Rhetoric

To expand a bit on Dave’s post, let’s note what’s really important to the wingnutty among us.

In a speech delivered a month after his reelection, Lincoln carefully surveyed the North’s resources and manpower and concluded that the nation’s wealth was “unexhausted and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” Southern soldiers began to desert in droves. Through the long, bloody summer and fall of 1864, the South had hung on only because of the belief that the North might tire of the conflict. But Lincoln did not tire. Instead, he doubled the bet — and won the war.

Pay close attention to the double step. Stuntz refrains from directly asserting that Southern soldiers began to desert in droves because of a passage fifty paragraphs into a report that nobody read, because saying that would make him sound stupid. He’s certainly happy, however, to imply that this is the case, leaving the idiocy to the readership of the Weekly Standard. Here are some other reasons that Confederate soldiers may have been deserting in the winter of 1864-1865:

• June 1864: US Grant begins his ten month siege of Richmond
• September 1864: Sherman captures and burns Atlanta
• October 1864: Sheridan defeats Early in the Shenandoah Valley
• December 1864: George Thomas destroys Confederate Army of Tennessee at Nashville; Sherman plows through Georgia on his way to Savannah

Sherman’s March through the heart of the South, combined with the blockade, had almost completely cut off the northeastern corner of the Confederacy from supply. Starving soldiers tend to desert, especially when their homes are at the mercy of enemy armies wandering through the countryside and when they have no prospect of victory. In short, the South was defeated not by Lincoln’s rhetoric but by the invasion of its territory and the destruction of its armies.

Now, this butchery of history wouldn’t be all that notable if it weren’t part of a much larger tendency to ignore results in favor of rhetoric, what Yglesias calls the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. This is why we get metaphors like “doubling down” and why guys like Hitch and Insty reject the formulation of plans or the analysis of military operations in favor of “Just Win, Baby!”. As the Raiders have discovered, however, in the absence of the material necessary for victory and compelling strategic and operational planning, the will to win leads to disasters profound in scope…