mission really is, they perform exceptionally well and, at least the majority of them, behave admirably.

What's confused here are the trends--no mention is given to the recruiting of felons and no mention is given to the culpability of the civilian leadership to set an example of respecting the rule of law in a time of war. Combining an acceptance of felons in your military with not explaining the basic difference between right and wrong gets you what we have now, which are quite a few instances of "war crimes."

The conclusion though is this--for all of the incidents, we still have a thoroughly professional military where the vast majority of the troops DO NOT engage in war crimes or commit horrible acts of violence against innocent people, and we still have a military that is full of people who would not tolerate that kind of activity. We're slowly losing that, though, and that's what the fight is really about. Saving what's good about our military.

But that was a good try.