Thoughts on mandatory conscription and democracy

Hi everybody

So this is kinda an odd thing for my third blog post to be about, but I was watching this Vaush video about how Germany is considering reinstating mandatory military service in response to growing threats from Russia and the USA being an unreliable ally. Vaush was opposed to it, on some practical and some moral grounds, but I feel like I basically support it, at least in theory. I thought about arguing in the comments about why I think that mandatory conscription can be justified from a left wing perspective, but I felt like I wouldn't be able to make a nice concise argument that'd be worthy of a comment. So instead I want to brain vomit here and force all my nonexistant readers to listen to something that wasn't worthy of a Youtube comment.

So my feelings about mandatory military conscription are mostly rooted in my extreme love for the ideal of democracy (hence why I love John Dewey - I'll get around to discussing that more in the future). Basically, I think that democracy, as direct and participatory as humanly possible, is a great moral good in and of itself. I think that fundementally, even though humans are all kind of stupid individually, if you put enough people together on an equal playing field and let them figure out problems together, they will cancel out each other's stupidity and come up with a good solution. It might not be the best solution, but the beauty of democracy is that it is self correcting. As a biologist, I also rly love evolution and the way complex, perfectly designed solutions can emerge just from mindless self correction and trial and error, and I feel like democracy is kind of a more intentional version of that same sort of principle at work.

In my mind though, the big caveat that causes a democracy to sink or swim is the level of actual participation its people have in it. Voting for politicians isn't good enough - politicians become a class set apart from the rest of the people with their own interests, stopping it from being a DEM(people)ocracy and turning it into some sort of politicianocracy. Only including democracy in the civic and not the economic sphere has the same problem - in this case, capitalists become little dictators making decisions not alligned with the people's will. I even think that referenda aren't rly even participatory enough - sure, regular people get to vote on it, but they aren't actively involved in debate and compromise with each other, so the actual process of democracy in action isn't rly happening. My preference for democracy is sortion to choose regular people to sit on "legislative juries" and work out the solution to problems together - but all my ideas about that are another blog post for a later date.

Where this all applies to military conscription is my idea that, if a military is to exist, its purpose should be to defend democracy. Obviously, the ideal would be no military at all, but I feel like even in a democratic socialist utopia there will still be bad people (terrorists, cult leaders, wannabe dictators) who threaten the continuation of democracy and the safety of the people, so I think it is good to have some sort of organized defense against that. And since only democracy can adequately defend democracy, and in my mind democracy is defined by active participation, the best form of military for a democratic government to use is a democratically run one made up of its citizens.

I think living in a democracy requires total participation from all of its members, doing your civic duties to uphold the democracy in return for the benefits it brings you. This duty should extend up to and including defending democracy by force against those who wish to destroy it, if it comes to that. A democracy that outsources its military service to a professionalized group is forfeiting some of its democratic control away to the whims of a specific class (in this case, the kind of people who want to join the army). This is bad for practical, less ideological reasons too - it self selects for certain types of people who might choose to act against what most people want them to do in service of their own interests. For example, here in the US, a disproportionate number of soldiers are rural, working class men (due to lack of job opportunities and cultural biases). Since this group is also very likely to be Trump supporters, I worry a little that they might support him even against the wishes of the rest of the US government. If the military were a representive slice of the American population, this would be less of a problem.

As a lover of direct democracy, I of course love Switzerland (which i think has the best democratic system in the world at the moment), and Switzerland has mandatory military service in a way that I feel is a good implementation (Finland too, which I also love, tho in this casemostly for its education system). I think it is ok to have volunteers in the military if people choose, but everyone should at least be given the neccesary training to be prepared to defend democracy if they are called upon to bolster numbers. I also think it meshes well with a neutral, defensive geopolitical stance - there is more pushback to sending soldiers across the seas to fight in pointless wars when it could be anyone's son, not just volunteers who "signed up for this". Think about how much opposition there was to Vietnam, a war fought by conscripts, versus Afghanistan or the other volunteer wars in the middle east. Conscription seems like it is likely to make a country more reserved in the way it uses its military.

I am also totally OK with the idea of concientious objectors serving in non-combat roles - in fact, I think that mandatory service would be even better in lots of other fields beyond just the military (firefighting, caring for the elderly, building homes for the needy, etc). I know that some states in Germany have mandatory "hand and hitch-up service" to get things done in small towns where there otherwise would not be enough labor - I like this.

Anyway, thats the end of the ramble for today. Hopefully I sort of got my point across. I think that the write up on the Wikipedia about arguments for consciption makes the point much more succinctly than I ever could, but I wanted to put in my two cents. I think of myself as a leftist, but I think when it comes to non-economic issues, the classical liberals like Rosseau, Jefferson, and Touqueville rly knew what they were talking about, and I really agree with them, especially regarding ideas of the social contract and the value of democratic citizenship. I don't like war, but if we are going to fight it, WE might as well be the ones doing the fighting.

~ TD

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