Gun ownership, martial culture and interventionist foreign policy

My first thought on reading this is that it’s somewhat surprising to see Tyler Cowen make more or less the same argument Michael Moore gestures at in Bowling for Columbine. I saw Bowling for Columbine when it came out, and found its implicit argument rhetorically and emotionally compelling, but somewhat lacking analytically. Cowen tries to turn that around, suggesting that both mainstream liberals (pro-gun control, more or less OK with the general contours of American foreign policy) and his libertarian comrades (vigorously martial/pro-gun in their private lives, pacifist and anti-interventionist in policy) as the fuzzy, emotional thinkers who can’t account for what (to him) is a clear connection between the two faces of a martial culture:

More importantly, if America is going to be the world’s policeman, on some scale or another, that has to be backed by a supportive culture among the citizenry. And that culture is not going to be “Hans Morgenthau’s foreign policy realism,” or “George Kennan’s Letter X,” or even Clausewitz’s treatise On War. Believe it or not, those are too intellectual for the American public. And so it must be backed by…a fairly martial culture amongst the American citizenry. And that probably will mean a fairly high level of gun ownership and a fairly high degree of skepticism about gun control.

If you think America can sustain its foreign policy interventionism, or threat of such, without a fairly martial culture at home, by all means make your case. But I am skeptical. I think it is far more likely that if you brought about gun control, and the cultural preconditions for successful gun control, America’s world role would fundamentally change and America’s would no longer play a global policeman role, for better or worse.

I must say my initial reaction is pretty skeptical. Cowen doesn’t do much work here to establish a causal connection, beyond noting some vague similarities. One immediately wonders how his theory would account for France, which as from what I understand lacks our martial/gun culture at home, and has long had a government prone to military adventurism and a public that appears to be largely supportive of such (or, at least, supportive enough.

Which brings me to my main question–What do our political elites elites need from us, the public, to sustain an interventionist foreign policy at roughly the level we find it at? Given the fair amoung of elite consensus here, they’re pretty insulated from public opinion, it seems to me (unless they launch a full-blown war for profoundly and obviously stupid/false reasons, and it turns out disastrously, as in Bush and Iraq, but when that happens even a supportive-in-theory public won’t save you). What else does such a foreign policy need from us? Sufficient volunteers for a military service roughly the size of the one we’ve got now is one thing, and a martial culture surely helps out with that. But with the decreasing economic opportunities and rising costs of college I expect they’ll be able to get the 1-2% of the population they seem to need without too much trouble, and can bring up the enlistment rate through a modest tweak in the incentive structure. It’s not clear to me what else political elites need from the public that a martial, gun-enthusiast culture motivates us to give them.

….as numerous commenters have noted, the conflation of American style “gun culture” (or even just widespread private deadly-weapon-of-the-day ownership) with “martial culture” is sloppy and ahistorical as well; this is perhaps an even more fundamental problem with Cowen’s argument than the one identified in the post.