Home / Robert Farley / A Marine Corps of One?

A Marine Corps of One?

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What Yglesias said:

It’s interesting to me how heavily ideology shapes people’s narratives about their own lives rather than the reverse. After all, can one really credibly say that the Marine Corps is a field in which one’s success and failure is going to be determined by one’s individual effort rather than collective efficacy? I don’t want to be in the position of telling a veteran that I know his business better than he does, but that would be a mighty strange kind of military in which solidarity, teamwork, and the effective operation of a large public bureaucracy play no role. But joining the Marines is something a lot of conservative-identified people do, and talking about reductive individualism is also something a lot of conservative-identified people do, so why not just throw it all in one big post?

Military organizations, of course, work exceedingly hard at creating a community identity, mostly because “individuals” won’t do the things that Marines are expected to do unless they consider themselves part of a tight community, with strong obligations not only to the idea of the United States, but also to their fellow Marines. Membership in the United States Marine Corps is voluntary in a broad sense, but many of the tasks associated with being a Marine are- to engage in a remarkable degree of understatement- in tension with an ethic of individual independence, autonomy, and freedom.

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