McCain is not a classical liberal; he's the product of an intensely hierarchical honor culture that he seems to think would substantially improve the rest of us if we adopted more of its values. I have no shortage of respect for the military, and their willingness to place their own lives between the rest of us and war's desolation. But that doesn't mean I think America would be a better place if we had a more martial state. His record bespeaks little respect for spontaneous order and individual freedom. What free-market instincts he evinces seem to have come as part of the conservative ideas combo-pack he bought because it was cheaper than buying the parts individually--all he really wanted was the national greatness and the moderately conservative social structure.
Great, but incomplete. I don't know whether Megan recognizes it or not, but she has hit at the fundamental fault-line in modern conservatism: the rift between McCain's loyalty-and-order and what Megan calls "classical liberalism," but which we might recognize more easily if we just called it "libertarianism." Extra-credit reading would be Fred Kaplan's Slate piece on "The Creeping Monetization of Military Service" (link). Kaplan says:
[T]here is a ... danger in the growing monetization of military service. Yes, an all-volunteer force must be paid well, especially when serving involves not merely "learning a career" and being "all you can be" (as the pre-9/11 recruitment ads put it) but also killing and maybe dying in battle. But every good junior officer I've ever met gets very uncomfortable when the discussion turns to this topic; they emphasize, sincerely I think, that they're not in the military for the money; that fair compensation is appreciated, but they could make a lot more as a civilian if that was their goal. Putting so much emphasis on cash bonuses tends to draw people whose primary aim is making money—and who aren't talented enough to make the same kind of money in the civilian world.
I'd love to see Kaplan (or someone at his pay grade) pick up that one and run with it. We've just begun to explore the implications of that divide. Indeed, for the most part, I don't think we know they are there. The libertarians (okay, classical liberals) can do nothing with it because the social substrate is invisible to them. McCain at least recognizes that he is ignorant of economics, which is a start.
Update:Phil Carter throws some constructive oil on the fire (link):I'd add a caveat to [Kaplan's] story, and that is that the all-volunteer force is monetary by design. Read the studies, memos and discussions that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly those involving Milton Friedman, Mel Laird, and other Nixon advisers closely involved with the end of the draft. They consciously built a force structured around monetary incentives that fit their vision of a market-oriented military. How well is it working today?
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