Paranoid Right-Wingers See Obama's Volunteer Service Project as Sinister Plot to 'Re-Educate' Americans

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted April 18, 2009.

Sounds like a Weathermen's plot to me!

If the Service Act seeks to instill the sober virtues of patriotism and selflessness, why did 168 congressional Republicans vote against it?

The closest thing to an answer is found in the Senate floor speech delivered by Jim Demint, R-S.C., who assailed the bill without resorting to "coming-fascism" hysterics. Demint warned that expanding national public service infrastructure would destroy civil society by undermining self-reliance and pushing out private charity, essentially arguing that volunteerism is a zero-sum game.

"We cannot replace private charity with government programs," he said. "If we try, a lot of people are going to miss meals [and] suffer cold winters and leaky roofs."

Here is the familiar conservative refrain that government can't do anything right, but with a bizarre twist. Demint is saying that not only will government-sponsored volunteerism fail to accomplish good, its very existence will forever poison the idea of altruism in America. It apparently doesn't matter that the "cold winters and leaky roofs" Demint worries about are among the very problems that the Service America Act is designed to ameliorate. Along with creating a Vets Corps and an Education Corps, the Service Act establishes a thousands-strong Clean Energy Corps to retrofit and insulate homes as part of the larger goal to "improve energy efficiency and conserve natural resources."

This rubs up against another source of (mostly unspoken) conservative opposition to the bill. The Service Act, with its surprisingly strong emphasis on the environment and energy, is arguably the first government initiative that addresses the energy and climate crisis with anything like the war-level attention it deserves.

The launching of a Clean Energy Corps echoes FDR's 1941 creation of the Office of Civilian Defense, which organized volunteer civilian support for World War II. These councils helped organize, recruit and train volunteers for wartime programs ranging from scrap-metal collection to rationing. Obama's Clean Energy Corps also reminds one of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps, launched in 1933, which employed millions of young Americans planting trees for nearly a decade.

No doubt many conservatives hate the Service Act because of its strong New Deal aroma. But the Act ties into groups with more recent lineages that touch an even rawer conservative nerve.

There is anger on the right that the Service Act will benefit groups involved in dreaded "urban community organizing." These groups often have ideological origins in the early New Left and Great Society programs of the 1960s. Among them are ACORN and Public Allies, where first lady Michelle Obama was the founding executive director between 1993 and 1996. That organizations embodying the tactics and ideals of Saul Alinsky will benefit from government largesse is maddening for the right.

And yet, conservatives, even the crazy ones, are correct to warn of national-service mission creep. There are influential people in the Obama administration, possibly including the president himself, who would like to go beyond expanding volunteer opportunities to establishing mandatory service laws.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has repeatedly expressed a desire to create "universal civil defense training" and a mandatory national-service requirement. He appears to have been a little too impressed by his Gulf War adventure in the all-draft Israeli military. As he explained to the New York Daily News in 2006, "We're going to have universal civil defense training. Somewhere between the ages of 18 to 25, you will do three months of training."

The idea of mandatory national-service has a distinguished intellectual pedigree on the left. At the turn of the 19th century, the philosophers William James and John Dewey laid the American foundations for service learning and a national-service culture. In his keystone essay on national service, "The Moral Equivalent of War," James argued that mandatory service — a "blood tax" — would take the best aspects of martial culture and employ them toward peaceful ends to the benefit of individual and country alike.

As many critics on the right have pointed out, Dewey and James were deeply influenced by pre-WWII Germany's vigorous ideas about youthful bonding and the cultivation of patriotism through service.

If the Service Act of 2009 had included a Jamesian "blood tax" clause, no doubt the left and the right would have united against the bill. But it doesn't. It's a Great Society piece of legislation, not a Third Reich diktat. If conservatives in this country were more honest, no doubt many of them would admit that deep down they find the former a lot scarier than the latter.

See more stories tagged with: the serve america act, volunteer

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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