National Service 0

The late Richard Hofstadter, one of our great political thinkers, wrote 45 years ago that our political discourse is often marred by what he called “the paranoid style,” typically employed by “dispossessed” people who feel marginalized by events, and who therefore traffic in “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasies.” Case in point, the reaction to this national service initiative.

For weeks this spring, there was hysteria about Obama’s purported plans to “enslave” young people with compulsory national service. In some right-wing quarters, the measure was nicknamed the “National Enslavement Bill.” But, as Hofstadter might have put it, this was merely one of the fantasies, concocted and nurtured from long-discarded House language. When the bill was initially introduced in the House, it had a suggestion about studying “whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed.” But that suggestion was stripped out long before the House passed the bill, and it never surfaced in the Senate at all.