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As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.
The problems for the "hot brilliant war hero ladykillers" archetype gets complicated with details, scale, and scale's inverted cousin, depth. Let's approach this from a few angles.
"1. We want strong men. Warriors!"
I do bemoan the fact that Congress is now only 5% or so military veterans. And, of that, an elevated amount are non-combat veterans (this in a nation coming off of 20 straight years of deployed warfare). And isn't masculinity in crisis? Shouldn't we have more ass-kicking real life G.I. Joe's on Capitol Hill?!
Well thank god for the likes of Eli Crane, Dan Crenshaw, and Marcus Luttrell! Not exactly. These guys are all former SEALs. They're badass credentials are unimpeachable. And they're wildly ineffective in congress. This is not only objective but obvious. One of my favorite examples is Eli Crane who for some reason decided to go on record with a gossip columnist for politico. This is bizarre. Politico is a DC specific news outlet that covers the "deep inside baseball" of Congress and The White House. Their reports are often ex-communications junior staffers and they live and die by their connections to politicians and their offices. There's a lot of quid pro quo and handshake deals. To be en effective politician, you have to know how to handle the press. You can't be too coy, you can't be an open book.
The one thing you don't do is go on record, multiple times, talking shit about your colleagues personal lives. It doesn't matter the party affiliation. There are 530+ members of Congress with complex networks of personal friendships, loyalties, and favors. Saying crazy shit about each other's policy positions is totally fair game, but you don't tell a reporter - on record, cited by name - "yeah, actually, that person drinks too much." This is because it will then be impossible to get anything done because no one wants to spend time with or trust you - you might dime them randomly in a gossip column.
But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.
Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.
Navy SEAL, Green Beret in GWOT? And enlisted? I dunno ... those guys can get into some shit. Again - I firmly believe these are the most pure form of "warriors" we have on the planet today. But the archetype model I started with above doesn't want that, they want Romance Novel Ready Warriors.
"2. Shooters gonna shoot and cads gonna cad"
This is more directly related to @FiveHourMarathon 's post. Can adultery be heroic and masculine if done correctly? If I am flying around bedding starlets instead of masturbating with my goon goggles on, my wife could maybe find some pride in that, right?
The problem here is when we consider scale, both large and small. It's possible to read the JFK sex files, chuckle, roll your eyes and go "Different times. Guy was an asshole. Got laid a lot, though." But what you're dismissing is the real human toll it all had on people like Jackie, Marilyn, and the countless nameless secretaries who undoubtedly went through all kinds of mental and emotional anguish (and, in some cases, physical - STDs, yall).
Okay, but, that's a couple dozen (a hundred) people. And it's not my problem. Can't we still, you know, try to support the idea of "Responsible cocksmen-ery"? No, we can't, because people will be irresponsible and, frankly, bad at it and irresponsibility and incompetence at scale are awful for society.
If men are suddenly "empowered" (lol) to run around like JFK trying to seduce the pants off of every waitress, it ends with the emotional and mental anguish of full families, with violently acrimonious divorces, with kids with fucked up families, and, on the harsher end, with actual no-debate-about-it sexual assault. Additionally, if I a have reasonable suspicion that my drinking buddy wants to Oval my Wife's Office, I might get a few whiskey's in me and decide to take a swing at him. Remember, men kill each other for money/drugs, respect (hierarchical preference in a male dominated space), and for control over specific females. Making Adultery Great again is a good way to Make America Murdery Again.
The archetype fails, here, when it's extropolated to scale. The sociological mechanism of monogamy-marriage is explicitly to create high social penalties to being a cad so that society doesn't eventually devolve into jealousy-motivated murder madness.
It wasn't at all necessary and, mostly as you pointed out, the product of the lack of concept of real consequences for multiple generations of a family who had grow up as the elite of the elite of the elite. There's a reason they called it "Camelot" - the Kennedys, specifically, are the closest American got in the post WW2 era to anointing our own royal family.
As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die. JFK catching a hot one from Lee Harvey Oswald's blammer prevented what I think was a highly likely outcome for his presidency - nothing gets done and JFK flames out publicly when his affairs become too much for Jackie to bear. The seduction of the Hot Young President gives way to the ugly truth. Goldwater wins in '64 - running on an even stronger "morality" platform.
On warrior-representatives: I'd be curious to hear your take on Jason Crow.
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I think actually this is exactly the mindset needed to fix most of our political problems. We absolutely need no nonsense leaders who aren’t afraid to at least verbally meet each other on the parking lot after work. The current crop of “leaders” have long since perfected the art of doing things that they procedurally cannot do (thus ducking the responsibility of not actually doing the things that need doing), or hiding really bad ideas in thousand page bills full of nonsense and then pretending that in order to get something done, they simply had to vote yes on a bill with “let’s shoot Taylor Swift” in it, because it had something else in there. You still own voting to shoot Taylor Swift. The mindset drilled into the elite and leadership of the military is that you are responsible. You are responsible for yourself, your team, the results of actions you took or didn’t take, and the actions and decisions of your team that you didn’t do anything about. They are not likely to pull the same kinds of things that our leadership does now.
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A couple of reasons why you don’t see that many soldiers in political office anymore:
With a couple of exceptions like Grant and Eisenhower, most soldier-politicians are not career military. Most of them joined because of a big war, did 3-5 years in the military, and then got out and and started climbing the political ladder. You don’t really have that kind of soldier any more. Most people who join the military are either working class and trying to get some civilian job market skills and education for free, or they really want to be in the military. The first type likely isn’t going to have any bourgeoise-class political ambitions anyway and the second is just going to stay in the military for life because they like it. The especially elite units are often made up of the second type.
The really elite units like the SEALs, green berets and snipers tend to select for a certain personality type, they even run psych evaluations to get that personality type. And to put it bluntly, that personality type is “lightly on the sociopathy spectrum”. You need that if you want a guy who can kill 50-200 people over the course of their career without having a mental breakdown, and who can fight in the pretty calm and detached method of modern warfare and isn’t just a Viking berserker. I want to be clear, these guys are (mostly) not bad people or serial killer types, and most of them have very peaceful and mostly pro-social lives outside of the military. The problem is that type of person often comes off as weird, and often comes off as a jerk. If you want a good example, look at how many people (even conservative pro-military types) were kind of disturbed by Chris Kyle’s autobiography. This guy never did anything bad outside of combat and had a stellar service record, but it sounds like it was written by a working-class Patrick Bateman. As much as we joke about politicians being psychopaths, that is not a personality type that really gels well with politics.
However, when you hear "the smart but lazy, you make into officers, as they have the mental clarity to make the tougher decisions", this is what they actually mean. You can't command an armed force (or a nation) if you're not willing to make decisions that can get your men killed, or to be more precise, ones that will outright cost you men. This can be direct, or it can be indirect (letting the CIA create a crack epidemic on your own streets so you can free some hostages means some of your men die, for instance).
If, at the end of the day, you're not willing to painfully incinerate the cutest little girl (regardless of whether or not it's actually her or you), you're not fit to command [and to be perfectly honest, you're not fit for politics either]. And that's just the way it is.
This is a distinction that's lost on many people: it's the difference between Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men and Brad Pitt's character from Fury (referenced above). The difference is, ultimately, that the former was stupid/lazy about it and the latter is not.
This is also why certain tactics are derided as "Machiavellian" despite that being how systems of governance must work to be stable. It is readily apparent that Machiavelli thought in this same way; that's why people are disturbed by his observations even though I find them to be made in perfectly good faith.
That is because Western democracies are kayfabe and the power rests elsewhere. The people in power are all like this, make no mistake.
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I bask in your praise.
Perhaps there is an advantage to service being a normal, expected thing of men of a certain class: it allows us to have the benefit of having veterans in leadership, without those veterans being likely to be freaks. War is a good activity for a man to be exposed to, but men who maximally choose war as a profession are bad choices? At a smaller scale you see that with combat sports, where some exposure to them is a positive for any man, but the men who devote their lives to it are...different.
Sure, but then you look at the other examples. Clinton certainly wasn't royalty, but he was the only president to run a federal budget surplus since Nixon, and he fucked like an irresponsible rabbit. Eisenhower was a professional military man his whole career, he kept a mistress. I'm sure the accusation of "Cargo Culting" can be made here, but odds are when you talk about your heroes before the millennium, they had a mistress (the best odds remaining that if they didn't they were gay, or completely bizarrely sexually terrified). So I'm thinking it means something!
I disagree, if LBJ made Goldwater look ugly and unstable, Jack Kennedy would have trounced him even harder. Goldwater was a bad candidate for the time.
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Supporting your point, LBJ was very much a non-combatant officer who did a minimal stint as an officer during World War II because he knew his political ambitions required it. His one encounter with enemy fire (he was on a plane that got shot at by Japanese) became embellished in his retellings until years later he was giving speeches about how he "fought in the jungles with our boys." And no one can deny that LBJ was an extraordinarily effective politician.
Undermining your point: LBJ was also a cocksman who cheated on his wife constantly. He might not have run through as many starlets and secretaries as JFK did, but he did flaunt mistresses in DC.
I remember once reading that LBJ bragged that he got more tail by accident than Kennedy ever did on purpose.
Might be true, might not - one thing I am sure of after reading Caro's biography is that absolutely nothing LBJ said about himself could be taken at face value.
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