Political Ideals and The Military Ethic

the i77o's to the 1960's, from the Committees of Correspondence to S.N.C.C., American political rhetoric has remained remarkably constant. Liberty and equality. Although each generation of reformers discovers in anger that rhetoric is not the only form of reality and that political ideals are at best imperfectly institutionalized, the liberal tradition (of which Locke is fons if not origo) has dominated American political thought and, to a much lesser degree, political behavior.* Almost unopposed by a Burkean conservatism not yet reconciled to the French Revolution, protected by two oceans, nourished by natural and then by technological abundance, liberalism has flourished like an only child. Liberalism, like an only child, has its inadequacies. Among them is its inability to understand the uses of power in general and of military power in particular. More particularly still, liberalism has failed to comprehend the military ethic. Political and economic power unprecedented in American history are now concentrated at the Pentagon. The military establishment takes fifty percent of the Federal budget and ten percent of the Gross National Product. The biological and thermonuclear weapons at its disposal awe the leaders of this nation even as they deter (we hope) the leaders of the Communist bloc. Although total war seems unlikely, limited wars are and will probably continue