Genuinely bad, chaotic Washington outrages come home to roost

OPINION:

Our long hot summer of discontents has morphed into an early autumnal frost.

• A bodyguard of lies unravels to reveal a larger pattern of law-breaking by those organs of state security (NSA, FBI and DOJ) normally charged with our protection; some even liken it to a “slow-motion coup” by the Deep State.

• There are troubling implications that these excesses reflected systematic political corruption in which the Obama White House conspired to protect Hillary Clinton while spying upon Donald Trump and his cast of deplorables.

• Finally, some observers credibly suggested that such banana-republic behavior reflects nothing less than intractable blue state-red state political divisions. With bitterness levels turning toxic, a second American Civil War is even possible, particularly in the aftermath of any attempt to impeach or overthrow Donald Trump.

Such warnings leave the realm of X-file conspiracies to demand critical attention, but if their ominous portents are correct, then how did we get here? At what point did the republic begin to slip its moorings, a hazard-to-navigation that any weekend Chesapeake Bay sailor can easily understand?

The answer is suggested by a side-by-side comparison of two pictures now featured on websites around the globe: The what-me-worry visage of Colin Kaepernick’s Nike commercial; versus the increasingly haunted likeness of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican Supreme Court nominee now being “borked” in the usual fashion. Familiar as these iconic portraits may be, a closer look reveals the dueling legacies of policy and social choices made nearly 50 years ago.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court discovered in Roe v. Wade a new constitutional penumbra of privacy rights guaranteeing every woman the right to an abortion. In 1974, America ended its reliance on the draft, effectively ushering in the new era of the AVF, the all-volunteer force still at the core of American defense policy. But in the space of little more than 12 months, American values had shifted decisively.

With abortion guaranteed, the life of the unborn was no longer an imperative, its termination a mere “procedure” upholding sovereign individual choice. In much the same way, military service was no longer the sacred obligation of the citizen but simply a career option. The soldier-citizen created by the Founders gave way to the mixed blessing of the professional soldier, the Vietnam-era nightmare of the perpetual draftee finally ended by Richard Nixon.

Both ends of the political spectrum applauded these developments for their own reasons. Democrats favored not only the policy choice of abortion — quickly dismissing any lingering moral qualms — but also finding in judicial activism their preferred method of enacting progressive social policies. Over succeeding generations, abortion rights practically became a Democratic sacrament, the defense of Roe v. Wade and any conceivable threat to its “settled law” an invitation to hysteria. While Judge Kavanaugh’s anxiety is readily understood, it pales in comparison to those unknown millions sacrificed in our ongoing “Holocaust of the unborn.”

Because of their intrinsic love for free markets, Republicans became long-running AVF champions. Just as political scientists like Samuel P. Huntington had predicted, a professional military permanently grew into a formidable, technically-sophisticated force, perpetually dispatched into hell-holes most Americans couldn’t find on a map. Even after Sept. 11, 2001, we were not called to arms but to the shopping malls, our credit cards guaranteeing only the most pyrrhic victory over terrorism.

Rather than the sons and daughters of the elites, we sent “Other People’s Kids” to the wars of 9/11, effectively drafting the reserves to accompany our professionals on multiple combat tours to the hell-holes. No one seemed to care that, in the age of on-demand abortions, our military manpower inevitably became the few, the proud and the ruinously expensive.

Because fewer than half of 1 percent of all Americans still serve in uniform, the rest of us profusely thank those few for their service but seldom study war or apply its lessons. With only non-elites in the ranks, why should we worry about Kandahar or even our Southwest border when service-to-self is the new American birthright? Because thirty-somethings have no memories of national service, Colin Kaepernick’s non-existent “sacrifice” was Nike’s one-finger salute toward every veteran and our willfully discarded history.

I witnessed most of that half-century as a former draftee who spent his life as a professional soldier while those national moorings silently slipped away. Nowadays, my greatest satisfaction resides with two precious grandchildren: Perfect reflections of the life-choice made by the birth-mother of my adopted daughter, a remembrance that always prompts grateful tears. Our blended family of Jewish and Christian heritages thus represents a higher kind of salute: To survival and to life itself.

• Ken Allard, a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a military analyst and author on national security issues.