Good stuff in general from Marco Rubio. I am still cautious about him after he went squishy on immigration a decade ago, even betraying promises made in order to do so.
I think caution is a good starting point in dealing with any politician. What is Lord Acton's most famous quote, again? "Power tends to corrupt...", so we don't just need to find better people to elect to office, we also need to do a better job about holding their feet to the fire.
If he is it is interesting that in the general morass of GOP governing ideology currently there may be a coherent repudiation of Reaganism from an established party figure.
I would think how they treat veterans would rank well behind disagreeing with the military's woke agenda and the possibility of getting sent off to die in the name of globalism for reasons for not wanting to join.
I am still not convinced Senator Rubio understands the workforce issue. The problem with young men who changed jobs every six months or less is not that they are only getting offered seasonal work. It is that they are not reliable enough to stay at a job long term. There is a deeper cultural issue here that isn't getting addressed. Still this represents a huge improvement over where Rubio was when he first entered the national stage .
The narrative I've heard from vets of the GWoT is a little different, or maybe just simpler. "I signed up to protect my country and all we did was drop bombs on goat herders."
I just had the talk with my teenager about how he needs to tell any military recruiter he meets in high school to go to hell, that they're liars and they just want to use him as a human IED detector to make more money for the Military-Industrial Complex. But we need to remember that college-educated UMC folks see things in a more ideological and conceptualized way. We see the problem in terms of overarching narratives and grand themes. We instinctively understand what is meant by "military-industrial complex." Working class folks aren't often trained in the same way of thinking conceptually, and I think it would take a deeper dive to see why they're now less willing to join. It means understanding what working-class people think when they hear the word "service" and emphasizing to them that they're *not* protecting their neighbors and friends by joining the military. They're being exploited (which working class folks clearly and intimately understand) by rich folk north of Richmond.
Another potential factor is not wanting to commit to the military because it is much harder to walk away from than another employer. If they view it as just another job, a lot of these guys are not going to want sign up for it. The pay is lousy and not much better than other jobs they can get and walk away from at any time.
I'm still skeptical that Wokeness is affecting enlistments (I'm open to the idea that it's affecting the officer class, but officer recruitment is holding up much better). The data we have is that it's left-leaning men who sharply reduced their enlistments in the last few years, so I think Rubio's analogy to the left's decreased respect for police is apt enough.
That said, I made an observation very late the last time Aaron raised this discussion, so I think it's worth highlighting again: in 1976 (which one might expect to be a very bad year), Army enlistments were something like 400% the number in 2022, despite a smaller eligible population in 1976. I haven't heard anyone else offering this context, but I'm inclined to think that historical arc is the real story. We take the large, permanent, all-volunteer military for granted because it worked for almost 50 years and its proponents seemed to have won the argument. But its sustainability has been eroding almost the entire time, a fact obscured by the much smaller demand of the post-Cold-War era until the erosion caught up to even the reduced post-GWOT demand. Revising Pentagon policies could change this on the margin, but I'm skeptical that they could reverse the greater historical arc.
As for your last paragraph, I continue to agree with the general point, but I thought Aaron and Marco were touching on the cultural issue when they were talking about the expectation of work, about halfway through.
It would have been helpful, at the cost of opening another can of worms, to mention that more than those with the right labor, it's those with money and the acumen to leverage the global markets who largely benefit from de-nationalizing, which facilitates a massive shift in power (and values).
Good stuff in general from Marco Rubio. I am still cautious about him after he went squishy on immigration a decade ago, even betraying promises made in order to do so.
I think caution is a good starting point in dealing with any politician. What is Lord Acton's most famous quote, again? "Power tends to corrupt...", so we don't just need to find better people to elect to office, we also need to do a better job about holding their feet to the fire.
Would you say that his use of terms like 'common good' and 'decadence' suggest he is reading the Catholic integrationalists (Deneen, Douthat, etc).?
I don't know.
If he is it is interesting that in the general morass of GOP governing ideology currently there may be a coherent repudiation of Reaganism from an established party figure.
I would think how they treat veterans would rank well behind disagreeing with the military's woke agenda and the possibility of getting sent off to die in the name of globalism for reasons for not wanting to join.
I am still not convinced Senator Rubio understands the workforce issue. The problem with young men who changed jobs every six months or less is not that they are only getting offered seasonal work. It is that they are not reliable enough to stay at a job long term. There is a deeper cultural issue here that isn't getting addressed. Still this represents a huge improvement over where Rubio was when he first entered the national stage .
The narrative I've heard from vets of the GWoT is a little different, or maybe just simpler. "I signed up to protect my country and all we did was drop bombs on goat herders."
I just had the talk with my teenager about how he needs to tell any military recruiter he meets in high school to go to hell, that they're liars and they just want to use him as a human IED detector to make more money for the Military-Industrial Complex. But we need to remember that college-educated UMC folks see things in a more ideological and conceptualized way. We see the problem in terms of overarching narratives and grand themes. We instinctively understand what is meant by "military-industrial complex." Working class folks aren't often trained in the same way of thinking conceptually, and I think it would take a deeper dive to see why they're now less willing to join. It means understanding what working-class people think when they hear the word "service" and emphasizing to them that they're *not* protecting their neighbors and friends by joining the military. They're being exploited (which working class folks clearly and intimately understand) by rich folk north of Richmond.
Another potential factor is not wanting to commit to the military because it is much harder to walk away from than another employer. If they view it as just another job, a lot of these guys are not going to want sign up for it. The pay is lousy and not much better than other jobs they can get and walk away from at any time.
I'm still skeptical that Wokeness is affecting enlistments (I'm open to the idea that it's affecting the officer class, but officer recruitment is holding up much better). The data we have is that it's left-leaning men who sharply reduced their enlistments in the last few years, so I think Rubio's analogy to the left's decreased respect for police is apt enough.
That said, I made an observation very late the last time Aaron raised this discussion, so I think it's worth highlighting again: in 1976 (which one might expect to be a very bad year), Army enlistments were something like 400% the number in 2022, despite a smaller eligible population in 1976. I haven't heard anyone else offering this context, but I'm inclined to think that historical arc is the real story. We take the large, permanent, all-volunteer military for granted because it worked for almost 50 years and its proponents seemed to have won the argument. But its sustainability has been eroding almost the entire time, a fact obscured by the much smaller demand of the post-Cold-War era until the erosion caught up to even the reduced post-GWOT demand. Revising Pentagon policies could change this on the margin, but I'm skeptical that they could reverse the greater historical arc.
As for your last paragraph, I continue to agree with the general point, but I thought Aaron and Marco were touching on the cultural issue when they were talking about the expectation of work, about halfway through.
It would have been helpful, at the cost of opening another can of worms, to mention that more than those with the right labor, it's those with money and the acumen to leverage the global markets who largely benefit from de-nationalizing, which facilitates a massive shift in power (and values).
Congratulations on such a great interview!
What!? That’s awesome! Looking forward to listening, and congrats, Aaron!