Taranto: Self-Interest as Expediency

If you want a good measure of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, just take a quick look at the first part of yesterday's "Best of the Web". Taranto begins his daily web feature by following up his previous day's analysis of the "anti-Vietnam movement" because many of his readers claimed that he missed an important point: that much of the anti-war movement was driven by expediency, which he calls (and dismisses as) self-interest. Here, I will focus on Taranto's analysis of self-interest and mostly leave aside whether expediency was an important part of the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era.

Taranto apparently grasps the fact that no one wished to be drafted and the understandable, if mistaken temptation to join the anti-war movement in hopes of ending the draft. In fact, he even understands why women, who were not drafted, would have similar motivations for doing just that.

For one thing, her being female does not mean the draft did not implicate her self-interest. Almost all young women have intimate relationships with young men, or aspire to do so; and a policy that threatens to deprive them of a boyfriend or husband--either directly, by sending him halfway around the world, or indirectly, by reducing the supply of prospects--quite obviously runs counter to their self-interest. In addition, the draft ran counter to the self-interest of virtually anyone with a loved one--son, brother, grandson, nephew, male friend--of draft age, which is to say, of a vast number of Americans.

Taranto discusses this point as a prelude to drawing a false distinction between selfish motives and ideological ones since a point of his prior analysis was that the lack of anti-war fervor today relative to the Vietnam era was due to the political ideology of many of those past activists.

So far, so good. But things get interesting -- or revealing anyway -- when Taranto first implies that self-interest and ideology are incompatible by nature, and then gives us his take on two major causes at the time: the anti-war and the civil rights movements.

What does convince us that there was more to [Dotty] Lynch's activism than self-interest is that she is still beating this horse more than 30 years after America abandoned Vietnam, at a time when there is no risk that anyone in her life (or out of it) will be drafted. That most of her peers are not beating that horse convinces us that they were motivated chiefly by self-interest.

Let's briefly set aside the fact that Lynch wrote in to Taranto to express dismay that the idealism of the anti-war protestors could be dismissed as self-interest due to the draft. Suppose Dotty Lynch honestly believed that warfare as such endangered her self-interest? Then she should -- out of self-interest, not to mention principle -- work to end it until she does so. In fact, I would think it odd of her not to keep such a flame lit until she succeeds or dies.

Now Taranto does have a point, that we can't all spend the lion's share of our time as political activists. Such urgent matters as earning a living, finding a mate, and raising children get in the way of that for most of us. But he's not done dismissing self-interest as a legitimate motivation for human behavior.

You may need to read the following whopper a couple of times to believe it.

It is important to note here that the justice of a cause is a separate question from the motives of those who pursue it. To take an obvious example, blacks stood to benefit enormously from the passage of civil rights laws, and this in no way diminished the righteousness of their demand for such laws.

But this example points to the way in which the antiwar movement was different from--indeed almost the opposite of--the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement could not prevail merely by appealing to the self-interest of blacks, who, as a disfranchised minority, lacked the political power to bring about change. A significant number of whites had to be convinced that justice demanded they act counter to their self-interest (!) by giving up their privileged position. This took many decades to achieve, and it required maturity, forbearance, and moral and intellectual rigor.

By contrast, expediency was sufficient to create a mass antiwar movement. Half-baked pacifistic and anti-American notions were all it took to make young people feel justified in acting on their own self-interest, and to bring about, in less than a decade, an end to the draft and an American retreat from Vietnam.

But this could not endure. With the threat of the draft gone, those who had opposed the war out of self-interest moved on and got about the business of living. [bold added]

Yes. Taranto really said that civil rights for blacks was a cause that was contrary to the self-interest of whites! As if making sure the next George Washinton Carver remains uneducated is in anyone's "self-interest". As if preventing a white businessman from hiring blacks willing to bid for lower wages is against his self-interest. As if living in a country that does not fully and consistently respect individual rights can be in anyone's self-interest.

When one recalls that freedom -- the governmental protection of individual rights -- is necessary for prosperity, one realizes that it is "civil rights" -- or, more correctly, making sure the individual rights of blacks are protected -- that is truly in one's own self-interest; and a position of legal "privilege" that is truly expedient. And, while this is not my focus, I must point out that not only does the potential benefit to blacks represented by the protection of their rights not diminish the righteousness of their cause. It is part and parcel of such riteousness.

And as to someone "needing" "half-baked pacifistic and anti-American notions" to "feel justified in acting in [one's] own self-interest", this is blatantly unjust and patently false to boot. This hawkish, pro-war, former member of the U.S. military, like many leaders of the military, opposes the draft. I oppose the draft, not just because a professional, all-volunteer military is superior to a bunch of conscripts, but because our government exists to protect our rights, the right to our own lives being most fundamental. Our government most definitely does not exist to dispose of our lives at will.

This is true not just on the level of an individual who might be drafted, but of our nation as a whole. I dare say that had our government not been able to draft soldiers for Vietnam -- a war which our nation had no need to fight, and in which our leaders had decided to limit our soldiers' tactical options anyway -- it would not have become the enormous debacle that it did, if we had gone there at all.

As Alex Epstein pointed out in a recent editorial on Memorial Day, the motivations of the professional soldier are selfish and noble.

For an American soldier, to fight for freedom is not to fight for a "higher cause," separate from or superior to his own life--it is to fight for his own life and happiness. He is willing to risk his life in time of war because he is unwilling to live as anything other than a free man. He does not want or expect to die, but he would rather die than live in slavery or perpetual fear. His attitude is epitomized by the words of John Stark, New Hampshire's most famous soldier in the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die."

The decision to join the military is not one to be made lightly, like the decision was (and apparently still is) for some to draft others to fight a war that will not further the cause of freedom. Indeed, the selfish cause is fundamentally a fight against slavery, which is exactly what the civil rights movement, in its better days, was finishing up.

So James Taranto dismisses selfish motives as "expedient", and as having nothing to do with the justice of a cause, does he? This is a man who has, by definition, damned his own self-interest. He cannot, by his own logic, be arguing on his own behalf, so it should not be surprising that he portrays opposition to the draft in such a dim light -- even in this day and age.

On that score, I should note that James Taranto supports the draft under some circumstances, a point he does not make explicitly in the article I comment upon here.

[T]he purpose of a draft is not didactic or redistributionary. There is only one reason that would justify conscription: if the military were unable to recruit enough volunteers to meet its personnel needs.

To which I would answer: If the military cannot recruit enough volunteers, it says something about either the war for which it seeks recruits or the society it may soon be unable to defend. In neither case should men be forced to go to the battlefield.

"A republic, if you can keep it," is a wise saying, but it is directed at each of us as individuals. This is true on both the military battlefield and the intellectual one. This is the cause for which I fight, and I will not be dismissed by the likes of James Taranto as one who acts expediently.

I have only one question at this point. If James Taranto does not care about his own life, why should we take any advice from him?

-- CAV