Keyes Goes Astray

Keyes Goes Astray
by Michael R. Allen

Lately, Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes has gained the respect of more conservatives than ever before. Keyes cannot win the nomination, of course, but he has emerged as the standard bearer of the hard right. Even libertarians have appreciated, among other things, his noninterventionist tendencies. Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo wrote that Keyes "is a libertarian through and through."

It's not hard to see why Keyes is appeals to libertarians (those who don't cringe at the mention of religion). For instance, he denounced the NATO bombing of Serbia, and demanded that the U.S. not intervene in places where it has no compelling national interest. And while he supports a national sales tax, Keyes wants to abolish the federal income tax. His domestic agenda calls for a sharp decrease in federal spending and the repeal of countless stupid laws.

As the passions roiled over South Carolina's flying the Confederate flag went, Keyes declared that his parents gave him the middle name "Lee" in honor of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The most unreconstructed decentralists cheered a black man willing to fly against the gale winds of political correctness. While few ask that Keyes become a pure libertarian, he seemed to be moving in that direction; not so much to philosophical libertarianism, but to the sort of Jeffersonian decentralism that, if it were still found in abundance, would set America back on its intended course.

That is the direction in which appeared Keyes appeared to be headed --until he published a column in WorldNetDaily on February 5, entitled "Euthanasia for Military Discipline."

The column is ostensibly about homosexuals serving in the military, but it sent alarm bells off on another front. Keyes proposed that the military be be used for something entirely different than defense: compulsory social engineering. Early in the column, Keyes seems to understand the nature of the military under a decentralized government. To wit,

"[The military] must remain true that the American people, not a mercenary elite, defend the country. And that means that we must accept the challenge to regulate military life according to the standards of American citizenship."

This is correct, and one might argue from here that the military be so confined to civilian rules that it only be permitted to assemble after the U.S. has been attacked. Alan Keyes isn't having any of that. Instead, he wants to reinforce the civilian control of the military by having a military composed of civilians. Never mind the contradictory concepts of citizen and soldier; Keyes wishes to merge the two, forcibly.

In order to create the citizen-soldier, Keyes has a specific proposal:

"[P]erhaps part of that education ought to be universal national service. It could consist of having everybody, after he has finished high school, perform two years of national service. ... Nothing would stand in the way, even as conscientious objections would be accommodated. Everyone would have to serve those two years."

Great. Keyes wants Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, in a bizarre synthesis with the military, to draft us to paint over graffiti and clean playgrounds. This surely will teach American youth all about citizenship -- that it is synonymous with socialism.

The decentralist in Keyes allows his one flawed idea to be the greatest concession to the state that he could make: the government owns the citizen, not vice versa. It is no surprise that this idea would be appealing to the Clinton administration, which once tried to make draft registration records available to AmeriCorps. That the most libertarian Republican presidential candidate endorses this idea speaks to the sad state of American politics.

Keyes even uses Clintonian semantics to promote his citizenship program. Notice that he begins his paragraph with a tentative tone, saying "perhaps" we should do this. Then, he finishes his statement with a certain compulsory turn of phrase ("would have to"), without ever explicitly endorsing his own idea. This sort of shameless evasion is unbecoming.

The concessions to collectivism build as he expounds on his idea. Alan Lee Keyes also sells his program on its socially therapeutic aspects:

"There is another great advantage of a system in which, regardless of money and class and background, people are brought together to live for several years a common life of service. It would help to overcome misunderstandings between races and classes."

Even done up in more conservative gown, the plan is the same sort of social engineering that Bill Clinton endorses. No one has ever demanded that Keyes adopt a purely libertarian ideology, and that he change every issue stand to a philosophically correct one; his strength was big-picture philosophy. But this cannot fit into his decentralist framework.

Keyes does not deserve the support of libertarians in the Republican primaries.

www.american-partisan.com