How did we get here? The right wing has identified Critical Race Theory as this week’s Threat Against America and has accused the U.S. military of “wokeness” because it has used this framework to assess the influence of white supremacists among its ranks. Now prominent right wingers are suggesting cutting the defense budget, using “defund the military” as a slogan.
We should be very specific here. It’s not that the right wing has suddenly gone peacenik or anti-imperialism or something that dupes like Glenn Greenwald might imply. Nor did the Pentagon wake up one day and realize the role it has played in imposing white supremacy around the world or in American culture. Rather, the top brass noticed that some of their peers and a few of the rank and file have been complicit in Trumpian attempts to bring about white nationalism, including the January 6th riot on Capitol Hill, where a lot of cops and former service members took part in a coup attempt. Trump himself did as much as he could to place loyalists among the Pentagon chiefs in preparation for the coup, but couldn’t get enough of the military to stand behind him. General Mark Milley, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejects “wokeness” as having any influence on the US military and wants to root out the little fascists who are threatening its credibility.
The white nationalist wing of the GOP and its propaganda outlets are really fighting for control of US military culture. They won’t actually defund the military, and if they did, it would only support more tax cuts. You won’t see any proposals for increased social spending. For decades, since I was a kid during the early years of the Reagan era, I have been arguing against increasing military spending and for using the money to support education, health care, and other parts of our social infrastructure. All along the hawks in both parties, including politicians afraid to look “unpatriotic” have served up militaristic rhetoric along with free market ideology to justify the annual 50% (at least) chunk of our national budget spent on war, official and covert, conducted around the world. No matter what that twit Tucker Carlson says, the GOP and half of the Democratic Party will continue to support this waste of taxpayer dollars while urgent needs exposed by the pandemic are underserved.