Belated Memorial Day

the wrath of Brooks

Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.

David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week, something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately, having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what "the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does) or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.

I don't think that's a real thing. Ocasio-Cortez is certainly not going to start calling herself a postliberal; the official left side of the movement is a weird little squabble in the UK Labour Party, led from the House of Lords by Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill, who does sound a lot like a John Fetterman or Josh Hawley with his invocation of "blue-collar values" and an extremely rightwing-sounding kind of socialism. The right side is the same international illiberalism we're always on about, emanating to some extent from Moscow and Budapest, which has attached itself to Trump and thence to the US Republican Party. Brooks just longs for it to have a left side to nourish his own personal OCD.

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But I do want to consider the umbrage Brooks manifests at Deneen's take. Not that I know anything about Patrick Deneen, or expect to know anything (his Substack has a paywall I'm not planning to breach), and not that I have any more experience of actual warfare than Brooks does (maybe I've read more fiction), but Brooks's Memorial Day point

Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees [the other one is Vance—ed.] telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

But that’s not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

is completely wrong, and it's useful to think about why.

For starters, Deneen didn't say that "regular" soldiers "never fight" for abstractions; he said they don't die for them, or "brave their all", which is a different matter (it was that fool Vance who Brooks quoted as saying, "People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home"). Lots of soldiers show up to fight for a cause, as well as officers (who Brooks seems to rule out of the discussion, speaking of elite snobbery—only "regular soldiers" can be doubted). Especially the volunteers, though it's good to remember that there are rarely enough of those, and some form of conscription is generally needed to fill up the ranks, and has been for centuries, the all-volunteer US force being a big reason for the severe limitations on the kinds of wars the US is able to prosecute nowadays, from Grenada and Panama to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Then, in purely tactical terms, it's much better for your army when your soldiers don't die. Soldiers dying is how you lose. You like young people doing the fighting, because they're brave, but you need them to know how to protect themselves. Most of the soldiers who die in combat aren't doing it willingly, but due to error or bad luck. It shouldn't happen, and you should be doing whatever you can to avoid it. Now that everybody's given up on the "forlorn hope" tactic of the days of Sharpe's Rifles, when the general (the Wellington-type general who regarded his troops as "the scum of the earth") would send a company on an uphill suicide mission to breach a fortification, the only militarily valid reason for anybody to voluntarily die is precisely for the rest of the unit, as Deneen says, which is what we rightly praise as heroism. Robert Jordan with his machine gun at the bridge in the Sierra de Guardarrama waiting for the Falangists to pass so he can take one shot at them before they kill him, maybe delaying them enough to give his Loyalist comrades a chance to escape, and he's already mortally wounded anyway. Dying for any other reason is merely a horrible waste, not a tribute to democracy, or God, or what have you.

Then, many or most of the causes for which we die in war are bad causes. When Brooks brings up Valley Forge, Normandy, and Guadalcanal, he's larding the argument with Brooksian sentimentality on behalf of the eventual winners we identify with. We shouldn't forget that some of the dead in those places were invested in causes they shouldn't have believed in, royalists, Nazis, Japanese emperor worshippers. Racists and fanatical slavers have died in wars, on the other side of the field from the Wide-Awakes; should we praise the former for living and dying their convictions? Caesar's and Pompey's armies, Octavian's and Antony's, fought over who was going to be the most powerful guy in the world. Was that worth it? And what about wars that hardly have any purpose at all, from the Somme to Khartoum?

Not that nobody ever dies for a principle, but that's not war, it's martyrdom. In war, there isn't time for such luxuries. The thing to commemorate at Memorial Day, I think, is the needlessness and pity of the sacrifice, not its alleged nobility.