



In the 20th century, war brought about social and cultural revolutions in the United States, including a large-scale movement of women out of the home and into the workplace. Nineteenth-century reformers had labored successfully to make it possible for women (and children) to leave the dark satanic mills and devote their lives to home and family, supported by a male breadwinner. The Victorians rightly considered the home more important than the workplace. A man’s duties in the world of affairs were a burden he had to carry to provide for his household, not something women should envy.

This happy situation was overturned in both world wars as men were drafted by the millions while the demand for factory labor to support war production soared. Back into the mills went the women. The result was the weakening of the family, the institution most responsible for passing the culture on to the next generation.

The threat war poses to the cake of custom is exacerbated by one of its foremost characteristics: its results are unpredictable. Few countries go to war expecting to lose, but wars are seldom won by both sides. The effects of military defeat on social order can be revolutionary.



If we look beyond dollars, francs, pounds, and marks, the toll of war grows endless. After World War I, there were no young men on the streets of Paris. As one British observer noted, the German casualty lists from the early battles in that war read like the Almanach de Gotha, the book that catalogued the German nobility. Most frighteningly to conservatives, wars like World War I can destroy a whole culture’s faith in itself. It may well be that European civilization’s last chance for survival was a German victory on the Marne in 1914.

One gain that comes out of war is as disturbing to conservatives as any of the losses: an aggrandizement of state power. The argument of “wartime necessity” runs roughshod over all checks and balances, civil liberties, and traditional constraints on government. In the 20th century, American progressives knew they could only create the powerful, centralizing federal government they sought by going to war. It was they, the left, who engineered America’s entry into World War I. Nearly a century later, 9/11 gave centralizers in the neocon Bush administration the cover they needed for the “Patriot Act,” legislation that would have left most of America’s original patriots rethinking the merits of King George. Just as nothing adds more to a state’s debt than war, so nothing more increases its power. Conservatives rue both.

Real conservatives hate war. If that now sounds as strange as thinking of blue as the conservative color, we can thank a bunch of (ex?)-Trotskyites who stole our name, and a military-industrial-congressional complex that has bought right and left alike. If history is a guide, and it usually is, the price for the nationalist right’s love of militaries and war is likely to be higher than we can to imagine.

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