Business: The New Military?

I used Jessup's rant in my last post because I consider it emblematic of a certain attitude I have been seeing these last few years among Republicans.

Jessup's error is clear enough.  He starts with a perfectly reasonable premise -- the military is necessary, it protects us, and the front line troops should be honored for it.  But he leaps from that to an utterly different conclusion -- that the military should therefore be unaccountable and not bound by laws other than its own.  His call for a lawless and unaccountable military assumes that military men are morally superior to civilians, and front line troops to support forces.  It also assumes that this superiority is great enough to make front-line troops immune to the normal failings of human nature -- the temptations of power, the tendency to confuse one's personal interests with the public good, and so forth.  Taken to its ultimate conclusion, it is the logic of military dictatorship.

I have no doubt that many professional military men agree with Jessup, nor that many right-wing civilians also do.  Certainly, in times past (say, when Dole or the senior Bush ran for President against Dukakis or Clinton), many right wingers were quick to hold up military service as proof of moral superiority and treat anyone who had not served as morally unqualified to hold office.

That approach is no longer viable.  Since the Vietnam war, our elite of both parties have usually been able to avoid military service, and besides, our military has shrunk enough that large portions of the population never serve.  And there was a long gap for anyone to young to have fought in Vietnam and too old for Iraq when the opportunity to fight in a major war just wasn't there.*

But it is sort of startling the way that attitude has now been shifted over from military service to running a business.  Part of it is no doubt the fact that the Republicans have nominated a former CEO as their candidate and want to play up that part of his biography.  But one heard that sort of talk, the general attitude that anyone who had not run a business did not really contribute, well before Romney was nominated, before primary season even began.  The basic view that businessmen are "job creators," that wealth is created only at the top, and that income is a reasonable surrogate for contribution to society.  Romney is pitched as the ideal President in an economic crisis because his private sector experience, just as a retired military man (think McClellan, Eisenhower) was pitched as the ideal candidate to win a war.  But the attitude has moved beyond that.  Just as many people used to regard anyone who had not served in the military as not morally worthy to hold office, today's Republicans seem to regard anyone who as not run a business as not morally worthy to hold office.*

There are some obvious problems to treating running a business as the equivalent of military service.  Business management and the military are both specialties that are not for everyone.  No society could possibly function in which everyone is a soldier, and no modern industrial society is possible with everyone running a business.  Nonetheless, in certain military emergencies, extremely broad drafts have been instituted.  Some societies, now and in the past, have had systems of universal military service, so that everyone with a few exceptions does have military experience.  Claims that lack of military service disqualifies a candidate from office have usually been made in societies in which service is the norm and failure to serve is the exception.**

But there is no equivalent system of requiring everyone to run a business.  Extreme economic emergencies have sometimes forced people to become entrepreneurs in the sense of selling apples and the like, but hardly in the sense of knowing what it is to run a business and make payroll.  And while organizations like Junior Achievement may encourage people to have the simulated experience of running a business, the thought of any system of universal conscription is simply absurd.  In short, think of not running a business as morally disqualifying for holding office, and you exclude the majority of population.

Add to that the view that businessmen should be held to no laws except the law of supply and demand, and accountable to no one except the market, and certainly the view that no lesser mortal may criticize them, and you get the businessman version of Colonel Jessup.  The ultimate logic of such a view is not military dictatorship, but plutocracy.

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*Ironically, A Few Good Men and Colonel Jessup were products of this era.  For all his ranting about lives being on the line, Jessup was not actually fighting a war.
**Both Dole and the senior Bush fought in WWII, a war that caught up most able-bodied men of their generation.