Alex Explains the News: Getting Defensive
Alex Howe opines on headlines.
As I tried to remember where I’d seen the above headline about America’s defense budget, I discovered—upon Googling—that there were more candidates than I realized. What can I say, writers love wordplay… even Serious Foreign Policy Writers. Most notable of all: The pieces that Google presented not only range widely over the last two decades, but cover the entire mainstream political spectrum.
This recent NY Review of Books essay convincingly explains how military spending—a huge political priority without fail for many decades—has recently undergone a consequential evolution… largely unnoticed.
Since World War II, spending the lion’s share of our federal treasure on guns and soldiers has represented an unshakeable bipartisan consensus. What’s new? We used to have serious debates about—forgive me—just how hungry that “lion” ought out to be.
No one in Congress is a pacifist. But we’ve reached a point where the idea of spending less on the military is all but verboten; it would be radioactively unorthodox for any Republican without the last name Paul, and dangerously “weak” for any Democrat. As the article persuasively demonstrates, this immovable consensus has sweeping consequences for exactly the domestic policy debates currently roiling The Discourse, from healthcare to progressive taxation… and yet hardly anyone talks about it. (Not even in recent Democratic debates which ranged from Actually Liberal to Wow Actually Very Progressive.)
In other words: We spend staggering amounts of money on the military—including, to take only one example, tanks that even the Pentagon doesn’t particularly want, but which are politically impossible to challenge—even as the major political parties claw at each other’s throats about how to allocate comparatively puny amounts of money for social programs that everyday people Definitely Particularly Want.
Why is this happening? Our nebulous yet endless War on Terror? (Or “War on Terror,” for those of that persuasion?) Our status as a mature and therefore potentially crumbling empire? Trickle-down effects from a jingoistic President? I’ll leave those answers to the pun-loving Serious Policy Writers.
