You heard it here first: Charles Rangel, the draft, and the Hegelian dialectic
It seems to me that Representative Charles Rangel’s suggestion to reintroduce the draft should get some sort of prize for cynical ploys in Congress. Granted, he’s got a lot of competition, but this one is designed to offend almost everyone, including the vast majority of his fellow Democrats, and even Rangel doesn’t think for a moment that his proposal has a chance of passing.
Whether or not he’s serious about the actual institution of an actual draft, Rangel certainly has been serious about suggesting such a thing. He did it back in January of 2003, to a resounding defeat–and, interestingly enough, Rangel was one of the defeaters: he voted against his own bill.
Those Republicans and Independents who turned on the Republican Congress this past election and either stayed home from the polls or voted for Democrats in protest may be rethinking just a bit when they learn that Rangel is going to be chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee. But the moving finger has writ.
And now it’s deja vu all over again, especially if Rangel has his way. Paraphrasing one of my personal heroes, Groucho Marx, Rangel said “you bet your life” when asked yesterday on “Face the Nation” if he would renew his call for a draft.
What’s motivating Rangel, besides the desire for publicity? He says he thinks a draft would make future administrations more wary of going to war in the first place; no doubt he’s studied the Vietnam years and knows that the war protests were at least partly fueled by the understandable self-interest of the youth of America, who were reluctant to be drafted into a far-off war that seemed both unwinnable and strategically unnecessary. But Rangel also says he wants the army to be more socioeconomically even-handed; he believes it’s the poor who are exploited by the present system.
Of course, Rangel is ignoring the evidence that indicates the composition of today’s armed forces do not at all correspond to his vision (see this, for example.) Perception is all, after all. Not to mention the fact that the highly specialized nature of today’s military does not lend itself to a draft.
Even among his constituents, many seem to regard Rangel as a sort of buffoon or even the enemy:
Along 125th Street in New York City on Sunday, Rangel’s draft plan was met mostly with derision.
“What, he was smoking pot or something?” said 58-year-old James Brown [no; not this James Brown].
“He doesn’t represent the people of Harlem if he’s for the draft,” Neil Davis, 48, said.
But I don’t think Rangel is dumb. In fact, he may be extremely smart. Certainly, he’s about to become a great deal more powerful when he ascends to his new chairmanship. And it occurs to me, attempting to drag some hazy facts from the dim reaches of my college memory (an era in my life that grows further and further away even as I write this), it seems to me that Rangel may be one of the few people on earth who understands the concept of the Hegelian dialectic.
Yes, you read me right: the Hegelian dialectic. As I recall, it’s one of those things where you go in one direction in order to end up in the opposite one by causing some sort of outraged reaction and backlash–but, as I said, my recollection is a trifle dim (the dialectic hasn’t come up too often in my daily life of the past few decades). So I decided to Google it.
And immediately fell into a deep morass of obfuscation. You take a look if you like; I’m weary. It reminds me of just why I decided not to become a philosophy major: impenetrability. Perhaps my interpretation of the dialectic is wrong; if so, I can count on you readers to set me straight.
But if–as I suspect–Charles Rangel understands and is operationalizing all of this, he’s got some heavy-duty intellectual chops to go with his heavy-duty audacity.
I’ve always liked Rangel but his draft ploy is simply theater and nothing more. He’s trying to make pro-war folks face up to what he sees as our ‘hypocrisy.’ He’s totally wrong-headed of course. But I still like him, just as I like many of my friends with political stances counter to my own. I’ve always felt that political beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with likeability on the one on one personal level.
Rangel gets my respect because he has always been a champion of veterans; it’s too bad he’s on the wrong side of history. Rangel is one of the reasons I wish the Democrats would wake up and get behind the WOT.
I like our present all-volunteer force and the vets in Iraq are re-upping in ample numbers, so no draft is necessary for now. However, I would be willing to bet money that a draft will probably become necessary somewhere along the line in the WOT.
Actually, we need a draft. It appears that the military is spread too thin, or is horribly mismanaged, or more probably, both.
Rangel’s motives are suspect, but we do need a draft.
I think Rangel needs to stop playing games and look for solutions.
Democrats won’t give anything more than Rangel’s Theater. They can carp and critique, but they can’t construct or govern. Even Clinton had to depend on the repocrat congress to carry his administration to the finish line.
We need a good leftist progressive congress, but democrats are more like democraps. They ain’t gonna do nothin.
Here’s some speculation:
Rangel is a saboteur. The draft would lower the quality of the military. For a saboteur, that’s good.
The military can only take about one tenth of the age-cohort that comes along every year, one fifth, if you consider that half don’t qualify.
Who gets drafted and who doesn’t is a recipe for endless anger and distrust and class warfare and political scheming.
Besides, he forgot his history. We fought the Korean War for three years with the draft, and in Viet Nam for longer than that before the protests began in earnest. If he’s thinking of not even starting, he’s forgotten his history.
Anyway, he’s lower than whale turds.
Neo:
Did I read you right…Rangel is smart???
He may be politically astute, but he is definitely militarily dumb. No rational armed force has a place for the low intelligence types that Rangel wants in.
Most of the reason that the low socio-economic class is not in the military is that – for whatever reason – they don’t pass the intelligence test. And this won’t change in the near future, given the low quality of inner city schools.
And, please note that the Air Force and Navy are actually purposely contracting in manpower amounts…while Marines and Army can make do with volunteers. Easy to expand the military (low the test limits), but will Congress come up with the funding to do so? Doubt it.
This ploy just plain stinks…Rangel has neither the good of the country nor the good of the armed forces in mind.
Charlie: Its like the old kids game. He made you look. He was all over TV. He got what he really wanted.
What good would more troops do? Give the terrorists more targets? Give the media more “baby-killers” to condemn?
We could easily wipe the insurgency out with half the troops there now, but doing so would enrage the media juggernaut, and they’d have Dubya’s neck in a hangman’s noose the day after we chased the insurgents back to their homes in Iran.
What good will more troops do, when we don’t even dare use the ones we have?
Good Ole Charlie: I was being (trying to be) humorous, saying he was smart because he could understand Hegel.
Draft? Nah.
Robot wars. Unmanned planes. Nanotechnology. That kind of thing. One thousand American soldiers can defeat 100 thousand islamic troopers. One button could end the Iranian menace. Only thing lacking is the will. The real problem is the media, brainwashing people with a counterintuitive marxist narrative. The enemy does not need to defeat the American army, it just needs to sell an image of indestructibility to the (alas, sympathethic) media. And the media so far plays along. I’m not sure how to solve that problem. What do you do, when your own people want your own country to lose a war?
Cranky, yikes, we sure dont need a draft to grow the military, All that has to happen is for Congress to authorise a higher end strength and the funds to pay for it. Rangel is playing class warfare like a fiddle.
Charlie is right, the Navy and Air force are being cut to the bone right now. I am personally involved in the cuts to the Navy. As usual they are shaping the force to the current conflict rather than the ones we may face, very dangerous right now.
CWO3
Of course, let’s also not forget that Rangel’s infamous draft proposal was something that Democrats tried to use AGAINST Bush during the 2004 campaign. One of the lies used to scare young voters into voting for Kerry was that if Bush was re-elected then the draft would be reinstated, even though a Democrat, Rangel, was the only one who had ever talked about such a thing.
I have been saying for quite awhile now that the US does not appear to have the troops sufficient to win in Iraq, and didn’t have them when we started. More and more people, including people like Irving Kristol at the Weekly Standard, have come around to that view.
However, I tend to agree that with our current sized armed forces and at this point in the game jacking up the manpower in Iraq probably won’t do much good.
Longer term, however, and beyond whether OIF was right or wrong, I do think it’s clear that we are in a decades long confrontation with many nations and we do not have the armed forces to handle that, principally in terms of combat arms (infantry, armor, etc.)
The only way to fix that is to radically increase the size of the armed forces. I now see that indeed some pro-war types are calling for that also. Fine. But, under the current setup, that is going to cost a lot of money and take a long time. After all, people aren’t avoiding service because the pay is too low.
That is why I have also advocated the draft for some time. Usually, when I float the idea, I am accused of a ploy a la Rangel. But I mean it. Considering our role in the world, and considering our standard of living and wealth vis a vis the rest of the world, and considering also the importance of controlling oil availability worldwide, our armed forces are just way too small.
I have thought until very recently that, if correctly argued, people might accept the idea of a draft, given what our nation is up against. However, I have been surprised at the reaction of close family and friends. They are violently opposed to the idea, because they believe it will enable presidents to start more elective wars. I was very surprised to hear that sentiment.
The bottom line is that the US does not have enough ground pounders commensurate to its role in the world. Until that is fixed, we will win no wars.
As for the dialectic: The idea is that, once you fasten on one thing, the opposite of that thing comes into existence. Then they contend. Ultimately they reconcile; theoretically at a higher level.
It comes out of a philosophical tradition that is deliberately very abstract because they are trying to get to first principles. But let’s try to be simple about it.
Suppose you are a child, and you like to eat. But all you like to eat is Cheerios. But by focussing on Cheerios you aren’t eating your vegetables. Of course, the highest form of food wisdom is to eat all kinds of things in moderation. (Or I suppose eat Broccoli flavored Cheerios.)
Then, again, to paraphrase the old Jewish master, if I am not for myself, who will be? (thesis) but if I am only for myself, who am I? (antithesis, I am not for anyone else.) Lesson: the positions have to reconcile.
Complete self interest as a political form: freedom, but anarchy. Complete control from the top down: despotism, but stability. The perfect expression of the reconciliation of these two is either the Prussian state circa 1820 or the USA (Hegel would say the former.)
God is immanent in the world (Spinoza, others.) God is completely personalized (pagan Gods.) God is both; actually three. Thus Christianity is the reconciliation.
These are the kinds of things Hegel was getting at.
Two more things about dialectic.
Rangel is not trying to carry on a dialectic in a meaningful way. He posed a very specific challenge: “If people are for the war, then they must be for Americans to share the burden via the draft.” He’s right, with only one exception: if one believes our armed forces are sufficient to meet all of our current challenges. I don’t think they are.
Finally, the pedigree of dialectic goes back to the Socratic dialogues. The underlying idea there is that no one knows the absolute truth, but, by the back and forth of dialogue, we can get closer. I agree with that idea.
Steve is Neo.
Neo, it is not dialectic itself is impenetrable, but awful language of German 19-century philosophy which Hegel used. Recently I came across remarkably clear and convincing expounding of these issues; it boils down to impossibility of using Aristotelian logic to description of development processes. But dialectic is a very dangerous instrument, perfectly convenient for twisting and turning the truth to one’s ends, so it is a favorite tool of charlatans, political and others. Misuse of dialectic became very important part of communist demagoguery in USSR, and was practiced wide by pseudo-scientists like Lysenko and scores of others.
I’m ready to report for duty! I want one of them doughboy pot helments and heavy wool leggings and a Springfield 30.06. The last time I enlisted I trained with an old M-1. I had to jack the bolt by stomping it with my boot. Ain’t Rangel a jackass? Here we have a large mass of the Dem party having doubts about Iraq and a fair percentage of them wanting us to immediately cut and run and then one of their own honchos up and calls for a draft! We can always have the troops we need if we want to spend the money. Look at the current enlistment rates and all the guys volunteering for extended duty in a dangerous place. Young single men don’t regard danger in the same way us older folks do, they never have and never will. We need to truly assess our stupid rules of engagement before we develop any grand plans for Iraq and any future fights we will find ourselves in.
Hegel’s an interesting explanation but here’s a simpler one: Democrats have always been the party that supported slavery.
I actually don’t think an the idea of a draft shoudl be rejected out of hand. Maybe not Rangel’s proposal specifically, but I’ve floated my own draft proposal (and masochistically cross-posted it to Kos).
There’s another reason the Democrats want a large standing army that can’t be used to fight wars. And it ain’t cause they dislike martial law.
blackfive.com and bookworm room have some very good discussions concerning the draft, as you would expect.
Oh ya, of course I agree with Tatter’s view that when there is a lack of will, it don’t matter how many boots on the ground there are.
Xrlq , also got it right.
My position is simple. No Total War, no Draft, period. Give troops no income taxes for 2x number of years served, applicable to spouses as well.
That is enough for the moment. Until America loses 1 to 10 million people in our cities, draft not gonna work.
Neo, I guess you may have some interest in real dialectic, because, actually, it is a General Theory of Change. It can be formally deduced from the first principles of logic and some general notion of complex system. In this sense it is not anymore a philosophy, but a branch of mathematics, and I believe that I personally made a significant contribution to this theory, pertinent to societal and biological evolution.
Blogger is at it again: right now, it’s impossible to post. So, stay tuned–I’ll probably get something up a bit later today, if Blogger cooperates.
We have the numbers necessary to win but there are reasons that we don’t want to assert ourselves too much. It’s a balancing act between insisting on what *we* want and not running rough-shod over Iraqi independance. So we end up dealing with a variety of inefficiencies to get the results we want because we’re trying to avoid possible negative results in other areas.
Yahoo headlines when I logged in… we’re engaging in joint-operations in Sadr City, and it’s about time.
But as for the draft and Rangel’s cleverness. It wasn’t so clever that it wasn’t immediately obvious that he was proposing the draft, which he in no way actually wants to have, in order to protest the war.
It’s not that uncommon for the anti-war sorts to be really and truely *angry* that our lives are going along well and our economy is good and we *don’t* have a draft… because they want people to CARE dammit. Spread the pain around a bit and they get more activists on their side.
The social justice claim, that blacks are victimized particularly, is playing on prejudices, belief without facts to back them up, that we send our poor and minorities to fight the nation’s wars. Blacks are “over represented” in the military, yet are significantly under represented in deaths and casualties in Iraq. What those numbers mean to me, is that it is very likely that the military is seen (by high school graduates who don’t take drugs and haven’t had trouble with the police) as an opportunity that can be applied to civilian life… which means chosing jobs that cross over in ways that infantry training does not.
So in effect Rangel is arguing against allowing people, black people, to assess their own lives and make decisions about opportunity.
It would be HARD to be that dumb. But pushing in order to pull doesn’t take being that smart, either.
A draft would be necessary IF the military were not able to meet recruiting requirements AND we needed troops for a conflict. Congress determines how big the military will be and the US went through a huge drawdown in the early 90s.
A public service draft would be a good idea. Americorps, Peace Corps, something akin to the old CCC (rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure). Go with Tom Barnett’s idea of building up a SysAdmin force of cops and administrators to take over nation building once the military mission is over.
Let every able bodied American take some time away from Xbox or PS3 to do some public service (especially in a 3rd world nation). Then, perhaps, we’ll have people with a greater appreciation for the rights, values and freedoms that they currently take for granted. -cp
“Heighten the contradictions” might be a better & more specific term than “Hegelian dialectic.” (Thesis + antithesis = synthesis, not that opaque but not that specific either.)
“Heighten the contradictions” was the particular phrasing of twentieth century Marxists (Marx of course phrased his theories in Hegelian terms) who thought they would bring about the rise of Communism by encouraging its opposite.
The failings of this philosophy in the political sphere were found to be
fatal by many of the German Socialists who voted for Hitler on the theory that a Nazi regime would “heighten the contradictions” and bring Socialism to power.
“The failings of this philosophy in the political sphere were found to be
fatal by many of the German Socialists who voted for Hitler on the theory that a Nazi regime would “heighten the contradictions” and bring Socialism to power.”
Not so sure that was a failure, at least for the eastern half of Germany. The German Socialists just ended up sacrificing their lives to build the Berlin Wall.
Maybe we should start a reserve corps of old farts like Rangle. They could stay home and do the office work, freeing up more real soldiers for combat duty.
Well, if the draft does come to pass (and it won’t), I hope any of Rangel’s offspring, friends, relatives, and associates who are of serving age draw very, very low numbers.
This lottery thing makes little sense.
Steve wrote:
“Rangel is not trying to carry on a dialectic in a meaningful way. He posed a very specific challenge: “If people are for the war, then they must be for Americans to share the burden via the draft.” He’s right, with only one exception: if one believes our armed forces are sufficient to meet all of our current challenges. I don’t think they are.”
I’m sure there are those who would ‘support’ the draft(those who generally wouldn’t be considered for service, lol) – but I’m absolutley certain that it will never wash. Considering how unpopular the war is amongst Americans it’s unbelievably crazy to even consider it – even more so, immedietely after an election dominated by the war.
Nor do I think more troops will make a difference either – intially perhaps, but I’m quite sure it would become even more of a bloodbath than it is now.
Ultimately the U.S will probably use air power(like in Vietnam)to ‘placate’ the Iraqis and protect it’s embassy, bases etc. In fact they have been doing that quite a bit more lately.
Sure more Iraqi civilians will die and world opinion will be even more against the U.S – but then we can ‘win’.
Which is what it’s all about – take it in the endzone!
About the growing U.S use of airpower and the lack of coverage in the MSM..
“Not surprisingly, this remains a non-issue in this country. How could Americans react, when there’s no news to react to, when there’s next to no information to be had — which doesn’t mean that information on our ongoing air campaigns is unavailable. In fact, the Air Force is proud as punch of the job it’s doing; so any reporter, not to speak of any citizen, can go to the Air Force website and look at daily reports of air missions over both Iraq and Afghanistan. The report of November 15th, for instance, offers the following:
“In Iraq, U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18s conducted a strike against anti-Iraqi forces near Ramadi. The F/A-18s expended guided bomb unit-31s on enemy targets. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons provided close-air support to troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Forward Operating Base McHenry and Baqubah. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles provided close-air support to troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Baghdad.
“In total, coalition aircraft flew 32 close air support missions for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities.”
This was a pretty typical day’s work in recent months; there were 34 strikes on November 14th, 32 on the 13th, and 35 on the 12th — and note that each of the strikes mentioned was “near” a major city. These reports can be hard to parse, but they certainly give a sense, day by day, that the air war in Iraq is no less ongoing for being unreported.
om Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), where this article first appeared, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
“It is not clear what proportion of the 30,000+ personnel evacuated to the United States for treatment actually return to active service, but there are indications that at least half of the 20,000 people sustaining combat injuries do not do so. Although the combat deaths are far smaller than in the Vietnam War, that was in an era of the draft (conscription), with much larger armed forces. The impact of nearly 3,000 deaths and around 10,000 serious injuries in the Iraq War so far is proportionally much larger than at the time of the much longer Vietnam War, and may partially explain the continuing difficulties in recruitment into the armed forces, especially the US Army.”
http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org/uk
Recruiting is always difficult, so cry me a river, Anonymous. Your sources are incredibly biased anyhow. How could any person actually look at the fact (I haven’t checked it but we’ll go with what the article you quoted said) that half of those who are injured return to active duty and put it into negative terms that half of them *don’t* return to active duty?
Maybe they weren’t active duty to begin with… a whole heck of a lot of those in Iraq are National Guard. I believe that our first female silver star recipient went home with her unit and stayed there.
JFKerry took the free-out after three bandaids.
And this article actually claims that deaths *now* have more impact than those from Vietnam? Why? Well, according to this guy, because there were more in Vietnam. Way more deaths and way more soldiers.
See, fewer deaths and injuries means greater impact because, ya know, less is more.
And this impacts recruiting? Shouldn’t it impact *retention*? But retention rates are good. Very good.
cry in the nile.
Fake is accurate, Synova. Not just less is more.
Wars increase recruiting for the Marine Corps and the infantry branches of the army. Warriors like wars, they don’t actually like joining in peace time if they don’t have to.
Kind of off-topic, Sergey, but I’d be interested in seeing your work relating to dialectic as a general and rigorous (mathematical) theory of change.
My problem with it is that it’s typically been used as mere obfuscation, the equivalent, in its heyday, of post-modernism, in its. Both have by now been sufficiently abused that even the herds of naive lefties are no longer much impressed. As for Rangel, I doubt he has the capacity even to understand obfuscation as a tactic, much less “heightening the contradictions” — I just see him as trying to spook up an anti-war stampede by flapping the old red flag of the draft.
Alas, Sally, this theory involves rather advanced mathematics and hardly can be popularized. I can explain the core of it only to fellow mathematician. But the practical conclusions are transparent enough and, to my surprise, support many of Hegel claims, stripping them from their mistical aura and too far-fetched aspirations. The most important conclusion is that a real change of any comlex system, not only of mind, is, indeed, a hard thing to do. But it is possible by clever application of force, patience, knowledge, creativity and will to success.
I view it as the pendulum system, a simple system. However, its behavior becomes dynamic when you vary the level of initial force, speed, and height. So if Hegel is refering to opposites and how they interact, then it seems to me, it is simply the truism that if you apply the right force in the right direction, you can make a pendulum not only swing to the right, but so far right you hit the left of the pendulum. Therefore one opposite simply becomes the opposite of itself, or the opposite of the opposite of itself.
VDH called it back biting or was it bite back effect. Where you say and act in one way, when in fact the opposite is true and everyone knows it. Venezuella and gestapo police Fox talking about America and our Berlin walls for example.
So what are they trying to do, are they trying to make America into mirror images of themselves? Or are they trying to make themselves into mirror images of America? Rather, it seems the dialectic process of dialogue becomes simply a method to achieve a goal, that goal independent of spectrums or labels.
The dynamic, that being dictators being the underdogs and America being the top dog, is the meta concept that these dictators using dialogue and the State Depos using dialogue, are trying to overturn. If they apply enough force, then they can overthrow the top dog and make themselves into the leaders and power players. The Shah was said to be more brutal and anti-freedom, compared to the pro-freedom Mullahs. Well. That dialectic came out all right, I think. They succeded in the goal that the dialectic sought.
Another practical application of the oratory dialectic, rather than the philosophical theory, is that of Israel. The meta concept is that Israel and Palestine keeps fighting and that they need to stop. The dialectic for the Palis is that Israelis are the terroists and when Israelis kill, more terroists are born. They want the US to stop supporting Israel.
Well, an opposite dialectic that you could use to counter the dynamic paraxism of the Palis is this. Demand that Israel committ themselves to Total War, a war to the knife and finish, or the US will cut off all military, financial, and diplomatic aid to the state of Israel and begin funding the Palestinian territories with US weapons and money. It’s like Amanie saying he wants nuclear power, it is a smoke screen, a bite back effect. By saying the opposite of what he wants, he thinks he can affect a realistic change towards what he really wants. All these dictators talk about the anti-freedom and weakness of the US, in the attempt to say the opposite of the real in order to change the reality. After all, they don’t criticize us because they really want us to be more free or what not. They criticize us because they want us to be less free and powerful. How do they do this by saying we should be more free and/or powerful? Well, about the same we help the Israelis by threatening to support Palestinian terroists against them and cutting
How do they do this by saying we should be more free and/or powerful? Well, about the same we help the Israelis by threatening to support Palestinian terroists against them and cutting off the aid. It creates an effect. This effect destabilizes the meta concept, and when the meta-concept is destabilized, then the reality changes. These tools always have more than one use, dual use, or manifold uses.
There are ideas and then there are ideas over the ideas. The ideas over the ideas, are the meta-concept. It connects the ideas and rhetoric of a philosophy, into a coherent and consistent whole. So if you listen to the Arabs speak to the West and then listen to them speaking to their jihad folks, you hear different ideas, styles of oration, and rhetoric. It does not mean it is a different philosophy, but the same meta-concept simply expressed through various tentacles of thought and words.
The reason why the US doesn’t say to Israel what Israel needs to hear, is because the US doesn’t understand how to manipulate paradox into crafting reality. The most glib and bureacratic of our government, knows only how to speak in tongues for their own self-aggrandizement and power. When they encounter an ideology that doesn’t believe in personal power so much as a doomsday Final Judgement with a Final Reward in Heaven, their doublespeak is infinitely easier to counter than the jihad’s doublespeak.
The dialectic is used by many people for many different reasons, regardless of what they call it. In point of fact, the dialectic is no longer even the dialectic, because it isn’t a bunch of words written by a philosopher. But the actual mechanical and physical blueprint that human beings have crafted and built. It is what it is because humans are what we are. The principles by which the dialectic work are the same as the principles that humans obey.
Do you really think Rangel’s kidding about unleashing the Hegelian Dialectic?
Is Ahmadinejad kidding? Ask yourself?