Citizenship, Responsibility and the Peace Corps

This post comes from a few different places. First is my long held belief that the right to vote and run for office shouldn't be a matter of birth or even passing some citizenship test (which, apparently, a lot of birth citizens can't pass anyway), but actually require some meaningful display of civic awareness. This variation of representative democracy was portrayed, perhaps most famously, by Robert A. Heinlein in the novel Starship Troopers. First one to mention Paul Verehooven's godawful film adaptation with anything other than scorn gets blocked both from this blog and my FB feed. That movie is an abomination and that bastard will never get another dime of my money.

Another military science fiction author, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Tom Kratman, has recently taken the service-for-citizenship idea and expanded greatly upon it. While Heinlein did a good job laying out the skeleton of the idea and explaining the philosophical justifications for it in Starship Troopers, Kratman has, in his “Carrera” novels, fleshed it out and looked at a lot of the finer points. Some of which I'll get into later.

The third place is a recent conversation I had with some friends at church who have worked in Africa doing humanitarian missions with the Peace Corps. For not the first time it occurred to me, where the hell was the Peace Corps when were rebuilding Iraq? I'm not criticizing the people IN the peace corps, I'm wondering why the hell the federal government didn't deploy an obvious asset to an environment that seemed to exactly fit their mission profile? I have no idea what the PC's numbers or assets actually are, but I do know they exist to help less fortunate countries rebuild infrastructure, agriculture, medical and educational facilities, etc, etc etc,

So why the hell was I, Lieutenant Watson, United States Army, assessing sewage systems and elementary schools instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents when we have an entire federal organization that is supposed to do all that “soft power” stuff?

I'll come back to that question in a moment.

Going back to the idea of service for suffrage; I've received some outrage (oddly, never from those who have served) at the idea. The most common (and valid) argument is that all the governed should have a say in what their government is doing on their behalf. At face value, that is a most reasonable stance. I mean, you are going to suffer the consequences of your elected officials' decisions, why should you submit to their rule when you didn't vote them into office? Universal suffrage is the only just system.

Well, there's just one problem- it doesn't seem to be working so well anymore.

Our system has proven itself vulnerable to “bread and circuses” mob psychology at its worst on one hand and manipulation by crony capitalists on the other hand. Voting is free, given to you just for being born here and thus many people treat it as being worth what they paid for it. Which is to say- nothing. Few are informed on the issues, and those who are face choosing between two professional politicians running along dogmatic lines rather than trying to do what's legitimately best for the country. Run for office ourselves, you say? Perhaps, but in order to avoid becoming part of the orthodoxy you're going to have to crap a fortune to compete with the existing political machines, and even then the Ross Perots of the world have met with little success, whether that's a good or a bad thing is debatable.

I posit, from the state of our economy and the tone of politics, that giving people the vote for free has failed. The result has been the creation of a class of political and corporate oligarchs, not Jefferson's merit-based “natural aristocracy,” but a society run by manipulators of currency and opinion, rather than by statesmen.

Furthermore, while it's true that all are affected by the decisions of the nation's leaders, not all are affected equally. By casting your votes you, the Great American Public, will decide who has the authority to order me to war, and, just as importantly, which legislators will decide my budget and resources to train and equip in between wars. And yet you will certainly not bear the blood price if you choose wrongly. Think on this, for the last twenty years, no Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces has had legit military service. In this election, neither presidential candidate had served. That means that Somalia, the operations in the Balkans, Second Iraq and Afghanistan were all ordered and administrated by men who were unwilling to risk their own lives when they were my age. But they were sure as hell willing to expend me and my comrades like pieces of ordinance. I learned at my daddy's knee that a leader's moral authority springs from never telling a subordinate to do something you'd be unwilling to do yourself. So... where's the moral authority?

Before one of my friends from my side of the aisle points out Bush Jr.'s service in the Air National Guard, just don't. Okay. Don't. He served from 1968 to 1974 and magically never went to 'Nam? Yeah, I'm sure that was a coincidence.

So what to do? Universal compulsory service? Require everyone to serve and thus earn their full citizenship whether they like it or not?

Two problems. One- you can't force civic virtue. You just can't. I can't make you love this country as much as I do, no matter how hard I try. I never believed in that False Motivation crap for small things, much less something as esoteric as Patriotism. Two- we don't need everybody in uniform, and what do we do with those who either by lack of will or natural aptitude would be disasters in uniform? We don't have enough clerical and admin tasks to take them all.

Germany and other European states do require universal compulsory service, but you have to read the fine print- if a young man or woman is a conscientious objector, or just doesn't care enough about their country to put up with the hardships of the service, he or she can spend their term changing bed pans in a nursing home, or something equally innocuous. How does this make one value their vote more and thus exercise it more carefully?

Which brings me back to the Heinlein model. No compulsion to serve, and no penalties for refusing to serve, save that you don't get to vote in federal elections or run for federal office. Voting is exercising rulership of your country- those who would rule must serve. Authority must equal responsibility, else we are doomed.

There still remain a few problems. Kratman addresses one, both in his novels and in conversations I've had with him. Some of us join and stay in the Army not necessarily out of patriotism, but because we like it. Oh, patriotism generally runs high in servicemen and women, but it not necessary to be a patriot to be a good soldier. Additionally, I fully acknowledge that people like me often have a very specialized field of knowledge. Oh, I'm pretty well educated, but I'd be a disaster as a President because my knowledge of economics and some other key subjects is strictly beer-and-peanuts level.

So I don't get to vote, and I definitely don't get to hold office, while I'm serving actively. Think about it, if we're going to admit that we need a system where citizens are self-selected rather than just given the franchise willy nilly, it's not the Justin Watsons of the world that need to make up the bulk of the body politic. I'm a lifer. I freaking love the Army and I'm obsessed with warfare. I'd be launching cruise missiles at every country whose ambassador looked at me funny! Not to mention what I'd be doing to insurgents and terrorists. I wrote a law of war essay on that very topic which got me 20 hours on the area (West Point punishment, if not familiar and curious ask me in the comments).

No, the body politic shouldn't be comprised primarily of Spartans, but of men and women who did a term or two, not primarily because the work appeals to them, but because it's the right thing to do. And who, hopefully, learned to place the goals of a group ahead of their own, learned to care more about their comrades' well being and their mission more than their own comfort and safety. We cannot ensure this for every veteran, but future citizens are more likely to learn it in the Army than working at Mickey D's.

So what about once we've taken every potential citizen volunteer with the aptitude and will to fight? Just because you're not a warrior doesn't mean you should be cut out of the political process. Even I know that.

Now we come back to the Peace Corps.

I asserted earlier that simple forced drudgery by itself is not enough to inspire good citizenship out of folks. To value something, they must feel that they've earned it and I don't believe playing post office does that. Hardship, danger, hopefully at least a touch of adventure- these are the things which make experiences all the more valuable to a young person. To those who cannot or will not fight in the defense of the republic to earn their citizenship, the peace corps, beefed up and refocused on US foreign policy priorities, provides a way to serve and to experience the big three I mentioned above without pulling a trigger. By doing the work that the Army has been forced to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, they not only free up our combat forces for their main purpose, they will be ginning a generation of young men and women who have seen the rest of the world and thus appreciate what we have here, who have experienced other cultures and thus may be able to relate better to those who come from different back grounds, and, most importantly, have subsumed their own desire for comfort and safety to go out into the world in service to their nation and, yes, to humanity.

I'm well aware that getting such a system enacted would take a miracle. The proles want their entitlements, the CEOs want to be able to continue buying legislators wholesale, so even if I could get some popular support for this notion, both sides of the main stream media would destroy it before you could say boo. But we better think of something, because we've got more than just a fiscal cliff to worry about. We have millions of Americans in love with rights and derisive of responsibilities- this is not good.