First weeks of junior-year first period, 7:10 a.m. Me, with Brewster High School’s soggy version of a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich sitting on the corner of my desk. An orange juice carton in hand.
“Who here would support Prohibition?” asked Mr. Gallagher, our AP History teacher.
Unthinking, I shot up my hand, and was soon joined by three others out of twelve in our class. Juice dripped down my sleeve.
“This is surprising,” said Mr. Gallagher. The eight potential gin-runners looked at us in disbelief. After all, history had rendered judgment. Prohibition didn’t work, therefore the issue was closed.
“They’re just being weird,” one said.
I sipped my state-subsidized juice manfully. Something in me had changed. My impression from history as it had been taught to me was that one couldn’t be a prohibitionist. Just as you couldn’t believe in having a king of France after the bloody revolution, and you couldn’t be laissez-faire after 1929.
Like many young people, I intuited that history had a direction. From the hut to the skyscraper, from superstition to reason. Friday, obviously better than Monday. My dim view was that politics, if they were meaningful, meant racing up the next plateau of human freedom and claiming moral victory over everyone else. Most important, don’t be weird.
Awaking from such a view of history isn’t all that unusual. Nor is it exclusive to conservatives. Most people can manage some sympathy for history’s losers. Usually it’s expressed as a bipartisanship of the past. “Ah, the anti-federalists were basically wrong, but they helped us get the Bill of Rights,” or some such.
I never took Prohibition seriously. But my faked sympathy for one lost cause grew into actual enthusiasm for others. I looked through my grandfather’s history books for the cranks that had made American politics churn. The Shaysites, Free Soilers, and Mugwumps. I learned that defeated ideas aren’t dead, just down. Occasionally it falls to us to pick up their moldering banners, patch the chords, and carry forward.
In that time, between 1998 and 1999, there were two voices that mattered to me politically. On cable television, there was Madeleine Albright hissing at General Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” And (in one of my grandfather’s history books) there was E. L. Godkin, founder of The Nation magazine, who wrote prophetically in 1896: “When we get our navy and send it round the world in search of imputations on our honor, we shall have launched the United States on that old sea of sin and sorrow and ruffianism on which mankind has tossed since the dawn of history.”
Albright made it sound like American armed forces constituted some kind of tricked-out lawn mower, and she was anxious to ride it across Serbia. Faraway nationalist movements were a stinkweed in the global garden that Washington tended. Most Americans had never heard of Serbia or the Islamist-tinted Kosovo Liberation Army who were now our allies.
Months earlier, Albright’s State Department had dropped the KLA from a list of terrorist groups and was pressuring France to do the same. This to save us the shame of where our zeal for human rights was leading us. If this was statesmanship, I was against it. I was embarrassed by it. In short, I was a budding isolationist.
This seemingly discredited impulse was the beginning and source of my conservatism, even as it alienates me from most conservatives today. The I-word is normally a pejorative, but I happily embrace it. The policy of isolation is simply this: America should avoid the quarrels of foreign nations. America’s independence is worth guarding. It is not pacifism, though, of course, it recognizes that peace is a rare good and war a dangerous, unmasterable evil.
I wasn’t alone among conservatives at that time. Even some of the most popular and conventional pundits echoed my own thoughts. Consider Sean Hannity, who asked in March of 1999, “Why should one U.S. airman give up his life when our national security is not in imminent danger?” On The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity went on to acknowledge:
“Slobodan Miloševi? is a bad guy. He’s an evil man. Horrible things are happening. I agree with that. Is Bill O’Reilly then saying we go to Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan? Where does this stop? … What this man is doing with ethnic cleansing is abhorrent, but sheer numbers—two thousand killed in the last year versus hundreds of thousands, millions in some cases, in other parts of the world. Are you saying the United States should go to all those places?”
My heart replied, “Hell no!”
Though the jingoes think it some kind of a slur against America’s exceptional munitions, isolationism is the policy that takes seriously the great gifts of America: our geographic remoteness from the conflicts of Europe (and the Middle East), our friendly relations with our neighbors, and our great natural resources. Above all, it knows the limits of our power. It acknowledges, along with the moralizing neoconservatives, that there is evil in the world, but finds it wiser not to enmesh ourselves in trying to stamp it out. You have one “splendid little war” in the Caribbean and soon you’re in an agonizing and dishonorable one in Asia.
Because isolationism grows out of America’s natural advantages, it has found champions in every age. Habitually, conservative peace-mongers cite Washington’s Farewell Address with its warnings about “inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others.” These arguments came at a time when the American continent was still a playground for great European powers. Americans then routinely condemned the intrigues and permanent interests of Continental politicking; they were “blame foreigners first” isolationists.
The same leave-well-enough-alone impulse animated the Anti-Imperialist Leaguers who opposed President McKinley’s ambitions in the Philippines. McKinley wanted to “uplift and Christianize” the natives, oblivious to the fact that the Jesuits had beat him by a few centuries. Rather than allow the Filipinos to choose their own leaders, McKinley pressed on. According to historian Paul Kramer, “U.S. officials predicted easy victories, underestimated guerrilla forces and, arrogantly assuming their objectives were universally shared, were shocked when U.S. troops were not greeted as ‘liberators.’” Has a familiar ring. Five thousand American boys died in the muck. Over two hundred thousand Filipinos did the same.
Throughout our history, when the world-beaters say “Pack your little kit, show your grit, do your bit,” and “we won’t be back till it’s over over there,” the noninterventionists of the Left and Right have reminded us that some won’t be back at all. So count the cost. Going over there changes the way we do things here.
The partisans of Little America aren’t just hayseeds and hippies. America’s belletrists from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain to James Russell Lowell and William Vaughn Moody thought militarism a danger to the republic. Even the America Firsters of the 1930s, maligned as parochial Midwesterners or closeted anti-Semites, counted Kurt Vonnegut, Edmund Wilson, e. e. cummings, and Sinclair Lewis as members or symps. And not just liberals. Felix Morley, Henry Regnery, and John Flynn, conservatives before the movement, saw that war centralized government and uprooted its people.
I continued with my books and orange juice, while NATO’s war against Serbian nationalists wound up speedily. The result was an Islamist-friendly Kosovo, and a Hague that bumbled through its humanitarian show trial of Slobodan Miloševi? for almost a decade.
Maybe I believed the so-called “peace dividend” was coming. Maybe I believed that the military would give me self-discipline and structure (even conservatives treat the military like a social experiment). I suppose even isolationists contain multitudes. So I conditionally enlisted in the Marines the following year, surprising my JROTC instructors. But my misadventure wasn’t to last.
My recruiter, West Virginia-bred and whiter than a hospital sheet, was seriously jazzed about my ASVAB scores. “You could be in intelligence,” he told me. But he kept hinting that I shouldn’t let Uncle Sam’s doctors see my sneaks when I took my physical in Albany.
“My feet stink?”
“Not exactly.”
A week later, I went up to Albany to be examined. When I got to the last step of my physical, I bent over with my just-issued Gideon New Testament in my left hand, my scrotum in my right, a cough in my throat.
“Goddamit!” the doctor shouted. “You wear orthotics!”
He had discovered the little secret I had with my recruiter. My feet require little inserts in my shoes.
I sighed. My ass could be shot off with Washington’s A-OK. But replacement orthotics couldn’t be ordered to whatever base or battlefield I might occupy. I was out.
I came home, got accepted to Bard College, and packed my bags. I was a Marine-rejected peacenik going to one of the most progressive schools in the country during the Bush years and somehow I came out a conservative.
I didn’t have some great reactionary revelation moment at Bard. Of course, I saw embarrassing sexual and political excesses. We had an “Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies.” And my first day featured an orientation course that introduced me to the free dental dams that we could use to perform “safe analingus.” Typically crosswise. We were supposed to be subversively erotic but with a special fetish for emotional sensitivity and near-ritualized consent. To attribute all this to political liberalism is an injustice to unsupervised and well-fed youth.
But it was the contrast of my college life with the blue-collar work I did during the run-up to the Iraq War that sealed me as an isolationist and conservative.
I worked at a chemical factory in Danbury, Connecticut, with my girlfriend’s father (now my father-in-law). Family-owned for generations, racially diverse in a way that Bard hoped to be, the company had roots. My fellow students pretended to believe in a dictatorship of the proletariat. My coworkers feared a dictatorship of liberal arts students, and gave me some good-natured grief about it.
They didn’t want to command the means of production; they wanted a decent wage. I tried to imagine a dictatorship congenial to my floor-mate Robert, whom we called “Two Dogs.” (So nicknamed because he was as ugly as two dogs making it.) He had a wild gray ponytail that swung as he barked at the ceiling. His disposition made him suitable for dirty jobs, nothing that required precision. A polity based upon his will would mandate beer-drinking during lunch breaks, and a Camaro in every garage.
I processed ammonium formate from 2002 until 2003. I still don’t know what the stuff does. It came out of the mixers steaming hot and smelling like super-concentrated cat urine. By morning it was a frozen rock. After I sledgehammered the drums, stabbed it with a five-foot metal pick, and ran it through an industrial centrifuge, it came out the consistency of a snow cone. As I began to shovel it into its shipping package, I feared that in the heat-induced mania I would accidentally eat it and die.
My coworkers, goaded by the “Axis of Weasels” sensationalism of the New York Post, talked about turning Iraq into “a sheet of glass,” and dropping a few on Chirac. Almost as if by osmosis they bought into the thinking that the war “would be a cakewalk.” In every run-up our hearts authorize the perfect war. We throw a cloak of nobility over the very few casualties we expect and jump ahead to the ticker-tape in Times Square.
General Powell was making impressive presentations on WMD in Iraq. Bush was premising the inevitable invasion on UN resolutions. The pundits promised that liberal democracy would flower in the Middle East. Neoliberals castigated foot-draggers on the Left as un-serious and insufficiently Trumanesque. Neoconservatives promoted Churchill.
Worse than their preening was that of the opposition. The most organized were Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), composed of World Workers Party members. For those of you who need a refresher on sectarian communists, the WWP distinguished itself in 1956 by supporting the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Armed democratists on one side of me, apologists for the Communist imperium on the other. Everyone had some hoary theory to export.
At night, after washing out the smell of snow-coned cat piddle, I turned to the stoic California poet, Robinson Jeffers (recommended to me by Justin Raimondo, the libertarian agitator at Antiwar.com). It was truly subversive stuff. When Jeffers’s collection The Double Axe came out in 1948, one critic wrote, “In this truculent book, Robinson Jeffers … makes it clear that he feels the human race should be abolished.” Another said that Jeffers offered “a violent, hateful book … a gospel of isolationism carried beyond geography, faith or hope.”
Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind
Unhappy country, what wings you have! Even here,
Nothing important to protect, and ocean-far from the nearest enemy, what a cloud
Of bombers amazes the coast mountain, what a hornet-swarm of fighters,
And day and night the guns practicing.
Unhappy, eagle wings and beak, chicken brain.
Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible magnificence of the means,
The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and shabby
Pathos of the result.
As our troops rolled through to Baghdad, I hoped that I was wrong to be so pessimistic. I rejoiced watching happy Iraqis tearing down Saddam’s statue and shaking their sandals at it. But those last three lines of Jeffers read like some forgotten prophecy. What had become of our great perorations about smart bombs and clean warfare, our fears about mass destruction, our propaganda about human shredders, and our hope for a democratic domino effect? The shabby pathos: thousands of dead Americans, a casus belied, and His Excellency Jalal Talbani shaking hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Of course, the realities of war do much worse than disintegrate our wish for democracy on every atoll and sand dune. “We will come out of this war without a Constitution,” bellowed John Randolph. If not the War of 1812 that he abhorred, certainly a future one. America’s fever for Iraq’s liberation produced predictable results: domestic spying, the Patriot Act, and authorized torture. You know, the eternal verities conservatives cherish. In heat for war, the right began defining treason down.
To break up my solitary readings of the isolationist Jeffers, my friends passed me an editorial in the New York Sun saying that war protesters were traitors, according to Article III of the Constitution. “There is no reason to doubt that the ‘anti-war’ protesters—we prefer to call them protesters against freeing Iraq—are giving, at the very least, comfort to Saddam Hussein,” it read, before expressing hope that the NYPD would send two witnesses for each protester, “with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution.”
It could have been worse. During World War I, President Wilson called for “stern repression” of dissent. His vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, suggested that those “not in support of the Government” be stripped of their citizenship. Wilson dispatched volunteers, the “Four-minute Men” from the Committee on Public Information, to whip up hatred of Germany. The Espionage and Sedition Acts passed easily. It took a conservative Republican Warren G. Harding to finally free the Socialist war-dissenter Eugene Debs from political imprisonment.
Conservatives should be natural enemies of war. After all, war grows everything conservatives hate: the IRS, public debt, and, more generally, the scope and reach of government itself. That creepy stalker of the American dream, de Tocqueville, wrote: “All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.” Conservatives are supposed to love the “near rather than the distant.” War leads us to worry more about the textbooks in schools outside Qarbala than the ones our children carry. We empower Washington to rewrite history for Japanese schoolchildren. How can we expect it to leave Kansans or San Franciscans educating their own without supervision?
Bill Kauffman, a chronicler of the old and wild American Republic, points out that militarism also wrecks families. Divorce rates spike among uniformed personnel during wartime. “The images of families cleaved by the Iraq War and occupation should outrage family-values conservatives,” he wrote in Ain’t My America. I saw marriages bend and break under extended deployments in Iraq. And I’ve witnessed ill-advised marriages launched because of the promise of more generous benefits. Even children aren’t spared the collateral damage.
When I was the child of a single working mother, conservatives gave the fictional character Murphy Brown grief for being a single working mother, a journalist. If only she wore combat boots. In November 2009, an Army cook named Alexis Hutchinson refused to report for duty in Afghanistan; she didn’t want to leave her ten-month-old son. The twenty-one-year old single mother was arrested and nearly court-martialed; her son was placed in foster care temporarily. Eventually Hutchinson was demoted to private and discharged. Today, nearly 200,000 kids cycle through military-run day care called the “Total Army Family.” Hillary Clinton was pilloried for saying “It takes a village to raise a child.” Now it takes the Department of Defense.
I eventually migrated to the outskirts of the professional Right, as a staff writer for the American Conservative, a magazine that made room for isolationists, realists, and other castaways from the movement. It took a century to push what was the broad tradition of American foreign policy from the center to the edges. We elbowed our way to the margin of the great debates. But even now our small space seems cramped and perilous.
The fever for war will come again. Perhaps, one of our statesmen, not in mind to waste a crisis, will shout, “We’re all Georgians now.” This portends some shock advance not on Savannah but on South Ossetia. Or maybe we’ll go sailing off to war for Taiwan, or South Korea. Every Pentagon promise is a tripwire.
The dissenters will be chased, first by the polemicists, maybe later by the police. We’ll be dismissed “from the community of polite discourse” and accused by those mapping the bombing routes of wishing the annihilation of the human race. The spirit is as old and mad as Napoleon: Join or Die.
And there is only one answer: to hell with you! Who needs your subsidized salons? Leave me to the rusty chains and boiling cat piss; it’s less rancid than your machine-gun idealism. You can have Madeleine Albright, Dick Cheney, and democratic peace theory. I’ll take George Washington and the Jeffersonian radicals, the Mugwumps and Midwestern Main Streeters, the cranky poets and America First. Between these two great oceans, America can hold us all, from storefront Pentecostals to the Catholic bingo halls, from the skate parks of unsupervised youth to the literateers of Brooklyn. Let our glory dreams sparkle under Friday-night lights or in open-mic cafes. It’s these that are worth defending. America is not some experiment, or a “progressive force” guiding the planet. It’s not the judge of the principalities and powers. It’s my home.