Even when the relationships forged in national service run deep or last long, the patterns of thought, feeling, and action that arise from them don’t always correspond closely to the challenges of cultural life in a democratic society. We shouldn’t expect them to. Military service can leave people maladjusted for civilian life—whether in the familiar post-Vietnam sense or in the harder-to-accept manner that the World War II experience led the boomers’ parents to lose authority over their kids.
Civil service, meanwhile, runs up against other difficulties. Especially in the technocratic, top-down form favored by Team McChrystal, national service might habituate us toward the kind of long-term thinking that the bipolar quality of hectic and lonely democratic life dangerously discourages. But it won’t draw us by the hundreds of millions into the face-to-face relationships we need to keep us from viewing our fellow Americans as hostile competitive strangers. National service doesn’t forge us in fellowship as a people. It doesn’t make us friends in forbearance. And in a political culture dominated by patronage and place-seeking, it could sometimes even deepen the error of our ways.
The wager of our elites isn’t that national service will save America by uniting the American people as fellows and not just citizens. It’s that they can create a bigger elite, one more capable of reaching down to organize the rest of us to get our acts together. Alas, without a renewed culture of friendship, we’ll continue to feel so hemmed in by our fellow Americans that big business and big government—no matter how big their leadership class—won’t do much more than make more of us into unhappy higher achievers. We can secure that cramped kind of character all by ourselves.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member