Militarized Conservatism and the End(s) of Higher Education

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.truth-out.org/militarized-conservatism-and-ends-higher-education


There can be little doubt that America has become a permanent warfare state.(1) Not only is it waging a war in three countries, but its investment in military power is nearly as much as all of the military budgets of every other country in the world combined. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute states, "The USA's military spending accounted for 43 per cent of the world total in 2009, followed by China with 6.6 per cent; France with 4.3 per cent and the UK with 3.8 per cent."(2) The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost Americans a staggering $1 trillion to date, second only in inflation-adjusted dollars to the $4 trillion price tag for World War II."(3) Pentagon spending for 2011 will be more than $700 billion. To make matters worse, as Tom Englehardt points out, "We dominate the global arms trade, monopolizing almost 70% of the arms business in 2008, with Italy coming in a vanishingly distant second. We put more money into the funding of war, our armed forces and the weaponry of war than the next 25 countries combined (and that's without even including Iraq and Afghan war costs)."(4) Moreover, the United States maintains a massive ring of military bases and global presence around the world, occupying "over 560 bases and other sites abroad"(5) and deploying over 300,000 troops abroad, "even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services."(6) In spite of how much military expenditures drain much-needed funds from social programs, the military budget is rarely debated in Congress or a serious object of discussion among the public. Rather than avoid squandering resources and human lives on foreign wars, we avoid "the realities and costs of war."(7)

War is now normalized even as the United States becomes more militarized, moving closer to a national security state at home and an imperial/policing power abroad. Military historian Andrew Bacevich is right in arguing, "The misleadingly named Department of Defense serves in fact as a Ministry of Global Policing."(8) War has become central to American character, but what is often unacknowledged is that its perpetual wars abroad are increasingly matched by a number of wars being waged on the domestic front. Such a disconnect becomes clear in the refusal of politicians, anti-public intellectuals and the general public to acknowledge how the federal deficit has been run up by our military adventures. As Frank Rich argues, "The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-play later war" in Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently in Libya.(9) Similarly, as the spirit of a hyper-militarized America bleeds into everyday life, politics increasingly becomes an extension of war, and right-wing, liberal and conservative politicians eagerly embrace a militaristic approach to policy and the need to cleanse the social order of any institution, mode of dissent, social group and public sphere willing to question its state of permanent war and its militarized and unchecked embrace of economic Darwinism. These foreign and domestic wars are not unrelated, given that they are waged in the interests of right-wing militarists, neoconservatives, liberals and corporate moguls - all of whom have a political and economic stake in such military incursions abroad and wars at home. Wars make the economic elite even richer just as they undermine civil liberties, public services and public dissent. A hyper-militarized America has not only fueled violations of executive power, it has also promoted armed conflicts that are directly related to an economic crisis that has produced a wave of political extremism in the United States, while furthering the rise of a punishing state that places the burdens of the current economic crisis on the backs of the poor. We seem to have no trouble in spending money for the production of organized violence designed to kill people, but we have little money to spend on education, health care, or other serious social problems facing the United States. As one educational journal pointed out:

This juxtaposition of robust war spending and inadequate support for education highlights the moral bankruptcy of political and economic leaders who seem to find endless piles of money to kill people abroad but not much to educate them at home. And, of course, the relationship is plain: The more dollars spent on war, the fewer available for human needs - whether alternative energy, food stamps, in-home elder care, public libraries or keeping teachers in their classrooms.(10)

War is not merely the outgrowth of polices designed to protect the security and well-being of the United States. It is also, as President Dwight Eisenhower pointed out, part of a military metaphysics - a complex of forces that includes corporations, defense industries, politicians, financial institutions and universities. Rich conservatives not only produce moral panics and fund collective rage and anger; they also lobby for and finance the military-industrial-academic complex.(11) War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society. As a mode of public pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a culture addicted to the production of organized violence, largely circulated through various registers of popular and media culture that extend from high fashion, television and Hollywood movies to the production of violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon. The spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers. A hyper-militarized America lives amid a thick fog of historical and social amnesia more than willing to forget that wars not only cause economic distress, but also, as my colleague David L. Clark points out, renders human beings into machines, "converts economies into factories of death" and "threatens to transform the world into a vast graveyard."(12) But war is not something that takes place elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind; it also produces military-like interventions that take the form of a corporate war on the social state and a right-wing war on any mode of critical education.