THE RECKONING, II
The two remaining threats to the age of contentment are unpopular military action and a revolt, in whatever form, of the underclass.
The independent power of the military in the United States has been sufficiently stressed, as also its alliance with and service to the community of the contented. Military expenditure, as we have seen, rewards a substantial and politically influential sector of that community; those who are put at risk or discomfort by military service come extensively from the economically less favored and some from the underclass. Their service, though described and praised as that of volunteers, is largely, though of course not universally, compelled by the alternative deprivation from which it is an escape.
Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.
But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada and Panama, nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse.
World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls. World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation. However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible. In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment.
The military power in its substantial strength could be a threat to the culture of contentment in the future. The Vietnam war, it cannot be doubted, strongly challenged the contemporary attitudes of the contented and sent hundreds of thousands into the streets in protest. A serious military conflict, certainly one that enforced general participation and brought combat or destruction to the American continent, would have a similar and undoubtedly even stronger effect. This would then extend on to the economic and social context that nurtures and defends contentment and would bring a serious reappraisal and rejection thereof. So, no doubt, would any extended participation in some lesser conflict in the Americas or abroad. It is a possibility on which all who see the United States in the emergent role of world police officer might reflect.
Set against this danger, however, are the considerable forces from within the community and polity of contentment that recognize the risks from major military adventure or are otherwise averse and that thus act as a restraining hand. This salutary sense of caution, it is well known, extends into the military establishment itself. And with the near-elimination of Communism there is also the diminished role of the war-nurturing anti-Communist paranoia among the contented. This, in turn, has lessened the seeming need for military deployment and action against areas of presumed (if improbable) Communist expansion.
On the other hand, the military establishment in the United States, as already seen, operates out of an internal power of its own. This means, with much else, that a plausible enemy is not wholly necessary. As this is written, Communism has collapsed; the Cold War has ended; dramatic further agreements were reached with the former Soviet Union reducing the deployment of nuclear weaponry. The military budget, nonetheless, has remained relatively unaffected. Here, to repeat, is proof of the autonomous power of the military.
It is in the nature of war, as Clausewitz observed, that its only certainty is uncertainty. The future effect of the military power on the polity of contentment cannot be foreseen. The danger can be cited but not assessed. Forecast becomes speculation. If one invokes the broad principle that the future will be much like the past, the military power will continue. So, almost certainly, will minor and seemingly safe wars. (It was Saddam Hussein’s distinctive service to show that the threat of Communism was not the only reason for armed intervention.) Beyond that one cannot go.
A clearer threat to contentment comes from those who are left outside its comfort—from the underclass in the urban slums to which it has been extensively consigned.
The members of the underclass, it has been noticed, do not live in a homogeneous sense of adversity. By all the accepted standards of contentment, life in the inner city is poor, mean and on frequent occasion dangerous. There is escape into drugs, alcohol and violence. But by comparison with life in the communities or countries whence many of their inhabitants have come—from Mexico, Central America and Haiti to the United States, as from Turkey and North Africa to Western Europe—it is an improvement. However little, there is more; for some there is release from more forthright political and economic repression. However insecure the new life and its surroundings, this insecurity is viewed as less than the dangers of war and civil conflict once experienced. Better and safer life in the barrios of Los Angeles than existence in El Salvador or Nicaragua. And, as we have seen, this sense of improvement is not confined to those crossing national boundaries. It was once strongly felt by those in the United States who left the politically and socially dismal existence of the sharecropper South or the Appalachian valleys for the urban slums. Some of the enhanced modern perception of an underclass, as already observed, has resulted from its having become visible in the cities. On the cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta, in the adjacent hills or in the valleys of the Appalachians it was not.
Yet the possibility of an underclass revolt, deeply disturbing to contentment, exists and grows stronger. There have been outbreaks in the past, notably the major inner-city riots in the latter 1960s, and there are several factors that might lead to a repetition.
In particular, it has been made clear, tranquillity has depended on the comparison with previous discomfort. With time, that comparison fades, and also with time the past promise of escape from relative privation—of upward movement—diminishes. This especially could be the consequence of a slowing or shrinking economy and even more of a prolonged recession or depression. The successive waves of workers who served the Detroit auto factories and body shops—the refugees from the adjacent farmlands of Michigan and Ontario and later the poor whites from Appalachia—went up and on. Many of those who came from the South to replace them are now stalled in endemic unemployment. No one should be surprised if this should, someday, breed a violent reaction. It has always been one of the high tenets of comfort that the uncomfortable accept peacefully, even gladly, their fate. Such a belief today may be suddenly and surprisingly disproved.
What is, perhaps, most certain is the reaction of the community of contentment to the miseries and violence of the urban slums and the probable reaction if the violence becomes more extreme. Aiding prediction, as ever, is the fact that the future, in some measure, is already here.
The first development, one we can already see, is resort by the contented in the larger cities to a laager mentality—the hiring of personal, neighborhood or apartment security guards or the escape to presumptively safe suburbs. In Manila in the Philippines affluent urban enclaves—the golden ghettos—are distributed over that poverty-ridden metropolis, each with its own impenetrable fence and stern security force. In less formal fashion, something of the same can now be seen in the modern American city, and this development could be, and one can doubtless say will be, greatly extended. In contrast with steps to tackle and ameliorate the economic and social forces shaping the despair and violence of the slums, such a protective remedy has an appealing element of immediacy and practicality: seemingly far better and surer the effect of outlays for security guards than the more distant hope from some rehabilitative expenditure in the inner city.
The second reaction is the likelihood, indeed near certainty, of what will happen if urban discontent, crime and violence increase: this will be attributed not to the social situation but to the inferior, even criminal, disposition of the people involved. Such is already the case. A major answer to crime, disaffection and disorder in the central cities is now a call for heavier law enforcement, including a more extensive use of the death penalty and more facilities for detention. No other current situation produces such inflammatory rhetoric. This mood, in the event of still worse violence, could, in turn, lead readily to armed repression, first by the local police, then by military force—the National Guard. The obvious fact that people of comfortable circumstance live peacefully together and those afflicted by poverty do not goes largely unnoticed. Or, if noticed, it is not discussed amidst the clamor for a clampdown on what seems an intrinsically ill-behaved and violent citizenry. Were one permitted one confident prediction, it would be of the likelihood of an increasingly oppressive authority in areas of urban desolation.
A final point must be emphasized. Recession and depression made worse by long-run economic desuetude, the danger implicit in an autonomous military power and growing unrest in the urban slums caused by worsening deprivation and hopelessness have been cited as separate prospects. All could, in fact, come together. A deep recession could cause stronger discontent in the areas of urban disaster in the aftermath of some military misadventure in which, in the nature of the modern armed forces, the unfortunate were disproportionately engaged. This could, indeed, be at grave cost to contentment. But, as sufficiently established, it is not in the nature of contentment that such eventualities, however persuasively described, be other than ignored. Contentment sets aside that which, in the longer view, disturbs contentment; it holds firmly to the thought that the long run may never come.