As the post-9/11 wars began, and then heated up, under George W the Democrats found themselves in a pickle. The wars were popular and there was no good politically profitable way to attack them directly. So what they did instead was to try and scare folks by predicting that W was headed for another Vietnam style quagmire. Instead of attacking the wars themselves, they decided to attack a theoretical, and unlikely, bad outcome.
Now, this being a purely theoretical scare tactic, they needed something more visceral to go along with it. So they decided that bringing up the specter of a draft would scare the crap out of the Normies. The argument went like this… if W gets us into another quagmire, we’re going to wind up having to throw hundreds of thousands of young men at the problem. And since we don’t currently have a standing Army large enough to do the job… that means we’ll have to start drafting Harvard and NYU freshman!
The Left figured that if they pushed this line hard enough, even some of those who thought the wars in Iraq and Afghnaistan were worthwhile endeavors might turn against them if they worried it might wind up witht their own ass (or the asses of their children) on the hot seat.
I think the Left underestimated the willingness of most Patriotic Americans to sacrifice for causes in which they believe, but that’s an old story and, perhaps, an argument for a different essay.
But it was an effective tactic in terms of sowing doubt amongst a certain portion of the populace who were already inclined to vote for Democrats, and those useful idiots pushed the meme farther out into the world. Back when I was on Facebook (I’ve since left and deleted my account because Zuckerberg is a Bond Villain who wants to destroy the Country as founded) I watched as a couple of women I went to high school with spent post after post warning about how their teenage sons kept asking them if they were going to be drafted and sent to fight the war in Afghanistan. They could have solved the problem very simply and honestly, by answering that question with “no, of course not”, but there were elections to win and that answer, while it may have eased the minds of their impressionable sons, wouldn’t have done anything to help Democrats win. So sacrifices had to be made.
The Draft Talk took a holiday during the Obama years, as such things always do, because wars started and proescuted by Democrats are always wholly righteaous and worthy of our deep respect and commitment. But the debate returned when Trump appeared and started waving a big stick at some of the constant thorns in our side like North Korea and Iran.
Suddenly talk of the Draft was all the rage again. Donald Trump was going to big dick us into war with Kim Jong Un or the Ayatollah and, once again, all of our precious Ivy league Freshman were going to be harvested and fed into the hungry maw of the war machine.
Well that didn’t happen (shocker!) and Joe Biden took over and so now all talk of warmongering and drafts is off the table until such time as Ron Desantis (no doubt the Left’s next great Hitler) moves to Washington. But I’ve started to wonder if all the Leftwing talk of a Draft hasn’t created a situation where the debate might have become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE is an effective saying that was popularized by Glenn Reynolds the Instapundit. What it means is that when companies “get woke” what they are effectively doing is trying to trade one customer base for another. It’s almost never a recipe for success, but when you’re customer base is majority Conservative (or even moderate) it’s often a recipe for complete and utter failure.
Occassionaly it works, as it did with Late Night TV. By breaking hard Left, Late Night hosts have successfully captured a smaller but more committed younger woke audience even while they’ve lost the wider more centrist, more casual audience who paid their bills for the fifty years before George W Bush began the process of psychologically breaking the Left, a process that was completed by Donald Trump.
But for many other U.S. companies, it’s been a losing strategy because, as it turns out, the Woke aren’t really interested in buying or using theses companies’ products or services in the first place. They just want the companies to kneel to their Woke gods. So these companies (Dick’s, Delta, Coke, Fox News) wind up sacrificing loyal paying customers who are centrist or lean right, in an effort to appeal to an angry fickle customer base that is already disinclined to buy what they sell (someone needs to tell the Murdochs that the World doesn’t need another CNN).
And that’s what seems to be happening with our Military right now. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, the folks who join the Military and fight for their country are overwhelmingly from what our Elites consider “Flyover Country.” They tend to be more Conservative, more religious, their values tend to be Traditionally American and an awful lot of them are White. If the new Woke Military begins to do what Woke organizations always do, which is to attack all of those things as fundamentally evil, then many of those young people who would have been called to serve in the past will take Kurt’s advice and decide to do something else with their lives.
And who will fill the gap? Diversity and Inclusion Majors from Columbia and Penn?
No one wants to find out of we can win a war against China on the backs of the kinds of kids who need trigger warnings and safe spaces. And in any case, in the same way that chasing Liberal viewers is a losing game for Fox News, there’s little chance that the Military will be able to sell themselves effectively to demographics that have grown up thinking that a career in the military is for rubes and suckers with no other options.
And so the Military will shrink, which is what the Left wants anyway. But history only rests, it does not go away. And someday we will have to fight again. And when that happens, who will go? Will we have a standing Army large enough to fight the Chinese?
We may not. And the longer the Chinese wait to push the button, the worse things will get. And the worse things get, the more likely becomes the need for a Draft.