This is Democracy – Episode 87: Coronavirus is Not a War: Problems of Militarism and Public Health

Announcers: This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today’s topic surrounds one of the most significant transformations in our society over the last 200 years, which is what our scholars today call the creeping or perhaps precipitous militarization of American democracy in American culture. Founders of our society expected us to be a society with very small military presence and we become a society with a very large military presence, and war has become the metaphor we use for everything from conflicts overseas to health crises at home.

Our two experts today are two of the leading people writing about this transformation, what it means for our society today and how we need to escape the militarized thinking that seems to dominate so much of our society. We’re very fortunate to have with us two professors: Professor Neta Crawford, who’s a professor and chair of political science at Boston University. She’s the author of numerous books, including Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars, and Argument and Change in World Politics, which is actually a book I’ve assigned to students for years. In addition, we have Catherine Lutz. She’s the Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. She’s the author as well of numerous books including War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Bases of Empire and The Bases of Empire has a dual meaning, and Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Among other things, Neta and Cathy are co-directors of the Cost of War Project at Brown University, which I think is one of the best projects in tracing the cost of America’s recent wars. I often use that data myself in my research and teaching. They published this week, a wonderful and informative piece in The Hill called Fighting a virus with the wrong tools. We believe that piece to this podcast. Neta and Cathy, thank you for joining us today.

Catherine Lutz: Thanks for having us.

Neta Crawford: My pleasure.

Jeremi Suri: Before we go to our discussion with Neta and Cathy, we of course have our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem?

Zachary Suri: “Carpet Bombing Disease.”

Jeremi Suri: Well, let’s hear about “Carpet Bombing Disease.”

Zachary Suri: “Carpet Bombing Disease.” Could Washington have imagined our military are 1.3 million tank armed nuclear arsenal force, burning down jungles, assassinating foreign leaders to wear horse, and parading their guns on TV advertisements that make war that like a video game. Could Ben Franklin comprehend our armies, the biggest piece of the American apple pie with apple slices to make civilization die and cinnamon crust to put a million and six feet under. We’re waiting for Armageddon with our tanks and heat-seeking missiles. Hoping to prove our greatness by pocking overpower other people’s, thinking the American Dream must be hidden niche whether in hills or war ravaged steeples, or trying to find their best lame excuses for torture. But Lincoln could have told us that safety does not come from waiting for the burglar with a gun pointed at the door that militarism division is a smoke snorting bore waiting in the wings of democracy. Where do we find ourselves dying to be obvious and disease, like the biblical pestilences are bombastic plagues, whereas the threat but in our own hands multiplying in our face like some spoof on the jets blasting over football stands, some prank, the Germans have crawled into the budget barren outcrops of public health. How will we find ourselves after trying to carpet bomb disease, but standing in the glorious desolation of the survivors and fleet, a few thousand chanting the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, praying war will save us from nature’s grievance.

Jeremi Suri: That’s a very powerful poem, Zachary, particularly the ending. What is your poem about?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about the American obsession with our military and with power abroad. But in many ways too, it’s about how militarism has crept into every facet of our lives, and we see it very strongly in this public health crisis that we’re now in the middle of.

Jeremi Suri: Well, I think that’s a perfect spot to turn to Neta and Cathy. Neta, what do we mean when we talk about militarism? What does that concept mean in practice?

Neta Crawford: Well, it’s essentially making the military seem like or be the tool you turn to first. You believe that it’s effective, efficient, that it’s going to solve your problems over other tools. The militarism really is essentially the idea that the use of force is effective because that’s what people respond to.

Jeremi Suri: I see. Cathy, you are an anthropologist among other things, what Neta explained so clearly, how does that influence our culture as a society?

Catherine Lutz: Well, it is based in a set of beliefs, Neta has identified a couple of them, the idea that forces efficient, let’s say you can maybe get something done if you were in a hurry, better to use force because it will reach your goal much more efficiently. There’s a whole set of cultural beliefs that people absorb growing up in this society in different ways in different sub-cultural areas of the country. But it’s a very, very widespread assumption on the left and the right that war is tragic but often necessary. So there’s really a very long list along set of ideas that help to support the institution itself so that the cultural supports, there we think of them as pillars of belief that hold up the whole political economic system of war spending, war preparation, and war waging.

Zachary Suri: Why is militarism so dangerous for society like ours?

Neta Crawford: Well, I think it has to do with the fact that when you say that the use of force is going to be in every case legitimate or effective or efficient, what you’re saying is that you’re not going to let the force of the better argument that is a democratic approach guide you or that you’re going to put your resources into what seemed to be the most effective tool. So it’s both an opportunity cost for a democracy and it’s also basically undermining the basic idea of democracy and human rights, which is that people together will decide what it is good and right to do.

Catherine Lutz: The cost of having this belief system, as Neta said, it’s an opportunity cost for democracy, the better argument, the collective discussion and the national security state that’s developed in tandem with this is one that just requires secrecy, requires that we not have the discussion. Leave this to the experts and the use of force is what we’re always told, even though there’s nothing more important in terms of democratic deliberation than the decision to go to war. It’s quite ironic that we’ve gotten to that, but there’s also opportunity cost that our project, the Costs of War Project, has identified some of them through the work of Dr. Heidi Peltier who’s talked about the way in which investing in military equipment and the military institution creates far fewer jobs than other kinds of investments, including investments in health care partly because they are obviously much more labor-intensive kinds of sectors, but also because it saves lives rather than loses them to a society. So that’s a huge opportunity cost that we’ve invented in war rather than green energy or public health.

Jeremi Suri: Well, Cathy, one of the things that has struck me about the Cost of War Project is that you and Neta and your other collaborators document the costs of our wars, the actual cost, and it’s mind-blowing in some ways. What do you say to those who would argue that the money we spend on the military has all kinds of positive effects through innovation, developing the Internet, Tang, all things of that kind.

Catherine Lutz: I love that image. Yeah, I love the image.

Neta Crawford: But I think Tang we can chalk up to the space program, but never mind, I digress.

Catherine Lutz: The image of drinking Tang while surfing the web is such a boon to civilization. Some of that assumption about the efficiency is just wrong just as it is on in the case of force itself, whether that can create a new social order in a way that is more effectively and efficiently than something else. The same thing is true here. We have such sharp examples with this virus and the call on the military to provide things that people now are acting like we ought to be extremely grateful that this ship has sailed up the Hudson to deliver 1000 beds to the people of New York. The cost of that ship, the inefficiency and expense of delivering health care that way rather than having built a hospital years ago that would have served undeserved neighborhoods in New York all this time with a 1000 beds and be available today. That’s the kind of thing that is true on so many grounds that more direct investments straight into the civilian world of need would get you much more bang for your buck to use the wrong metaphor again.

Jeremi Suri: You see, even you’re caught in this culture of militarism, Cathy.

Catherine Lutz: Yes.

Jeremi Suri: Neta.

Neta Crawford: Well, if you want a hospital or you want a road, better to build that thing directly than have the military give it to you as a side benefit. So all of the innovation that we could think of as coming from a military industrial complex could have been actually provided for much more directly efficiently, effectively perhaps than through investing in a military industrial complex and getting those things as a side benefit or a side payment. So I completely agree with Cathy there, it’s not just that we could get these things, ablative surfaces for warheads that are returning to Earth. We could have got something that could resist heat much more effectively by not putting it on a nuclear warhead, but investing. But we distorted our economy in our belief system so much that, that is sometimes the only way we can get resources directed to something. That’s the deep to my mind, fundamental distortion of this 150-200 years of militarism that sometimes we can only get something if it’s a side benefit of the war system. So think about investing in women and children of veterans or of people who’ve been killed in wars, that social welfare system has been a consequence in some cases of war, but couldn’t we have done that without war? Unlikely in a society that says that, our highest priority is the control of everything, everywhere all the time, out there and at home. But if we had a more compassionate society that had different beliefs, we might have gotten it.

Jeremi Suri: Now, this is a great point and it invokes the work of Rita [inaudible 00:13:49] and others as well as [inaudible 00:13:52]. I’m curious as a historian; is this something that’s been baked into our system forever? Because many of our first social welfare programs, going back to the 19th century are themselves built around the military, one thinks about Civil War pensions, which was the largest federal outlay in the second half of the 19th century. Is this something baked into our system or how has it become more of a problem? How has it become more significant over time?

Catherine Lutz: Well, it’s definitely if you look at federal spending on the military, that is definitely a post-World War II phenomenon that we expect to have these eyes and hands on everything around the globe at all times. Before World War II and after each of the previous wars, the military demobilized in a really substantial way, and it’s only in the post-World War II period that we have this giant standing army. So that’s definitely not a timeless feature of the American government or our society.

Jeremi Suri: Sure. You referred to this earlier, Cathy, I think quite appropriately as the national security state. The phrase national security itself was very infrequently used, if at all before World War II and it seems ubiquitous now, right?

Catherine Lutz: Right. That’s where I think people are starting to notice and I think this hopefully will be something that cracks open the discussion a little bit, this virus, because people are asking, “I don’t feel very secure.” Here is the richest country on Earth, we should be able to have purchased a public health system that keeps us safe. So the idea of going overseas and looking for threats there is going to have perhaps hopefully less allure than it might have absent the virus.

Neta Crawford: Could I intervene with a couple of other thoughts about this? Cathy, you and I have often talked about whether or not and how deep is American militarism. I tend to think of it as being foundational in the sense that from the beginning, the United States is built on war and dispossession of land of other people. That is from the colonial period through the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, all the Indian Wars, the US-Mexico War, the Civil War, where Indian Wars continued throughout, the continuation of the Indian Wars and then moving into the Philippines with the Spanish-American War, the militarism is a constant. But what you rightly identify is the way that in the past when military spending reached maybe 60 percent of national government expenditures, let’s say the War of 1812 or the Civil War, it went down afterwards and we didn’t have a permanent military establishment, there was a decline in the number of people in the standing army. But what we see post-World War II is the continuation of that. So the only wrinkle I’m adding here is to say that there is a part of the United States history, its DNA which is completely dependent upon and imbued with the sense that might makes right, we can take what we want, when we want by the use of force, and it works. It’s deployed intermittently in the 18th and 19th century but much more frequently in the 20th century, and has become permanent in the 20th century and 21st century, this permanent mobilization.

Jeremi Suri: I think that’s very well said. One of the points I often make to students is that scale matters, so this might be something that was germinating in the history of our society for 200-300 years in different formats. But it does seem to have multiplied in its scale, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, I think that’s what the two of you are saying. Why do you think that’s happened? What’s been the cause? Is this a conspiracy? What has multiplied the effects of militarism in our society for the last six, seven decades?

Catherine Lutz: So many things. I think one of the largest components of this is the development of these large corporations for whom are these large government contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, the nuclear weapons and so on are basically their lifeblood. The decline in the quality of our democracy as companies of that ilk and others, have increasing power over our representatives through the lack of campaign finance controls. We have again a credible incentive structure for continued massive investment in not just the weaponry and all of the contracts more generally, but in the idea that supports this high level of spending which is that the world is a world of threat, that force works and that this is who we are and have to be.

Jeremi Suri: So yours is a political economic argument in part?

Catherine Lutz: Yeah.

Neta Crawford: I would only add to that what you got to the end there, Cathy, which is, I think that the mobilization of fear is essential here. Not just a reaction to what is out there, but the idea that the world’s a threatening place. The best way to respond to those threats, according to this logic of militarism is with force and the readiness to use it. But I also think that the mobilization of fear is political. So think back to the 1980s, or the late 1970s when the committee on the present danger told us that the Soviet Union was building bigger weapons, more warheads, they were going to come across East Germany into West Germany, and we needed to have more military force to respond to this imminent threat. So with the end of the Cold War that declines, but the other threats had to be essentially found in the post-Cold War era. The threat in that period became what the DOD called uncertainty. So we were prepared to respond to a world where we wouldn’t know what the threats would be becoming, but we had to be prepared for everything.

Then in the post 911 world, we’ve got reasonable fear but no sense of what risks we’re willing to live with. In fact, the fear becomes unreasonable and we need to be prepared to again meet uncertainty in everything, everywhere, all the time. I think that the psychological piece here is really important in the fact that we can’t calm our nervous systems down enough to have a good understanding of what risks are we willing to live with? If we can’t have 100 percent certainty that nothing bad will happened to us, what can we endure? Then the other part of that is not just the domestic, military, industrial complex, and their influence on legislatures, which I think can’t be overstated in some respects, but it’s the desire to maintain American hegemony, and to not lose face and influence in the world.

It seems to me as if in America, which is in decline in part because we spend so much money on military forces and protecting everything, everywhere, all the time, is anxious to hold on to that hegemony, its great power status. When history tells us that you can’t hang on to that great power status by spending, overreaching, creating enemies. In fact, what we’re doing is counterproductive to maintaining that great power status. It’s this American imaginary of the great power, greater than Rome and we must maintain this position, or there’s something wrong with us. That is totally linked with the American standard of living and our sense of things should be cheap and easy and we should be able to completely control and grow our economy, and that nothing bad should happen to us in terms of both economics and politics, we have to be like a Leviathan, and if we can’t do that, there’s something wrong. So that’s in part where we keep spending high levels of our Treasury on war, when in fact it’s counterproductive.

Jeremi Suri: Neta, this is really powerful what you said and it connects directly into the piece that you and Cathy published this week in The Hill, which in some ways motivated this conversation, and I hope everyone will read the piece. You and Cathy argue that, just as following the lines of what you just articulated, that our hyper militarization has now become self-defeating, in that in this pandemic, using war is a metaphor that’s actually hurting us. Can you elaborate on that?

Catherine Lutz: Well, actually, I would say something about that, but I also want to give an example of what Neta is talking about that connects these as well. Let me start with the example. There’s this aircraft carrier that were carrying 5,000 sailors, which everyone has heard about in the last couple days, who’s been watching the news?

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Catherine Lutz: The rear admiral at the command of the ship has been relieved of his duty for having had the temerity to announce more publicly than he should have, that his sailors are sick. Again, this is the 11th aircraft carrier group out and around the planet doing the work that Neta suggests it’s doing, but they’re being fell by a virus just like anyone else. The idea that he was not supposed to be announcing a weakness in a country that could’ve done without eight or nine of those aircraft carrier groups and still been the dominant C4’s on the planet, is a sign of that again, irrationality. The idea that there is no limit to the invulnerability and the power that the United States has to wield. In the meantime, they’re landing on the Island of Guam and putting their sailors began with the racialized arrogance that Neta is pointing to in our longer history, on the island, in the civilian neighborhoods, in a hotel where when they already have a third of the island’s landmass under their control where they could have put this the sick sailors.

So this is just an example of how when you look at the way in which these two things, the virus and this giant military, intersect the irrationality, the militarism, and the problems that come with it are very visible. But what’s happening instead is that people are turning to the military, both in government and in the general public, and assuming that this is who is going to save us; they’re going to send us their ships, they’re going to send us their ventilators, they’re going to build us hospitals, they’re going to send us their personnel. They’re doing some of those things, but they’re not doing it in the same way that the civilian sector might do it, and they’re not doing it at the same cost as the civilian sector would have done it. Again, some of those resources should have been in civilian hands to start with, so that the public health problems that the America has had for years, on high rates of infant mortality, maternal mortality in the African-American community, high rates of diabetes, and cancers, and sorts of diseases of our environment and our food supply. These are the kinds of problems that might have been tackled with those funds, which instead were fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the ends that we’ve seen. Now, I don’t know if that answers the question that you have asked?

Jeremi Suri: Yes. That’s a very powerful point and an example that’s not only poignant, but deeply troubling. Neta, did you want to add to that?

Neta Crawford: No, that nails it.

Jeremi Suri: So then what should we be responding to when people, and it’s not just those on one side of the political spectrum, we have all kinds of individuals saying that we’re at war with the pandemic. Is that the wrong thing to say?

Neta Crawford: I think it’s wrong to equate any kind of struggle, any mobilization with war. The kind of mobilization that we could be engaged in, where compassion, and care, and the use of resources to help. It shouldn’t be difficult to find a metaphor of love and connection, but instead, we have to mobilize a metaphor of defeat and basically, destruction. That’s true that this is a struggle, but not all struggles need to be equated with war. I find that disturbing in a sense. Again, it’s a valorizing war. When war is valorized, that means that it becomes seen as both possible and legitimate. There are other things that we are doing which are not war, like we’re actually helping people by helping them help providing, for instance, ways of people to make masks at home and contribute those masks to hospitals. That’s a gesture of generosity and care. It’s not war.

Catherine Lutz: Actually, with a metaphor, the metaphor directs our attention to the virus. It says we want to kill the virus, the virus is the enemy. President Trump in particular has rift on this quite a bit, the idea that it’s an invisible enemy, and we’re destroying it. One can’t say that that’s not what we’re trying to do, we are trying to destroy the ability of the virus to replicate and move from person to person. But because we focus on that, as opposed to mutual care, and the metaphors that we would be using there that might be more available in a different kind of society would allow us to focus more on that. Again, those stories aren’t absent from the media or from the way we talk to each other but certainly, the much more common metaphor is one that doesn’t focus on that.

Jeremi Suri: Right. That makes a lot of sense. War implies violence and it implies winners and losers, and the love metaphor that you both invoked or something similar to that, would it imply mutuality in a way that’s probably more appropriate. Zachary, you want to ask about where we go from here. We would like to close on a positive note. What can we learn? How can we do better? Zachary, go ahead.

Zachary Suri: How do you think we begin to counter this trend militarism which has really captured our country over the past few decades. How do we begin to counteract that?

Catherine Lutz: I think we do have the opportunity right now to object to the use of the military or the celebration of the military as the savior here. I’m not maybe answering the question of how we go backwards from where we are now to go forward to a better social worker, but I do think that in this current crisis and moment, the opportunity is there to at least push back on a further valorization of the military as the be-all and end-all institution of American society. Certainly, public polls show that over the last many decades, the US military has gotten more and more public support for a variety of reasons, more and more of a sense that soldiers are super citizens and that the institution has the highest character. It’s they, not the nurses and doctors who have been allowed to get off the planes first or get salutes at sporting events. But one can imagine that if we push this forward, we’re thanking health care workers, and the cleaners, and the food service workers in the hospitals, thanking them for their service and community care rather than an institution whose main purpose will always be to wage war.

Neta Crawford: I also wanted to respond to that, if I could.

Jeremi Suri: Please.

Neta Crawford: I think, Zachary, one of the important things that we can do is think about if we had a world that we’d all like to see, one where our basic needs are met, one where people could get the kind of education that they needed to pursue their aspirations, one where you were doing work that you felt was valued and valuable. When we think about that kind of world, we don’t get it by building a military. We might be able to protect it if we were attacked, but were not being attacked for the most part. We get the world that we want to see by investing in life-affirming institutions and practices and learning how to deal with conflict in ways that are not militarized, but rather that are respectful and deeply democratic.

I think to get there, what we have to do is decrease military spending in the US which is much greater than any of its rivals, and put those resources where they could do better work for us, not just at home but in the rest of the world. I think it’s really rethinking about how we conceive of security. What security means? It’s called human security in the literature but really, it’s an ethic of care and responsibility and democracy that we need to be promoting rather than putting all of our eggs into a basket that say the best thing that we can do is deploy resources that were meant to kill, and we’re going to deploy those ill-fitting resources for war. I think we have to just start prioritizing these other values rather than the military one.

Jeremi Suri: I think, Neta and Cathy, that’s a perfect point to close on what you have elucidated in your scholarship, both of you, through the Costs of War Project at Brown that I hope everyone will look at through a recent article in the Hill. In your insights today, you’ve elucidated the ways in which we as a very rich, well-endowed society have perhaps misused many of our resources. We see this so clearly today when, as you said, we’re confronted with this huge health crisis and we seem so under-resourced in some of the basic human care that we would expect to citizens in any society but particularly, in a society with the resources that we have. If nothing else, this moment, as you’ve pointed out so well and you anticipated in your scholarship, this moment should force us to rethink how we allocate our resources and the priorities we set at home as well as abroad. I want to thank you for joining us today, for lending your insights. I want to encourage our listeners to read your scholarship, and of course, I want to thank Zachary for his poem as well. Thank you for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

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Announcer 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com. .

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