Draft? PC Sensitivities Save the Day!

Thomas Sowell takes up the possibility of reviving the draft as a way of bolstering a strapped American military. He concludes that it isn't possible. Why? Well, take a look:

Back in the days of World War II, the military was drafting young men who were, by and large, patriotic Americans, people who felt they had a duty to protect the country from its enemies. Today, a military draft would bring in large numbers of people who have been systematically 'educated' to believe the worst about this country or, at best, to be nonjudgmental about the differences between American society and its enemies. The fact that we could use a larger Army of the kinds of people who have already volunteered to put their lives on the line does not mean that we can get it by adding warm bodies fresh from our politically correct schools and colleges, where standards and self-discipline are greatly lacking.

Apparently the low standards he's referring to are the ones shared by his column's editors.

A few points of interest here. First, if you understand anything about American history--as Sowell, a professor at Stanford, certainly should--you know that the peaceful draft that began in 1940 and continued through WWII was the true historical anomaly, not the Vietnam era protests or contemporary reluctance among college students to go to the hellhole that is Iraq. During the Revolutionary War, military discipline was nothing like what we expect today, and troops could often just leave and go home. For most of early American history, you could formally buy your way out of military service if you had enough money or found a substitute to go in your place. Damned unpatriotic richies. The Civil War produced deadly draft riots in New York City in 1863 as working class Irish refused to fight in a "nigger war." Damned unpatriotic Confederate sympathizers. WWI's draft was both controversial and unpopular, and it led to much of the civic unrest and political backlash against that war. So the idea that today's "PC" sensibilities have unleashed some strange anti-American wave in pop culture is at best silly, and at worst, the whiny and hysterical rant of the mentally unhinged.

Not surprisingly, then, Sowell is just dragging out the old PC shibboleth to save his sorry conservative ass from dealing seriously with the overextended condition of the military under his boy, George W. Bush. Convenient, that. Thank God for PC. It allows bellicose conservatives to dodge a bullet. (Kind of like the Texas National Guard did for W.) They also get to use the occasion to call for more ideological indoctrination in education. A two-fer! A skeptic might note that right-wing icons like anarcho-capitalist Ayn Rand have argued that conscription is an unconstitutional violation of the 13th amendment prohibition on slavery. Damned unpatriotic free-marketeers.

If we treat WWII patriotism as the anomaly, what does that tell us? Well, first of all, we'd had two terms of liberal Democratic governance that had legitimized the federal government and its policies for the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the working class, the racial minorities, and the well-educated. We also had an extraordinary situation, where Hitler was storming through Europe, our British allies were being bombed into the stone age, and the Japanese were menacing our western coast, eventually to attack Pearl Harbor. The conservatives, of course, bitched, sympathizing as so many of them did with the fascists. But they lost. Why? In 1940-5, you had a combination of wise, responsible national leadership and jarring circumstances that brought home the essential nature of the conflict. We wouldn't seem to have either of those today. I wonder why Sowell didn't want to make that point.