Letters

From the August/September 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

As to whether Brasilia was built without regard for Brazil's present and past: Surely a bureaucratic government's efforts to draw "development" to a part of the country that no one had heretofore felt the need to develop fits the bill. The fact that the government now props up industries in the same region doesn't change that diagnosis one bit.

In Military's Defense

I found several faults or misinterpretations in Glenn Harlan Reynolds' article ("It Takes a Militia," May). Militias in the United States have had, at best, a mixed history. The review glorifies them for being of the people but doesn't touch on their faults. Reynolds claims that militias can be a check on foreign wars. (The Mexican War of 1848 was largely fought with militia units.) However, militias have tended to be inordinately wasteful (chiefly in lives), due to a lack of training and discipline, both tactically and administratively. The Civil War illustrates this clearly. By the middle of the war the volunteer units had become almost carbon copies of the regulars except with slightly looser discipline.

As for the threat of a coup, it's no lie to say that the military community has drawn away from the civilian world to some extent. However, most military personnel still take the oath seriously. There's a big divide between the senior leadership and the rank and file. The average GI still believes in this country; too many have been overseas and seen just how good we still have it. We're far more loyal then most of the civilian leadership. Expensive, yes, but much of that cost comes from Congress and the senior leadership looking for miracle gear.

I'm a regular Army infantry noncommissioned officer with 19 years of service. I agree that those who do not wish to defend their freedom may not be deserving of it, but after 19 years, I still have to believe they are.

Charles A. Temm Jr
Ft. Benning, GA
[e-mail]

Glenn Harlan Reynolds replies: Charles Temm's remarks about the militia echo those from other professional military men. They are not so much wrong as beside the point. Before one assesses how good a military force is, one must consider its mission. During the 18th and 19th centuries, militia forces proved quite effective at their primary purpose: defense of local terrain against invasion and insurrection. (Militia-like forces are still good at this, even against professional soldiers, as the U.S. experience in Lebanon and Somalia illustrates.)

When it comes to projecting power abroad, militias aren't as good. Part-time soldiers are less willing to go on such missions, and, as Temm rightly notes, preparation for such work requires more and different training than does the defense of familiar terrain. To the Framers, who feared not only standing armies but also the imperial ambitions they would bring, this unsuitability for foreign missions was not a flaw but a feature: A militia-based defense strategy was far less likely to produce foreign entanglements and wars. As Gary Hart correctly points out in the book I reviewed, our current situation--with so many foreign troop deployments that even military buffs can't keep track of them all and with wars initiated essentially on presidential whim--would have horrified the Framers. A professional army is better suited to our current situation, but the militia system was meant to keep us out of the situation altogether.

Likewise, I find Temm's profession of military loyalty reassuring. But the Framers, knowing that human institutions are fallible, sought to create a framework in which our liberties were not dependent on the loyalty of a standing army.

Courting Distortion

I found Jonah Goldberg's review of Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty ("Conservatism Without History," May) a stream-of-consciousness ramble of reactions which did not have much relevance to the text ostensibly under consideration. Perhaps he ought to have waited until the audiotape version became available.

First, I cannot share Goldberg's perception that Shalit "ignores the essential insight of modern conservatism" about the need for gradualism in reform. His assertion that she is indifferent to history completely inverts what strikes me as her goal, a recovery of memory. It's not that she believes restoring the use of calling cards would instantly solve the problems of modern courtship; Shalit's service is in reconstituting a vision and ritual of courtship which commonly is distorted or derided today.

Second, Goldberg adduces an "inconsistency" in Shalit extolling paternalism while, at the same time, condemning a House of Lords case acquitting men of rape on "implied consent" grounds. But such a reading confuses Shalit's support for the duties and privileges embedded in familial relationships with her opposition to the modern liberal regime, which has subjected even social relations to contractarian ideology.

Finally, his review completely avoids mentioning Shalit's criticism of those conservatives who have readily acquiesced to the destruction of romance because it releases them from the obligations of chivalry and marriage that once afforded women a measure of protection. Neoliberal economics and sexual libertinism are viable only when human persons first have been reduced to individual economic agents. Although Goldberg remains curiously silent about the subject, here is where he might direct his concerns about ahistoricism and abstract political theorizing.

Morgan N. Knull
Baton Rouge, LA
[e-mail]