Don’t Pick the Draft

Atrios is correct about the unpersuasiveness of the Carter/Glastris “national service” article, and also makes a very important point about using 4-year colleges as a technique to avoid the elitism of the draft. When you teach at city college, this is a mistake you won’t make; a draft would drive many working-class people out of school.

But as Katha Pollit pointed out in a column I discussed in one of my first posts here, the problems run even deeper than that. It may be possible for a better article to design a system on paper that would prohibit economic elites from evading the draft in a more effective way. The bigger problem is that discussing such a system (in the context of the United States) is a waste of everyone’s time, for the obvious reason that it would have no chance whatsoever of being implemented. I see no reason to discuss such plans for the same reason that I don’t spend much time debating whether equitably enforced abortion laws would be desirable. It’s beside the point. Military service in this country, regrettably, will persistently have a severe class imbalance. The primary effect of the draft will be that the predominately lower-class people who serve will be compensated less.

I should perhaps flesh out my other normative argument. I’m not necessarily against a draft in all cases, but I certainly do believe that the burden of proof on the state should be extremely high. In Israel, a draft is easily defensible. For emergency recruitment in a just war, OK. To create a permanent large potential standing army for the United States, no. (And, like Atrios, I certainly reject statecraft-as-soulcraft arguments. Instilling self-sacrifice and national pride may be a good thing, but it doesn’t justify that level of coercion.)

A final point is that such arguments tend to assume that maximizing the power of the U.S. is in the best interests of its citizens; I think that’s highly questionable. But even if it’s true, I don’t think it justifies a permanent draft.