Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/01/12/to_arms_at_all_costs.php

To Arms, at All Costs

Friday, January 12, 2007

H. W. Crocker III, author of Don’t Tread on Me, gives no apologies. He is an unabashed supporter of the armed services in a time when it is becoming increasingly popular to question its approach, size, and role in the world. Perhaps more provocatively still, Crocker is a vigorous voice in favor of that most heinous of American sins: imperialism.

If Crocker set out to write a provocative book, he has succeeded; if a good one, he has largely failed.

Crocker’s book is, if nothing else, ambitious. A 400-year history of the American military’s engagements, Don’t Tread on Me chronicles the battles our military has been involved in from the early skirmishes with Indians right up to today’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But to call it a history book would be a misnomer; it is rather, in the author’s words, an argument “that America is a country of practical independent-minded people shaped by the frontier, an ambitious and well-meaning people who naturally carved out an ‘empire of liberty.’” For Crocker, “it is America’s desire for empire that explains her history.”

Not content with his book merely being an argument, however, Don’t Tread on Me is also a tribute, an ode to the American soldier. As Crocker writes, “this book is a debt of gratitude to the fighting men who have made America what she is; who defend her now; and who will defend her in the future.”

Crocker is relentlessly supportive of America’s historical expansion, even taking pains to point out what other bits of land should have been conquered or annexed. One story Crocker recounts is that of William Walker, a Tennessee-born “gamecock” who conquered Nicaragua in 1855 with an army of 58 men. Just two years earlier, Walker had “annexed” Baja California with an army of 250 men. Due, however, to difficulty in maintaining supplies however, he was forced to give up the Baja and return to California.

Now the president of Nicaragua (the United States recognized the legitimacy of the government), Walker might have gone down in history as the founding father of this Central American country had he not run afoul of US shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who subsequently sponsored Costa Rica and other neighboring countries in a successful war to oust Walker.

Another “enlightened American” from the same time period was General John Anthony Quitman. Having fought for Texan independence, he favored annexing the whole of Mexico. When this didn’t work out he was elected to the governor’s mansion in Mississippi. Once there, he was forced to resign from office for “violating federal neutrality laws.” He had been caught aiding a former Cuban governor’s attempt at a coup intended to take the island.

These failed attempts at land grabs are but a few of the instances Crocker bewails as America failing to live up to its destiny. Commodore Perry’s failed foresight in taking neither Japan nor the surrounding isles under control is another example.

Crocker often seems at odds with his own views, saying at one point, “it might be a sad commentary on human affairs, but it is true, that the pursuit of political principle is a terrible thing…pragmatism and compromise…are the levers of peace. The pursuit of political principle becomes the triumph of abstraction over humanity.” Crocker, a vigorous supporter of both President Bush and the War on Terror, seems to be oblivious that this is the very charge leveled by those who oppose the Iraq War. Yes, there will be those who continue to stubbornly insist that all is well in Iraq, and those who apparently look up to Neville Chamberlain as the greatest of Prime Ministers, but in the end only the future will tell if Iraq was “worth it.”

The debate may rage on about whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do, but the ideological underpinnings of the war now seem set in stone for all except the few who still believe America invaded Iraq to obtain cheaper oil. On opposite sides of the chasm sit idealism and pragmatism. Though a reason like “weapons of mass destruction” may have temporarily aligned these two camps at the war’s outset, it has became clear that the fire behind the war was an ideal: liberty. Is it worth the price we are paying right now in the bloody streets of Baghdad? Only time will tell. One thing that is certain, however, is the existence of ideals, of principles (to use Crocker’s words), worth fighting for. Therein lies the problem with his statement. He writes that “the pursuit of political principle becomes the triumph of abstraction over humanity,” despite having claimed a hundred pages earlier that during the Revolution, “liberty was an Englishman’s—and an American’s—first allegiance, not the king.” If pragmatism had won out at that time, today we would be electing MPs instead of Representatives and Senators. Indeed, to elevate “pragmatism and compromise” over principle would effectively blunt the central tenet upon which Crocker has built his book: the Manifest Destiny of the United States.

The battle between idealism and pragmatism is the central argument about the nature of conservatism today. Crocker is the perfect paradigm for the confusing coalescence of disparate ideas that have beset the conservative movement since the Reagan administration. Reagan himself is partly to blame for some of the confusion.

His eulogy a few years ago hammered home a few main points about his legacy such as: defense build-up, reduced federal spending, and most obsessively (it was his funeral, after all) his upbeat and optimistic outlook on life. This last characteristic is a most baffling one for a conservative icon to have possessed. After all, classical conservatism is, in no small part, defined by its pessimism — pessimism about the future, about unwarranted and drastic change, and most tellingly, about human nature. Though to more perfectly understand the source of intellectual disorder in modern conservatism, we must go back a bit further than Reagan.

Confusion was aided to a large degree by FDR’s appropriation of the word “liberal”—hitherto used to denote devotees of Smith and Bastiat—for his own statist government. Many of those who believed in freedom continued to cling to the label “liberal” (the recently deceased Milton Friedman not least among them), but the vast majority sought out a new label hence the migration of “classical liberals” to conservatism. More recently, the coalescence of neoconservatives with conservatives has further muddied the picture of what conservatism is in the twenty-first century. Do conservatives believe that, deep down, all humans are good and capable of living peaceably with one another, or do conservatives believe history has shown the former’s belief to be a pipedream. A classic summation of the latter’s position was recently given by Dartmouth Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Hart:

The Conservative Mind, most of the time, has shown a healthy resistance to utopianism and its various informed ideologies. Ideology is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought.

There is, then, a general confusion about what being a “conservative” in the here and now is. There are a few who know clearly where they stand, like Professor Hart, or someone like Christopher Hitchens who makes it clear what he believes. But even a conservative in the vein of Professor Hart would express deep-felt approval of the Reagan Presidency, even though Reagan was anything but a burkesque conservative. By and large, most contemporary conservatives haven’t the slightest idea why it is logically inconsistent to believe simultaneously in the precepts laid down by Burke and the Iraq War.

Crocker is a perfect example of this paradox in current conservatism. When writing about the build up to the American Civil War, he stated, “in practical politics, pragmatism and compromise—Edmund Burke’s politics of prescription—are the levers of peace.” Just a few hundred pages later, when listing reasons for the invasion of Iraq, pragmatism and compromise are, bizarrely enough, missing. Crocker, and most contemporary conservatives, can’t have it both ways: either Burke was right and history is the best guide to the future (roughly), or the neocons are right and ideals should share the course for the future (history be damned).

Crocker is often guilty of wanting to have it both ways. Issuing grand universal proclamations and contradicting them a hundred pages later seems to be a recurring theme throughout Don’t Tread on Me. Such proclamations may have sounded lofty and elegant to him, but strike the reader as either pointless excursions into empty rhetoric, or even worse, as further proof that Crocker has not taken the time to fully consider what he is talking about. In the end, I believe Crocker has mistaken support for the armed forces as the be-all-and-end-all of conservatism, when that support is, in fact, only one facet of conservatism (old or new).

Crocker, this conservative “contrarian” historian as the inside flap of the book so prominently proclaims, is completely one-dimensional. He writes favorably of America’s historical military prowess, and that is all he does. His view of the Civil War, the one major instance when Americans fought Americans, for example, is decidedly non-contrarian. He simply reaffirms the common historical consensus: the north was led by a bunch of timid and bumbling generals until Grant, and Lee was absolutely brilliant. “A bold look at the history of America at war” indeed.

Crocker’s gravest trespass, however, has to do not with the content of his book but with his ability as a writer. It is not an irritation with his specific style I write of, out that: Crocker has no style of his own. He jumps from one style to the next (all of them below par) with no apparent reason. In one moment he writes of engagements as if he is poorly translating the Iliad, in the next he tries chopping things up a la Hemmingway. Everything he writes comes off as a ragged imitation of someone else.

Had Montcalm waited, 3,000 French troops led by Colonel Louis Antoine de Bougainville could have hit Wolfe’s thin red line from the rear. But the marquis thought he must act instantly. Bougainville could not possibly arrive from his positions in the north before the afternoon. In the meantime, Montcalm was outflanked. He must act. He acted so quickly he did not even bother to disengage the troops at Beauport.

As you have no doubt also noticed, Crocker has an annoying tendency to leap back and forth between the past and present tenses. He no doubt felt that by using the present tense here and there he would make the history more exciting, but history can stand on its own without the help of distracting and irritating literary crutches.

And irritate they do, right up until the bitter end. Crocker’s book is neither interesting nor well written—had I not been reviewing it, I wouldn’t have made it past the first hundred pages. He is upfront about Don’t Tread on Me not being a history book, but neither is it a convincing argument in any regard. It is notable only for it’s ill thought out and confused conservatism, and there’s plenty of that for free lying around nowadays for those so inclined. This book isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.