Neocons in Military Sci-Fi A Rant and a Challenge

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Two months, but...all right, I think I have it;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky. This man and his politics are the answer.

Left, too far left even for the bolsheviks, and commander of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War 1918-20. Militarist, internationalist, socialist- perfect fit.

[MKSheppard]

Elucidating on my earlier post regarding drawdowns/BRACing affecting the political scene of the US:

Take a look at the hotbeds of liberalism such as New York City / San Francisco. They weren't always such hotbeds; they used to be a bit more balanced due to the influence of the US Navy on them.

NYC had the Brooklyn Navy Yard (aka New York Naval Shipyard) which was in service from 1806-1966; and employed 10,000 people in 1938 and then 70,000 people in WWII.

Postwar, of course, Brooklyn became a casualty of the McNamara privatization of the Defense Department in the 1960s, which saw us close Springfield Armory, eliminating the 'in house' expertise the Army had in designing small arms; and making us significantly more dependent on contractors.

A bit east of New York City, you had the Grumman Corporation, which employed 23,000 people on Long Island and cranked out military equipment, such as the F-14D Tomcat.

Out West, in San Francisco, you had:

• Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard (aka San Francisco Naval Base aka a billion other names). It was a private shipyard which was bought by the USN in 1940. It employed 17,700 workers in the last months of WWII, and an average of 8,000 post-war until it closed in 1974.
• Mare Island Naval Shipyard. In WWII, 50,000 workers worked there; and from 1955-1972; nuclear submarines were built there. It was BRACed and closed in 1996.
• The Presido of San Francisco.

There's probably a bit more around San Francisco that I'm missing; but you get the point here.

The geographic spread of Military installations and defense contractors around the country provided a significant amount of political and social mixing. With the trend towards ever larger consolidated joint bases; it's highly likely that a US Army soldier joining the combat arms today will spend the significant majority of his career in the South; since posts like Fort Ord in Monterey, CA no longer exist.

Given that the typical military SF author will have served some time in the military before they started writing as evidenced by the following list of experience, compiled from quick scans of Wiki and author bios:

David Drake = US Army, Vietnam
John G. Hemry (aka Jack Campbell) = US Navy LCDR, served on USS Spruance.
Robert Heinlein = USNA 1929 but was invalided out of the USN in 1934.
Robert Buettner = US Army Reserve Intelligence Officer.
Chris Bunch = Vietnam Vet; wrote STEN with Allan Cole who was a newspaperman, but the son of a CIA agent.
Dan Cragg = US Army 1958-80, Sergeant Major
David Sherman = US Marine in Vietnam.
William C. Dietz = USN Medic
John Dalmas = Drafted in 1944, volunteered for Airborne, demobilized October 1946
Gordon R Dickson = US Army 1943-46
William H. Keith, Jr (USN Corpsman in during the Vietnam War)
Elizabeth Moon = Joined USMC in 1968 and became a First Lieutenant.
Jerry Pournelle = No military experience, but worked at Boeing in the late 1950s and worked on PROJECT THOR "Rods from God".
David Feintuch = No military experience, was an attorney from Harvard.
Joe Haldeman = Drafted into US Army, Combat Engineer in Vietnam, WIA there.
Tanya Huff = Canadian Naval Reserve 1975-79 as cook.
Mike Shepherd = Born into a USN family, and drafted into US Army in 1968. Failed boot camp on second day due to ending up in intensive care ward of hospital.
Steve White = USN Officer during the Vietnam War.
David Weber = No military experience, lifelong history buff.

*sigh*

John Ringo = US Army, 82nd Airborne.
Tom Kratman = US Army, retired as LTCOL in 2006.
Michael Z Williamson = USAF, which kind of explains stuff.
Travis S. Taylor = No actual military experience, but worked for the US Defense Department.

I can't help but wonder if 10 years from now, we'll look fondly on Ringo/Kratman/Williamson/Taylor as the good old days; given how much more insular the military has become since 1992, since that's where we'll get the next generation of Mil-SF authors from; with some exceptions.

*shudders deeply*

[Patroklos]

I am not sure why the OP uses the term neoconservative because that is not what he is describing. A necon would be all about the alien threat, not domestic issues. In any case, yes it is annoying.

I would also point out that there is still significant military installations in "liberal" areas. San Diego, Seatle area, Conn, and DC just to name a few from the Navy.

[StarSword]

I would also point out that there is still significant military installations in "liberal" areas. San Diego, Seatle area, Conn, and DC just to name a few from the Navy.

Well, they're all port towns, which is kinda Navy territory.

Although, the Navy doesn't seem to get the flak that the Army and Marines get, so I dunno.

[Lonestar]

I am not sure why the OP uses the term neoconservative because that is not what he is describing. A necon would be all about the alien threat, not domestic issues. In any case, yes it is annoying.

I would also point out that there is still significant military installations in "liberal" areas. San Diego, Seatle area, Conn, and DC just to name a few from the Navy.

San Diego has never been overtly "Liberal", and Virginia(that is, the DC area) is largely "Mississippi North".

[Block]

I am not sure why the OP uses the term neoconservative because that is not what he is describing. A necon would be all about the alien threat, not domestic issues. In any case, yes it is annoying.

I would also point out that there is still significant military installations in "liberal" areas. San Diego, Seatle area, Conn, and DC just to name a few from the Navy.

San Diego has never been overtly "Liberal", and Virginia(that is, the DC area) is largely "Mississippi North".

Uh what? Southwest VA is like that but NOVA and pretty much all of Maryland except out towards Fredneck are pretty liberal.

[Simon_Jester]

I am not sure why the OP uses the term neoconservative because that is not what he is describing. A necon would be all about the alien threat, not domestic issues. In any case, yes it is annoying.

The entire tangent that the American right has gone off on is sometimes called "neoconservatism." This is partly a holdover from the time around the Iraq War when the neocon foreign policy agenda was the biggest item on the Republican Party's public platform.

Nowadays that's pretty much faded, because you have to be a fool to try and drum up political support from any angle by advocating escalation of the war in Iraq or something like that. "Bomb Iran" won't win you any friends you didn't already have, as John McCain learned; people are a lot more afraid of the economy than they are of terrorism right now.

So what's come to the fore is the domestic side of the American right:

-Deep trust in the free market as a solution to all problems. This is in some ways simply an extension of the political concept of Enlightenment-style democracy into the economic sphere, although it's an extension that's been drawn in a specific direction and is far from the only such extension.

-Opposition to central government that shades into secessionism and anarchism at the extreme outer edge of the movement.

-The perception that the US represents the pinnacle of "Western Civilization," and avid denial of the idea that modern-day Europe can make the same claim. That comes from the idea that the above two beliefs are the "Western way," and that Europe has lost its legitimacy as 'Western' by abandoning them. Thus, the US is the guardian of a "Western" tradition that stretches back a long time if you ask neocon historical hagiography, like the work of Victor Davis Hanson. Which means that any suggestion "we should do it how Europe does it" is a priori a sign that someone is trying to abandon the Western model which has worked so well for the US.

(This is about as traditionalist as the modern American right gets, and it's a somewhat altered version of the tradition with a lot of facts selectively edited out)

-Distrust of minorities and the fear of minorities gaining power over 'real' America. Any extension of rights or privileges to pretty much any racial or cultural minority is opposed or met with a "But haven't we already fixed discrimination? Can't we stop talking about it?" Because the American right's historical narrative is basically the Rise of the White Man, and even if they're not actively hostile to members of other races, it's not part of 'their' story and there's a lingering fear of 'their' story getting overwritten by someone else's.

-Foreign threats, especially vague, nebulous ones that can't easily be deterred by overwhelming firepower, must be denigrated and held at bay; any hint of foreign intrusion on 'real' America should be resisted, much as white blood cells swarm an infection.



Anyway, the practical upshot is that this general vein of thinking gets emphasized in the thinking of the American right. It all fits together; what was actually called "neoconservatism" in the 2000-2005 timeframe is just the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, on the American right there is a tendency to assume that the American left is totally antithetical to all these things, even unto the point of being actively self-destructive. So if I'm on the American right, I will tend to assume that the straw liberal 'must' logically support the mirror image of what my own idea of my own policies are:

-Refusing to defend the country, even from the most obvious and violent threats, because they don't support the use of armed force in situations where I would want to use force and consider the need obvious. Clearly, if you're opposed to the Iraq war, you must be opposed to fighting a horde of carnivorous aliens who came to Earth to eat your children.

-Centralization of government power, even to the point of a bureaucratic command economy and political despotism. If you want to raise taxes on stock transactions, you probably don't like stock transactions at all, and would rather have everything done in state enterprises.

-Allowing 'real' civilization to be held down and torn apart by various minorities, who will be given enough power and resources to make sure that the 'core' who made the society work can never recover control of it. Because you wouldn't be trying to encourage the ethnic minorities to boost themselves rather than assimilate into a better society if you weren't trying to value their worse society over our better one. And because you wouldn't be encouraging all these cultural minorities with their sexual deviancies and whatnot if you weren't trying to Balkanize and fragment and corrupt our better society by allowing it to fall into decadence.

And so it goes.


'Liberal' societies in military SF are very often the victims of this kind of mirror-imaging. I want X and would die to defend Y, I am righteous, you do not want X, so you must be so unholy that you wouldn't even want Y.

[Slybrarian]

Don't forget "increase central government power whenever it fits our policy goals." Gay marriage is a state's rights issue! Except now some states are allowing it, so we must have a constitutional ban for the entire country! Texas should consider secession - right after the feds pay for our firefighting costs!

[Number Theoretic]

Well, of course! Dont let pesky things such as "consistency" or "integrity" get in the way of our political goals. Because after all, those are, what counts!

[Simon_Jester]

Don't forget "increase central government power whenever it fits our policy goals." Gay marriage is a state's rights issue! Except now some states are allowing it, so we must have a constitutional ban for the entire country! Texas should consider secession - right after the feds pay for our firefighting costs!

Well, of course! Dont let pesky things such as "consistency" or "integrity" get in the way of our political goals. Because after all, those are, what counts!

Sigh.

OK, these are just cheap wisecracks that miss the point. Did you have a reason for saying them, aside from venting political spleen?

Of course you can find hypocritical politicians. And people whose worldview contains inconsistencies; it is a rare person who can really act out a self-consistent worldview that has no internal contradictions, and most of the people who can do it are fanatics.

If you want to talk about the influence of political ideology on military science fiction, though, Rick Perry's policies are totally irrelevant. What matters is that there are certain veins of thought popular among the American right, and these thoughts affect literature, and that they get called 'neoconservatism.' Because they are something a little distinct from the classically 'conservative' political thought of "things should stay the way they are or maybe go back to the way they were a little while ago."

Under this 'neoconservative' umbrella you see things like:
- Deep trust in the free market to solve all problems.
- Opposition to central government especially when the central government's actions are unwelcome*.
- The idea that "the West" is the best of all civilizations and that the best way to take advantage of "the West's" traditions is American-style.
- Distrust of minority groups created by a fear of Balkanization and 'fifth column' infiltration of "the West" by political and racial forces too weak to destroy it directly from without.
- Phobia of foreign threats, especially those which cannot be held at bay by force or the threat of force.

And when those themes express themselves in science fiction you get things like Plucky Libertarian Space Colonists revolting against the Nanny State or Colonial Overlord. You get "America saves the day" in SF settings near enough to the present that the US actually exists in relevant terms.

And you get a situation where 'honorable' opponents, who can be met and defeated by force, are viewed with less fear and loathing than 'dishonorable' opponents, who can't, because they are internal enemies of the state's status quo, or because they are covertly screwing you over in some other way rather than fighting you straight out.

Again, Rick Perry's policies are totally irrelevant to what's going on here, whether you feel like bitching about them or not.
_____________

*Only a fool is as angry to be helped by outsiders as to be harmed by outsiders. Are you really surprised to hear people who would rather be independent of the central government willing to take free money from the central government when it's offered? If not, you don't know people very well.