Some New Year’s thoughts on popular support for militarism in the United States.

Herein I want to think not individual evil (or sociopathic self-aggrandizement), but the consequences of collective violence as implemented in and through state policy. The occasion for this is the new year, though in truth I’ve been looking for an excuse to publish a blog post on the topic. More specifically I want to look at a year end commentary on the Foreign Policy site (http://foreignpolicy.com/), “The GOP Plan to Bring Back a Unipolar World” by Gordon Adams and Richard Sokolsky (December 30, 2015), and read it in tandem with Jonathan Waverley’s important—though deeply flawed—book Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth, and War (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

I’ll start with the latter because it speaks so directly to the domestic politics of the critique made by Adams and Sokolsky. Waverley is a quantitatively-oriented political scientist who uses a version of rational choice theory to argue that the voting public in a contemporary “democracy” is primed to support costly, militaristic policies—fighting unnecessary wars, spending large amounts of money on aggressive, capital intensive “defense”—and that in some narrow sense this is a “rational” choice.

Waverley uses the insurance adjuster’s concept of “moral hazard”—indicating a situation in which a person has a perverse incentive to engage in risky or expensive behavior, for example utilizing “gold star” health insurance for unnecessary tests and procedures because there is no direct cost to the individual or parking a rental car with full coverage in an obviously high risk area for a trivial gain in convenience or even just for the thrill of “sticking it” to the insurance company.

So for the individual in a nominally democratic society such as the United States, there is a tendency(per Waverley)  to support expensive forms of militarism in which the costs are primarily capital (in the form of taxes that pay for expensive military equipment) rather than social (risk of death, injury or life chance that would result, for example, from a wide-spread mobilization that would directly impact most families). Waverley uses polling data to show that “average” (meaning median income) voters in democratic societies consistently support aggressive military strategies even when the potential for definitive victory is small and the benefits marginal as long as they can pass the relative cost to others. In Waverley’s words:

“This book argues that, if the contemporary United States serves as a poster child for democratic militarism, it is not the result of a set of uniquely American contingencies. Rather, the potential for this pathology exists in any system where the majority of citizens have an important influence on policy. A suboptimal, militaristic grand strategy can result from rational calculations on the part of the average voter, and no marketplace of ideas will cure it.” (p. 5, emphasis added)

It is important to understand that Waverley is not arguing that wealthy elites in certain categories of production do not benefit disproportionately from a heavily capitalized militarism. Nor is he arguing that politicians don’t manipulate foreign policy for domestic political advantage. Rather, what he is arguing is that from a certain point of view—albeit a point of view I personally consider to be literally insane—this process is driven by the rational preferences of average voters given two conditions:

(1) the system is relatively democratic—here meaning that elected officials actually have to run for office, over and over, and that failure to appease the average voter is likely to result in their being unelected;

(2) relative inequality in the system, such that average (meaning median income) voters pay less in taxes than well-to-do voters.

Note that the argument here is not about one-percenters and corporate interests that may manage to shelter vast portions of their incomes, but a pitting of the relatively large number of tax-paying middle-income voters against relatively fewer “affluent” tax-payers who pay, in any system of income tax even if it were completely flat, more on a per capita basis.

By the way, Waverley is not arguing that aggressive militarism is efficient. Quite to the contrary he acknowledges that it is a net loss for the society taken as a whole, directing spending away from more useful public goods (health care, education, infrastructure) and often producing either no gain in security or a negative gain. Rather he is saying that from the point of view of the individual voter, acting in accord with his own interests, this is not irrational. The median voter is not being duped by political hawks or military contractors, it’s rather the other way around: political representatives pander to this self-interested choice and military contractors profit as a consequence—but a consequence they probably couldn’t conjure out of thin air.

Waverley’s argument, though he doesn’t always acknowledge as much, is contingent not just on a somewhat peculiar form of actuarial logic—what he calls “defense redistribution”—it also designates “security” as a preferential category of public good. He has little to say about this, but a key footnote is rather revealing:

“Even if we complicate the theory by allowing public funds to be spent on “butter” as well as guns, as long as the voter regards security as a normal good (i.e. more is better than less), no matter how much she may prefer other goods such as education, the book’s theory remains sound.” (p. 26)

That is, so long as we consider “security” to be the object-equivalent of, say income, education or longevity, his formulae still works. Except to think in such terms is rather obviously counterproductive (to say the least). Security is a notional, purely negative, good. There is no way to measure what didn’t happen—except of course in actuarial terms. But even actuarially calculations require some norm of occurrence. This is most obvious with life insurance—since everyone is guaranteed to die, the only question is when—but applies to every category. Such norms cannot be established for security unless we make the assumption that an increase in militarization (spending on the military and related “security” equipment and services) translates into an increase in security—and, in Waverley’s argument, it requires that median income voters routinely, as a matter of course, imagine that almost any war of choice will increase security.

This latter point—even if supported by polling data—constitutes a collective kind of insanity that emerges from individual “market” choices. Waverley’s argument about democratic militarism is important because it forces us to reconsider arguments—smacking of elitism—that average American voters tend to support an aggressive military policy and militarism because they are “dupes” (sheep, ignorant), and consider other motivations. Often, for example, average voters are said to be manipulated by fear narratives. Yet what Waverley shows is that such voters don’t think the threat level is higher than other voters (so says his analysis of the polling data), they are just willing to make military spending a higher priority.

I think that the assumption revealed in the footnote quoted above—that his conclusions require “security” to be considered a “normal” good when it is clearly a “threshold” good: an essential, sine qua non of social life that everyone wants, but one that is in reality is calibrated not just to cost, but to issues of convenience. In the real world people will ignore threats, even significant ones, to avoid inconvenience and are not particularly good at calculating actual threat levels—whereas they are very good at evaluating actual inconvenience levels.

This doesn’t necessarily undermine Waverley’s main point, which is about a situation of individual moral hazard, but here it is important to note that if security is adequate, then above a certain threshold, and people actually valued other public goods more, they would lean toward support of these other goods. The only consistent conclusion is that many voters do not actually value these other goods—eduction, infrastructure, healthcare—more highly than security.

But if anything like my contention that more security, above a certain level—you can call this the level of “white flight” if you like, where the relatively affluent, mostly white populations move away from urban centers to be ex-constituent and therefore not “vulnerable” to paying taxes that would support the public goods of the less affluent—is transparently absurd, then there must be some explanation why median income voters prefer security to these other public goods.

My best guess—and this is based on analogy with research done on “tax revolt” voting as it relates to changing demographics (see e.g. Alvarez and Bedroll 2004; Lee, Ottati and Hussain 2001; Wilson 2001)—is that an apparent  preference for security and aggressive military action over other goods is motivated by a kind of redistributive bigotry. A plurality of median income voters actively object to redistributive schemes in which someone who is worse off than they gets a higher proportion of the redistributed good. Median income voters prefer “security” spending not because they pay a lesser portion of it than affluent voters, but because they accrue one hundred percent of the benefits. While it is sometimes said that higher income voters have “more to lose”—this is fatuous when it comes to security against terror attacks or political violence, since at the most basic level everyone has exactly the same thing to lose: their lives and the lives of those they care about most.

This helps to explain the vast expansion of domestic policing and incarceration, at great cost, as well as spending on foreign military adventures and equipment. Again, this doesn’t negate Waverley’s point about moral hazard (and the rational choice of median voters in preferring “defense redistribution” to any other kind), it just complicates the reasons why median income voters have a preference for “security” over other potential redistributed goods and calls into question the presumptive (actuarial) rational choice motivations. It also points to, in my mind, a more compelling explanation of why such voters are willing to support wildly disproportionate spending on distant, implausible threats while spending much less on more immediate threats at home. It’s a sort of fallacy along the lines of looking for lost car keys under the street lamp, no matter where they were likely dropped, because “that’s where the light is.”

That is, hundreds of billions to take a shot at ousting a noxious dictator that poses only the most marginal “threat” to U.S. interests and virtually none to individual Americans seems like a good deal compared to the inconveniences that would be associated with trying to secure the homeland which in turn are preferred to redistribution types that might disproportionally benefit the less privileged (education, healthcare).

Which brings me to a look at Adam’s and Sokolsky’s Foreign Policy (30 Dec. 2015) article on the GOP longing for American hegemony. Relentlessly “realist” in their orientation, the authors provide a point-by-point critique of Republican aspirations to use military spending (and intervention) to “restore American greatness.”

The basic position of the leading Republican presidential candidates is that “Merika” should kick ass. Or as Adam and Sokolsky adumbrate it:

“To restore America’s strength, alliances, global standing, and leadership, the candidates have all, by and large (with the exception of Sen. Rand Paul), advocated greater use of force against IS, and an increased U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria. More broadly, almost all have called for a major priming of the Pentagon pump with billions of additional dollars to restore what they describe as our sapped military strength.”

But according to the consensus of the post-Cold War realists, this notion is misguided (which I am uncomfortably in agreement with). Why?

“…[B]ecause the world has changed in a fundamental way. The United States is simply no longer a global goliath bestriding a unipolar world. Turkey no longer jumps when America says frog. Putin is unmoved by U.S. demands. China is clearly expanding its own role, creating international economic organizations that include most of its closest allies but not the United States. The raw measures of military and economic power that are typically invoked to rebut the relative change in global power are not easily converted into the currency of diplomatic leverage.”

In other words, because a more aggressive foreign policy will not lead to America “calling the shots” but wasting money down a rat hole achieving nothing or worse, an increasingly insecure world. While stepping back and letting China and Russia waste their money on marginal interventions is a net gain in competitive terms–a key point for realists.

Yet the two FP authors understand the politics of the GOP. They write:

“…You can’t blame them for these public broadsides — Americans seem to be on their side. Recent polling shows that national security and terrorism concerns have become the most important election issue in the mind of the American public, rising from 21 percent in April to 40 percent in December, replacing jobs and the economy (which declined from 29 percent to 23 percent). According to a December 2015 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the public disapproves of Obama’s foreign policy by a ratio of 57 to 37 percent. Even before Paris and San Bernadino, Americans saw the GOP as more able to “protect the country from international terrorism and military threats,” by an advantage of 52 to 36 percent.”

Which makes perfect sense in Waverley’s thesis of the tendency of elected officials (or those seeking office) to pander to the “redistributive militarism” of the median income voter. But I would like, excuse me very much, to make a couple of points to the contrary.

First, Waverley’s contention that median income voters will prefer security as a public good to any other good is not completely stupid, but when he says “no marketplace of ideas will cure it” ( p. 6), he is indicating that contemporary GOP politics, so long as the the U.S. remains a representative (voter-influenced) “democracy” with fairly high levels of wealth inequality, is not only inevitable. This, to me, seems counter-intuitive. Not because of an idealized faith in democratic forms or “the people”—but for the purely empirical reason that “more belligerence” is not always seductive to median income voters–nor is it the key value for all such voters.

This is not a naive faith in human goodness on my part! Quite the contrary. If I am at least partially correct that a significant stratum of the medium income electorate votes not so much for redundant security, but against redistribution to those below the medium income level (often imagined as a proxy for race), then the hyper belligerence of the GOP is liable to be a losing game as compared to the relatively less bellicose policies of the Democrats. This accords with predictions related to the current election cycle—but even if a Republican is elected President it doesn’t undermine the basic critique of the idea of a hyper-positive valuation of redundant pseudo-security. If the swing is toward the GOP it might well be because of fear of a type of redistribution that is despised.

Second, I agree with Adam and Sokolsky when they say:

“In contrast to the Republican message, in today’s world, power is often “situational,” assembled by coalitions of like-minded countries with the capacity, resolve, and resources, to take effective action to advance shared interests. American leadership looks different in this world; it is most effective when the United States helps mobilizes these multilateral partnerships, and allows others to take ownership of the solution.”

But this is still a calculation which doesn’t take account of the real costs of war. The “effectiveness” of the United States or any country in real terms should factor the suffering of those who fight, those who become “collateral damage”, those who have to live with the aftermath of both—as well as the secondary and tertiary costs of providing for these direct and oblique victims of war and the “lost goods” possibilities of what could have been if the trillions currently being expended on notional security was redirected to other forms of the public good.

Finally, I think that Waverley overestimates the stupidity of the “median voter”. Yes—I think the “rational choice” impact of selecting security goods over other goods is real, but only because of the race-linked, class driven fear of “giving” to those with less. This fear is not, contra Waverley—and yes it is a hopeful assertion, not a research derived finding—not immune to discourse in the public sphere. Though… I would allow that it is resistant to glib manipulation and would be most impacted by a realization of a redistribution of wealth—most fundamentally a redistribution of income independent of labor—that would mitigate current levels of inequality and allow for a general perception of public spending and regulation that tends to benefit everyone.

References

Alvarez, Michael and Lisa Garcia Bedroll. 2004. “The Revolution against Affirmative Action in California: Racism, Economics and Proposition 209.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 4(1): 1-17.

Lee, Yeh-Ting, Victor Ottati and Imtiaz Hussain. 2001. “Attitudes toward ‘Illegal’ Immigration into the United States: Proposition 187.” Hispanic Journal of Behavior Sciences 23(4): 430-443.

Wilson, Thomas. 2001. “Americans’ Views on Immigration Policy: Testing the Role of Threatened Group Interests.” Sociological Perspectives 44(4): 485-501.