Government-mandated “community service” is integral to Barack Obama’s vision of “change.” Obama has described such service as a key element of creating “a new era of responsibility — a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”
Actually, there is nothing novel about Obama’s emphasis on government-imposed citizen “service.” National service, in some form, has been endorsed by every U.S. president since George Bush the Elder. But none has promoted it as insistently as Barack Obama.
Of course, most Americans are hardly strangers to responsibility. They hold jobs, provide for families, and perform volunteer work for schools and churches. Thousands of acts of service occur literally every second of every day in America, both in the form of mutually beneficial business transactions and charitable deeds performed out of conviction.
The problem with such service, apparently, is that it is neither mandated nor brokered by the government. So from the perspective of those who believe that life should be organized by the state, such spontaneous service simply doesn’t count.
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Before it created a small but significant scandal, the Obama campaign’s position paper on national service promised that as president he would “inspire” Americans to render “universal voluntary service.”
It was not explained how service could be both “universal” and truly “voluntary”: Was the assumption that differences over opinion regarding the proper type of “service” would simply vanish? Or would the reluctance of many Americans to surrender valuable time to carry out government-approved activities be overcome by the sheer power of Obama’s charisma?
Obama’s vision of “Universal Voluntary Service,” as originally outlined in his campaign literature, displayed far greater ambition and more than a touch of authoritarianism: “Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.” The blueprint likewise called for the expansion of AmeriCorps from 75,000 to 250,000 and the creation of five separate “Corps” of government-funded “volunteers” to deal with education, health, energy, veterans affairs, and homeland security.
One element of the Obama plan, the “Classroom Corps,” employed frankly militaristic language, stating that the administration would “enlist” retired teachers, “recruit” civic leaders, and “draft” parents, grandparents, and others to serve as mentors.
The campaign for “universal voluntary service” is bipartisan and enjoys enthusiastic support from the mainstream media. Richard Stengel, Time magazine’s managing editor, is co-chair of Service Nation, a non-profit established to promote Obama’s service campaign. Former GOP presidential candidate John McCain has joined with Obama in promoting government-imposed service.
Tony Blankley, who served as chief of staff for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has called in his new book American Grit for the re-introduction of a universal military draft.
Blankley’s proposed system is similar to legislation being promoted by House Democrat Charles Rangel; it would require all Americans who turn 18 to spend two years either in military service or in a government-selected “Homeland Security” role. He proposes a “compulsory program for all Americans aged eighteen or nineteen, men and women, after most have graduated from high school. The military, reviewing these graduates’ transcripts, extracurricular activities, and medical reports, would select however many they needed to fulfill their draft allotments for a two-year period of military service. Those not chosen by the military would undertake a two-year service obligation.”
Setting a tone likely to be emulated by other Republicans, Blankley condemns Obama’s national service proposal not because it represents a presumptuous imposition on the lives of Americans, but because it wouldn’t provide soldiers for ongoing and envisioned military conflicts.
“We will soon be faced with the choice of severely scaling back our role in the world or expanding the army through conscription,” observes Blankley, blithely assuming that the former option is simply inadmissible. Since “there is a limit to the number of people willing to volunteer to be a soldier,” the government must return to a system its critics consider nothing less than military slavery.
All “national service” proposals, whether civilian or military, are rooted in the assumption that individuals owe service to the State — indeed, that the State has the first claim on the individual’s time, labor, and wealth.
Although the legally protected practice of chattel slavery ended roughly a century and a half ago, politicians routinely insist that the government is entitled to claim uncompensated labor from the citizenry in the name of “community” or “national” service.
The first American public figure of significant stature to endorse this concept was philosopher and psychologist William James, who in 1910 urged “a conscription of the whole youthful population. . . for a certain number of years as part of the army enlisted against Nature.” James envisioned a national system of conscript labor to build roads and bridges, skyscrapers and tunnels; to extract ore from the ground, and fish from the sea; and to do various other kinds of manual labor as a way of having “the childishness knocked out of them.”
Through government-imposed labor, James insisted, young men “would have paid their blood-tax” to the amorphous entity called “society” without serving in the military. In fact, it was through this proposal for universal conscription that James infected American political discourse with the phrase “moral equivalent of war,” an expression that has become one of our more obnoxious clichés.
William James was not the first or only one to propose universal conscription. The eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto dictates a “universal liability of all to labor” as the state directs, and the creation of state-supervised “industrial armies.”
After seizing power in Russia through the Bolshevik coup, Vladimir Lenin demanded that his subjects consider themselves part of a “great army of free labor” to be deployed as the ruling oligarchy saw fit: “The generation that is now 15 years old. . . must arrange all the tasks of their education in such a way that every day, in every city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of the problem of common labor, even the smallest, most simple kind.”
Undergirding such grand pronouncements is the shared assumption that only labor or “service” that is mandated and supervised by the state is worthwhile. Left to attend to their own business, human beings have an amazing capacity to serve each other in mutually beneficial ways.
But this is done without the intrusive and presumptuous involvement of social engineers who desire to correct what they see as defects in the way other people live. For such people “service” is simply unsatisfactory unless it somehow helps build and fortify the state. And to them the state of crisis produced by a war, or the “moral equivalent” thereof, is useful as a pretext for the regimentation of society.
This is why aspiring social engineers welcomed the onset of World War I, which offered unprecedented opportunities for government intervention in private life.
During World War I, Bernard Baruch, chairman of the Wilson administration’s War Industries Board, brazenly endorsed the concept of state ownership of every American:
