Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 19:08:40 EDT
From: freemanaz@aol.com
Subject: [azpeace] War is the Health of the State
To: azpeace@yahoogroups.com
Reply-To: azpeace@yahoogroups.com


This article originally appeared in the March, 2002 edition of Freedom
Daily.

War Is the Health of the State
by Sheldon Richman

Some conservatives are surprised to find people on the left supporting the
war in Afghanistan. It's not surprising at all.

War collectivizes society (the euphemism is "unites") and increases the
government's domestic power. There is no mystery here. In war there seems to
be one overriding goal for the entire society: defeat the enemy. Everything
else is subordinate. The aspirations of individuals must take a back seat to
the war effort. Any resources the government decides it needs, it will get.
But government produces no resources. So it must take them from those who do
produce them.

The term "resources" may be defined rather broadly by the state. Hence,
conscription. If a state declines to conscript during a given war, it is not
likely to be out of any scruple concerning the principle of individual
self-ownership. More likely, the state fears a backlash from the citizenry
or, in our time, the high-tech nature of warfare makes masses of manpower
unnecessary.

The key collectivizing effect of war is not material but psychological.
People are encouraged to think of themselves not as individuals but as foot
soldiers in the great national crusade. That in itself makes war attractive
to some people. The libertarian essayist Albert Jay Nock counseled his
anti-war colleagues that it is a mistake to preach that war is bad because
it eradicates individuality and assigns a role to each citizen. Most people
want their roles assigned by a higher authority, he said. So how can that be
an argument against war? Nock thought this applied as much in the land of
the free as anywhere else.

The American intellectual class from the mid 19th century onward has
disliked liberalism (which originally referred to individualism, private
property, and limits on power) precisely because the liberal society has no
overarching goal. This, as F.A. Hayek long pointed out, is the defining
character of a liberal order. Individuals are free to use their freedom and
property to pursue ends of their own choosing, which usually center on
family, work, friends, and community. Nationalists and other collectivists
disdain these concerns as "trivial pursuits," as one editorial writer put it
recently.

Champions of the national unity imposed by war grow nostalgic when they look
back on past conflicts. Even a television commercial for recordings of World
War II-era music urged viewers to remember when "we all pulled together."
That war was monstrous in terms of the number of people killed and the
massive destruction, but what is recalled fondly is the submergence of
individualism.

Some intellectuals have been more sensitive to the high price war exacts for
that unity. So they have longed for what philosopher Williams James called
th "moral equivalent of war," that is, collectivism without the bloodshed.
Proposals built on this principle usually include conscription -- for
national service rather than military service, of course. In past decades
we've suffered through wars on energy dependence, poverty, and drugs. The
government didn't accomplish its stated aims, but it did grow. And liberty
shrank.


Left-wing support of the war

Despite the search for the moral equivalent of war, nothing seems to work
like the real thing. Now we have the real thing, and more than a few
left-wing intellectuals are in the ranks of the war boosters. Why not?
Several writers at The Nation, the quintessential leftist magazine, have
found this war worthy of support for reasons that go beyond a wish for
retaliation for the 9/11 attacks or defense against future assaults. Its
editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, writing in the Los Angeles Times, November
25, with Prof. Joel Rogers, proclaims, apparently without irony, that the
war "presents the opportunity of a lifetime." Among other things,

"War's mobilization of the populace against a shared threat also heightens
social solidarity, while underscoring the need for government and other
social institutions that transcend or replace the market...."

All this shifts the playing field of political debate away from those who
counsel, "Let's leave it to the market or the military!" as the answer to
all human concerns. Far from seeming hard-nosed and realistic, they suddenly
appear beside the point, if not immoral. Those who believe in social justice
and shared democratic effort in problem solving, by contrast, seem on to
something important and even admirable.

In brief, the 9/11 attacks have made the idea of a public sector, and the
society that it is supposed to serve, attractive again.

It would be tragic, they say, if the advocates of comprehensive government
were to blow this chance to realize their dreams:

The real question today is whether progressives have the wit and collective
will to accept that invitation. Doing o will require us to affirm our
values in ways understood and respected by ordinary Americans, to present a
concise and clear agenda for advancing those values and to enter and compete
for support in electoral arenas.


Conservatives, war, and big government

Vanden Heuvel and Rogers are closer to the truth than the war boosters who
claim to value limited government. It is hard for the government to
prosecute a war and not expand. See Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathan.
Unlike the market, the "public sector" is coercive. War intensifies
government power, regardless of anyone's wishes; the beast has a logic of
its own. Observe the concentration of power in the executive branch since
September 11. Observe the public's unquestioning support for that
concentration.

Conservatives may think they can support war and oppose the expansion of the
state, but that is like trying to square the circle. What makes them think
they can contain the expansion? Have they noticed that the gun controllers
have been emboldened since September 11 after suffering serious setbacks?
The collectivists definitely have the better internal logic.

In 1917, as Woodrow Wilson prepared to take the United States into the
European war, the leading collectivist intellectuals of the day, John Dewey
and Herbert Croly of The New Republic, beat the drums for American
participation. Sounding much like vanden Heuvel, Dewey wrote that the
progressive opponents of war were blind to the "immense impetus to
reorganization afforded by this war." He hoped they would work "to form 
the conditions and objects of our entrance." In other words, they should
exploit the opportunities war bestowed for collectivizing America. Croly was
pithier: "The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."

The progressive warriors failed to heed their erstwhile and prophetic
colleague, Randolph Bourne, who wrote on the eve of U.S. entry that war is
intrinsically illiberal. It is, he said, "the health of the state."

In a penetrating essay published in June 1917 "The War and the
Intellectuals," Bourne wrote,

"The results of war on the intellectual class are already apparent. Their
thought becomes little more than a description and justification of what is
going on. They turn upon any rash one who continues idly to speculate. Once
the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless,
that the only way one can count is as a cog in the great wheel. There is no
good holding back. We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears
and plunge into the great work."

Bourne heard the pro-war intellectuals say that they were the realists and
the opponents were impractical. He'd have none of that. Opponents of war
were indeed chastised for not facing facts, he wrote,

"But is the realist, who refuses to challenge or criticize facts, entitled
to
any more credit than that which comes from following the line of least
resistance? The realist thinks he at least can control events by linking
himself to the forces that are moving. Perhaps he can. But if it is a
question of controlling war, it is difficult to see how the child on the
back of a mad elephant is to be any more effective in stopping the beast
than is the child who tries to stop him from the ground. The American
intellectuals, in their preoccupation with reality, seem to have forgotten
that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany."

World War I indeed set many precedents for government planning,
regimentation, and suppression of dissent. In the end the progressives
became disillusioned, as idealism gave way to realpolitik, the consequences
of which plague us even in the current conflict.

The upshot is that even those who feel this war is a just response to the
murder of American civilians should temper their enthusiasm with the
realization that it will change America for the worse not the better.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation and
editor of Ideas on Liberty.

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