If you don't like how polarized U.S. politics has become,
don't just blame Republicans and Democrats. Consider
two other key contributors to today's politics of polarization -- the military and the academy.
Since the draft ended in 1973, the U.S. military has
become one of the nation's most conservative and rock-ribbed
Republican bastions. Around the same time, New Left activists
began storming the ramparts of higher education, moving
universities sharply to the left. As a result, these two ostensibly
nonpartisan institutions now define opposing poles on
the contemporary political spectrum.
Each institution harbors a particular set of mores and
beliefs that doesn't mesh easily with the other's. The U.S.
military is the repository for the stern martial virtues of
honor, valor, nationalism, discipline, and self-sacrifice. The
academy is the wellspring of the postmodern values of personal
autonomy, self-expression, cultural diversity, and profound
skepticism of authority of any kind.
In the barracks, where televisions are usually tuned to
Fox News, military personnel are socialized to view liberals
as unpatriotic twits. On campuses, anti-war and anti-military
attitudes remain de rigeur. More than three decades
after the Vietnam War ended, some elite colleges still ban
ROTC programs. And a coalition of law schools has gone
to court to keep military recruiters off their campuses, as a
way of protesting the Pentagon's policies toward gays.
Yet there is nothing natural or inevitable about antagonism
between the military and the academy. Before the
tumult of the 1960s, many U.S. universities were staid
places more likely to be roiled by fraternity pranks than sit-ins.
Mass conscription, begun in World War II and continued
through the first half of the Cold War, ensured that the
military faithfully mirrored U.S. society, with its dominant
New Deal coalition and "natural" Democratic majority.
Now, thanks to self-selection, the all-volunteer army has
moved to the nation's right flank. According to 2004 exit
polls, 34 percent of the voters in the presidential election
were conservative, 45 percent moderate, and 21 percent liberal.
But an Annenberg School study in the same year found
that, in the military, 40 percent of the officers say they are
conservative, 40 percent moderate, and just 7 percent liberal.
Only 15 percent of the officers were Democrats, while
47 percent were Republicans and 31 percent independents.
If fighters tilt right, thinkers lean even further to the left.
According to a national survey of college faculty, almost three-quarters professed left-of-center views, while only 15 percent
identified themselves as conservatives.
Only 11 percent owned up to being
Republicans. In the humanities and
social science departments, Democratic
professors outnumbered Republicans
by 7-1.
These polarities parallel what
William A. Galston and Elaine C.
Kamarck have called "the great sorting
out" -- the two parties' tendencies
to become less heterogeneous and
more ideologically pure. Interestingly, though, this phenomenon
doesn't seem to reflect fundamental changes in
Americans' political outlook. Since the 1970s, say Galston and
Kamarck, voters have shown a remarkable ideological consistency,
averaging 33 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate,
and 20 percent liberal.
Why, then, does polarization matter? For one thing, it
makes it harder for elected officials to define the common
good, much less find common ground. The Kulturkampf between the military and the academy is arguably worse for
the country, because unlike political parties, these institutions
are supposed to transcend narrow, factional interests
and instead advance our society's common aspirations. It's
not good for America's civic health when the formative
institutions of democracy are commandeered by one side or
the other in the baby boomers' perennial culture wars.
The existence of a political monoculture in the Pentagon
isolates military leaders from the full spectrum of opinion in
the society it is charged to protect. The hard-left takeover of
universities has imposed a stifling conformity of thought on
the very institutions that should be cultivating the spirit of
free inquiry. Instead of playing a vigorous and constructive
role in the nation's public debates, the professoriat seems to
be immured in an obtuse, "multiculti" scholasticism that
prides itself on being radically alienated from mainstream
politics.
What can be done to make the military and academia
more representative of the society they serve? Bringing back
the draft would surely diversify the former, though there's
little public appetite for it. As for colleges, maybe it's time
for progressive students to resurrect the Free Speech
Movement of the 1960s, taking aim this time at the new
establishment of political correctness.
Or maybe progressives should begin simply by serving
notice to the arch-conservatives in uniform and tenured
campus radicals: The institutions you have temporarily colonized
belong to all Americans, not to you.
