During my years as a reporter at Columbia, I covered talks from a number of military generals and found each of them troublingly ideological, emphasizing not winning wars and keeping the peace but framing various progressive hobbyhorses--from DEI to gender to climate change--as "national security issues." This was during Obama's second term, long before the Biden-Harris administration weaponized DEI and Covid mandates to disproportionately target conservatives and stack the Pentagon with Democratic loyalists. So while I share the ideal and goal of a non-partisan military, and understand why one might believe using the military for immigration enforcement is inappropriate, the politicization cow had left the barn well before Donald Trump entered politics.
This is just standard-fare whataboutism in slightly more elevated language than we typically get. It follows the same formula it always does: "We did this because you did it first, and worse." You list a series of things you call "troublingly ideological"—but what's troublingly ideological, actually, is the decision to characterize things like striving for a diverse military and addressing climate change as "progressive hobbyhorses." You think that because you sprinkle in "I understand why one might believe Trump's actions are inappropriate" it means you're not engaged in rank Trumpian apologetics?
I'd expect such reflexive ad hominem strawmanning from a miscellaneous commenter, not from the senior editor of a publication and executive director of an NGO. At no point have I argued against a diverse military or addressing climate change, but the number one priority of the military should be protecting America and keeping our troops from getting killed.
One of the Biden administration's top priorities was their "whole of government" approach to embedding Kendi-DiAngelo-esque dogma about race and gender as deeply and broadly across the federal apparatus as possible, and that included the military. It is not unreasonable to wonder if the administration's fixations on demographic bean-counting, waging culture wars, and going green might have been contributing factors to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that lost some of ours, or to the ramshackle state of our rusting fleet.
It might be worth considering that contemptuous dismissal of disillusioned independents' critiques of Democratic policies as "whataboutism" has not worked out very well for Democrats in recent years. Ignoring the extent to which Obama and especially Biden shredded norms in hubristic presumption of a permanent Democratic majority, and how badly that's ultimately blown up in progressives' faces and turbocharged Trumpism, is only to reinforce an epistemic bubble that does the center-left no favors.
"At no point have I argued against a diverse military or addressing climate change, but the number one priority of the military should be protecting America and keeping our troops from getting killed."
This is a reasonable position. Thanks for clarifying and for the exchange—and, of course, for reading our work.
Sounds as though you don’t agree with Truman’s decision to fully integrate the armed forces or allowing women in combat or other more enlightened thinking to “invade” command thinking? Perhaps being realistic to changes in the shifting winds of science and society along with having to deal with administration changes and their accompanying goals has been a way to keep from “politicizing”the armed forces quite unlike the damn foolishness of what is happening at the DOD these days which is showing itself to be totally politicized by an idiot Commander-in-Chief and his drunk accomplice.
During my years as a reporter at Columbia, I covered talks from a number of military generals and found each of them troublingly ideological, emphasizing not winning wars and keeping the peace but framing various progressive hobbyhorses--from DEI to gender to climate change--as "national security issues." This was during Obama's second term, long before the Biden-Harris administration weaponized DEI and Covid mandates to disproportionately target conservatives and stack the Pentagon with Democratic loyalists. So while I share the ideal and goal of a non-partisan military, and understand why one might believe using the military for immigration enforcement is inappropriate, the politicization cow had left the barn well before Donald Trump entered politics.
This is just standard-fare whataboutism in slightly more elevated language than we typically get. It follows the same formula it always does: "We did this because you did it first, and worse." You list a series of things you call "troublingly ideological"—but what's troublingly ideological, actually, is the decision to characterize things like striving for a diverse military and addressing climate change as "progressive hobbyhorses." You think that because you sprinkle in "I understand why one might believe Trump's actions are inappropriate" it means you're not engaged in rank Trumpian apologetics?
I'd expect such reflexive ad hominem strawmanning from a miscellaneous commenter, not from the senior editor of a publication and executive director of an NGO. At no point have I argued against a diverse military or addressing climate change, but the number one priority of the military should be protecting America and keeping our troops from getting killed.
One of the Biden administration's top priorities was their "whole of government" approach to embedding Kendi-DiAngelo-esque dogma about race and gender as deeply and broadly across the federal apparatus as possible, and that included the military. It is not unreasonable to wonder if the administration's fixations on demographic bean-counting, waging culture wars, and going green might have been contributing factors to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that lost some of ours, or to the ramshackle state of our rusting fleet.
It might be worth considering that contemptuous dismissal of disillusioned independents' critiques of Democratic policies as "whataboutism" has not worked out very well for Democrats in recent years. Ignoring the extent to which Obama and especially Biden shredded norms in hubristic presumption of a permanent Democratic majority, and how badly that's ultimately blown up in progressives' faces and turbocharged Trumpism, is only to reinforce an epistemic bubble that does the center-left no favors.
"At no point have I argued against a diverse military or addressing climate change, but the number one priority of the military should be protecting America and keeping our troops from getting killed."
This is a reasonable position. Thanks for clarifying and for the exchange—and, of course, for reading our work.
Sounds as though you don’t agree with Truman’s decision to fully integrate the armed forces or allowing women in combat or other more enlightened thinking to “invade” command thinking? Perhaps being realistic to changes in the shifting winds of science and society along with having to deal with administration changes and their accompanying goals has been a way to keep from “politicizing”the armed forces quite unlike the damn foolishness of what is happening at the DOD these days which is showing itself to be totally politicized by an idiot Commander-in-Chief and his drunk accomplice.
I found during my days in high school debate that strawman arguments tend not to be very effective.
Good. You learned something then.