Time to Reinstate the Draft?

Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks has written recently ("Require all young people to serve the nation" and "Draft might breathe new life into a listless U.S.") in support of reinstating the draft. Bully for him. Not only would requiring young adults to serve their country for two years equalize the risks of war-fighting among all social classes and backgrounds, it would also initiate Americans in the sadly dormant value of shared sacrifice in performing personal service to one's community and nation.

Rodricks wants everyone at 18 — with possible deferment not beyond age 21 — to be required to go into the military branch of their choice, or an AmeriCorps-style domestic service, or "a revitalized and expanded Peace Corps."

Why? "A draft would wake everyone up," Rodricks says. "It would ... transform a citizenry that, in the post-baby boom period, has become increasingly myopic, wealth-obsessed, self-centered, cynical and clueless to essential concepts of loyalty and teamwork, community and commitment. We think our kids are getting this through community service hours in high school. But that's a limited lesson, easily overwhelmed by the me-first think that marks the adolescent society of 21st-century America."

Such a draft it would also end the persistent complaint that the war in Iraq is being fought by the sons and daughters of the have-nots in lieu of those of the have-a-lots, whose offspring simply aren't signing up. oldstyleliberal can't decide which rationale for supporting a return to conscription impresses me the most: the value of shared sacrifice, or that of egalitarianism.


The idea of expressing my support for Rodricks' idea popped into oldstyleliberal's head today when he read Charles Krauthammer's Time essay "In Plain English: Let's Make It Official". Krauthammer fears that the "enormous, linguistically monoclonal immigration [influx we experience] today from Latin America" will undermine American cultural and political unity. English, he says, ought post haste to be declared our "official language."

Indeed? Whatever happened to the love which conservatives like Krauthammer so often profess for uncoerced market outcomes, including those in the "marketplace of ideas"? Which language people choose to speak in their homes and everyday lives — that of their native land or that of their adoptive country — depends on ideas they subscribe to about what is right and best. Why should the government in Washington step in and force them to employ a different tongue?

Well, says Krauthammer, we're in grave danger of becoming like his native Quebec: a threat to the continued existence of (in that case) Canada as one united nation. That's why we here in the U.S. need an "official language," now, for the very first time.

If in fact we are so imminently threatened, oldstyleliberal would suggest that Rodricks' idea of shared compulsory national service, at the cost to each of us of personal sacrifice in the bloom of our youth, would do at least as much to hold us together and build national solidarity as declaring English the "official language" of the United States would.

Not that oldstyleliberal is unalterably opposed to requiring citizens to be conversant with English. Let's just say that he'll cheerfully support Krauthammer and other conservatives in this regard when they sign on to the idea of reinstating the draft.